Vinnie comes alive

Vinnie Pasquantino leads the charge as the Royals offense explodes yet again.

When play started on Wednesday, Vinnie Pasquantino was hitting .108/.214/.108. His wRC+ was a -2. That’s a negative. Oftentimes, I will use a word like anemic to describe a poor performance of some length. That adjective doesn’t seem strong enough to describe how poorly Pasquantino has performed at the plate over the first 11 games of the season. If anyone needed a night like he had on Wednesday, it was Vinnie Pasquantino.

Hell, he didn’t stop at four RBI. Pasquantino went 3-3 with a double, a home run, a walk, two runs scored and a career-high five runs batted in. He led the Royals to an 11-2 thrashing of the Houston Astros. It was the third time this year the Royals have reached double-digits in runs.

Pasquantino is how hitting .175/.277/.277 with an wRC+ of 61.

The Royals have won six in a row. The last time they’ve won six in a row in April you have to go back to 2015 when they won their first seven games of the season. You know how that year turned out.

Pasquantino’s turnaround quietly started in the seventh inning on Tuesday when he worked a five-pitch walk. Against Houston reliever Bryan Abreu, Pasquantino laid off high heat and a couple more fastballs that were a touch low. In his next plate appearance against Josh Hader, he hammered an elevated sinker at 96 MPH for a sharp lineout to center. It was another out, but Pasquantino was on it.

As rookie Spencer Arrighetti was mowing down the Royals the first time through the order, Pasquantino worked another five-pitch walk. He’s been scuffling, but he can still take quality plate appearances. He could’ve offered at that first-pitch fastball. I’m sure it looked tasty. He held off and then watched four more pitches sail beyond the zone.

Arrighetti was impressive in his first two innings, carving up the Royals. He punched out Maikel Garcia and got Bobby Witt Jr. swinging ahead of the walk. The first inning ended with Salvador Perez popping out. In the second, he recorded three outs in the air around a Nelson Velázquez opposite field bleeder.

At that moment it seemed as though the Royals could be done in by a rookie pitcher they were seeing for the first time. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

Yet the second time through the order, things shifted. Actually, Kyle Isbel led off the third in his first appearance against Arrighetti and reached on an infield single. He stole second (these Royals are really running again, as you would expect. They swiped four bases on Wednesday and now lead the AL with 16 steals.) and after Garcia lined out, Witt drew a walk.

That brought up Pasquantino. After looking at a sweeper for a strike, this time he did go after the high heat.

He was behind on the pitch, but he was so quick with his hands to get there. Opposite field double. It brought home both runners for Pasquantino’s first RBIs of the year to go along with his first extra base hit. So huge. Both for him and the Royals. That they’ve been winning without getting production from him has been something of a bonus. Now that he’s getting locked in…watch out.

The third inning was fun, wasn’t it? After Pasquantino’s double cracked open the scoring the rest of the inning went like this:

Salvador Perez singled. Pasquantino moved to third.
MJ Melendez walked.
Nelson Velázquez singled. Pasquantino and Perez score.
Royals 4, Astros 0
Adam Frazier singles. Melendez scores
Royals 5, Astros 0
Hunter Renfroe doubles. Velázquez and Frazier score.
Royals 7, Astros 0

Isbel, who opened the frame with that single struck out. Garcia ended the inning with a foul pop. I always wonder about the hitters who make two outs in an inning. It just wasn’t Garcia’s night at the plate.

From the Royals PR department, this was the fourth time this season the Royals have batted around. There’s also this note:

There have only been six instances of a team scoring at least 7 runs in an inning this season, and Kansas City is responsible for two of them, including an 8-run 7th inning last Thursday vs. the White Sox...the Royals only did this three times over the entire 162-game schedule in 2023.

I’m beginning to think this year’s Royals team is better than last year’s. Just a hunch.

Back to Pasquantino, who was certainly locked in in his next at bat, a 10-pitch battle where he was at 1-2 when he saw the first of five consecutive changeups, fouling them all off. After a four-seamer and another foul, reliever Brandon Bielak spun yet another changeup. This one was close to middle-middle. Vinnie didn’t miss.

Reader, that is an angry swing.

Eleven games of unproductive at bats were all channeled into that moment in a fierce exhale. A tsunami of exit velocity, launch angle and just enough distance. Welcome back