Royals tarnish Halos, take two of three
Salvy is smoking, Keller triumphs and looking for signs of life in Benintendi's bat.
Is momentum in baseball a thing? I doubt it. As a Royals fan, you should know there isn’t. How many times over the last couple of decades have the Royals romped their way to an inspiring win of some sort where you walk away thinking, “That’s the business. That’s what’s going to catapult this team into contention.” Only to see them rip off an extended losing streak immediately following that supposed signature moment.
(The lone exception is the 2014 Wild Card Game where Salvador Perez clearly won not only that game with a rocket down the third base line, but the next seven games after that. Maybe I should amend the lede to “There’s no such thing as momentum in regular season baseball.”)
You could argue the Royals got lucky in their win on Tuesday. They followed that up on Wednesday by finally scoring more than three runs in another victory over the previously-hot Angels.
Momentum? Again, I doubt it. But I do know it was a good 24 hours of baseball at The K.
The Royals now stand at 6-4 on the year, their best start since they won eight of their first 10 in 2016.
Hot Salvy
Salvador Perez finished the series against the Angels going 2-4 with a home run and a double. In the three games, he was 8-12 with five singles, a pair of doubles and that aforementioned dinger. He drove in four runs. In the small sample of the 10 games, he’s basically picked up where he left off last season.
Perez is still chasing. That’s never going to change. He’s swinging at 46.6 percent of the pitches he sees outside of the strike zone, almost 16 percentage points higher than league average. Opposing pitchers are rightfully throwing pitches well off the plate when facing Perez and while his chase rate remains robust, it’s inconsequential as his contact is absolutely strong.
He’s also spraying the ball all over the field. As you can see above, his two home runs prior to the one he hit on Wednesday have gone out to center; his previous double was to right. If he’s hitting it on the ground, it’s a stone-cold guarantee that it will be hit to the left of second base. Hell, it will probably be hit to the left of wherever the shortstop is playing. But that doesn’t matter so much as 58 percent of the balls he’s put into play to this point have gone in the air.
As I’ve said in this space a number of times, it’s unlikely Perez matches his offensive output from 2020. He was so good and hit a production level he had never previously reached that it’s simply not realistic to expect him to hang those kinds of numbers over a full season. But this kind of start—after a slow first week of the season—would lead you to believe that he can probably come close. And that’s a very good development for this Royals offense.
Killer Keller
After getting absolutely destroyed in his first two starts, all eyes were on Brad Keller from the very first pitch. Perhaps we were concerned over nothing? After watching him work for a couple of innings it sure felt like it.
Keller, like his counterpart from the previous night Danny Duffy, was throwing heat the likes of which we don’t normally see. He touched 98 mph in the third, just the eighth time he’s thrown a pitch that hard in his major league career. And the first time he’s done that since August of 2019.
This is what a Keller pitch chart looks like when he’s successful.
Fastballs up, sliders down. It looks like he hit the zone three times with the slider. The fat one in the middle was to Albert Pujols on a 1-0 count. It had to have caught Pujols off guard as he took it for a strike. The other two were put in play, one for a runs scoring hit and the other for an out. It’s probably not a coincidence that both sliders that were entirely in the zone came in the sixth inning when Keller was likely feeling a little fatigued.
Keller still didn’t throw as many sliders as we would normally expect given his track record with the pitch. Last year, he offered the slider about 38 percent of the time. He threw the pitch 21 percent of the time against the Angels on Wednesday, right in line with the average he showed the slider in his two shortened outings previous.
For the fastball, the spin rate was up to 2,366 on average. That’s a big jump from what we saw in his two previous starts where he was averaging 2,280. That, along with his maintained velocity bump to an average of 94.3 mph helped the pitch rise, or have some nifty movement up in the zone. And with Keller locating that heater in the proper neighborhood, it was a difficult pitch to handle. He generated four misses on 20 swings against the fastball on Wednesday.
Bonus! When they made contact on the four-seamer, it was weak. The Angels put five in play off the fastball with an average exit velocity of 78.7 mph. Opposing hitters may muscle a flair over the infield with that kind of contact, but you’ll take the occasional single as opposed to the extra-base hits we were seeing in Keller’s first two starts.
Speaking of those extra-base hits, Keller only allowed one: To Jared Walsh who hit a double in the sixth. On that slider that caught too much of the plate.
Keller couldn’t finish the sixth, but after his abbreviated first two starts, this outing was an absolute success. He finished at 94 pitches and a well-earned boost of confidence.
Extra base Benintendi
New left fielder Andrew Benintendi has had a miserable start to the 2021 campaign. Through the nine games entering Wednesday, he was hitting .200/.300/.200 with an OPS+ of 44. The OPS+ was the lowest mark among the regular nine outside of Hunter Dozier. The bat looks slow, the swing looks long and there’s just not much happening at the plate to generate any kind of confidence.
Opposing pitchers are working Benintendi away. It doesn’t take long for word to get around when a guy looks long at the plate. This has been the modus operandi against him since Opening Day.
The result is a lot of balls in play to the opposite fields. And a lot of weak contact. Only 10 percent of the balls put in play off Benintendi’s bat have been classified as “hard hit” by Baseball Savant. His average exit velocity is 88.4 mph. He has yet to have recorded a “barrel.” This was his spray chart coming into the game on Wednesday:
The Royals and Mike Matheny have stuck with Benintendi in the second spot in the order, and it sounds like there is a process behind their patience.
“What we normally do, it’s three or four games ahead of time where we say we probably need to start watching a little closer…Only from the perspective of, ‘Is it time to make a change?’ And then give it a few more days,” Matheny said ahead of Wednesday’s game. “Only because the guys are looking for consistency too.”
Matheny was talking about looking ahead at the schedule and the potential matchups down the road and incorporating that process into making a lineup. If you want to read between the lines, you could surmise that the Royals are thinking about dropping Benintendi in the batting order, but they aren’t anxious to make that kind of change at this point.
“We will make changes. We already have. Some minor ones,” Matheny continued. “But try not to do too many overhauls each game by game.
“We have guys in a spot because of larger sample size…facts that we have. That we believe ‘this is probably a good spot.’ But there are times we have to call some audibles.”
Benintendi was 2-5 on Wednesday with a single and a double. Neither were classified as “hard hit” (both were below 95 mph in exit velocity), but both balls were pulled into right field. With those two hits, he’s not hitting the ball to the pull field 31 percent of the time, still well below his career average of 36 percent, but given the small sample, it won’t take much to nudge him back to where he should be on the spray chart. If he’s to get back to where he was in 2018 and most of 2019, he’s going to have to start getting around on the ball.
Roster moves
Ahead of Wednesday’s game, the Royals reinstated Josh Staumont from the Injured List and optioned Carlos Hernández to the alternate site.
The Covid protocols are in place and the Royals weren’t forthcoming with information, so I’m not going to speculate as to why Staumont was on the IL for a single day. But it was obviously nothing major as he pitched two innings and was touching 99 mph with the fastball.
Hernández, as mentioned in this space, simply is not ready for regular work in the majors. As the Royals are piecing together a bullpen—which will continue to be a work in progress—the right move for the day is to have Ervin Santana back up and in the mix. Just to see what he has to offer in short outings out of the pen. Or longer ones too, as a potential swingman.
Since the Royals needed a spot on the 40-man due to Tuesday’s activation of Ervin Santana, they designated Nick Heath for assignment. It’s a bit of a puzzling move as Daniel Tillo who is recovering from Tommy John surgery would seem like a candidate to move to the 60-day IL which would free up a roster spot. Perhaps the Royals are playing some kind of long game here and hoping they can sneak Heath through waivers and get him back into the system. Just another one of those organizational moves where you can’t help but wonder the reason behind it.
Central issues
Cleveland 0, Chicago 8
Carlos Rodón loses the perfecto with one out in the ninth when a back-foot slider literally hits the top of the back foot of the batter, but rallies to complete the no-hitter. Given everything the guy has been through with the Tommy John, shoulder issues, a fastball bottoming out around 90 mph, getting non-tendered last winter…baseball, man.
Boston 3, Minnesota 2 — 7 innings
Boston 7, Minnesota 1 — 7 innings
The Twins drop both ends of a Covid-ball doubleheader and are on a five-game losing streak.
Detroit 6, Houston 4
Michael Fulmer picks up his first win in three years as the Tigers sweep the Astros.
Things remain bunched up in the division, but you’ll like who’s currently on top:
Up next
Apologies for the bad info in yesterday’s newsletter. A year into this Covid thing and I never know what day of the week it is. Suppose I should learn to read the calendar. Anyway, as the Blue Jays jet into town from their temporary digs on the Gulf Coast of Florida here’s how the pitching matchups tentatively align:
Thursday — TBD vs Jakob Junis (0-0, 0.00)
Friday — Steven Matz (2-0, 1.46) vs Mike Minor (1-0, 4.50)
Saturday — Robbie Ray (0-1, 3.60) vs Brady Singer (0-2, 6.48)
Sunday — Hyun Jin Ryu (1-1, 1.89) vs Danny Duffy (2-0, 0.75)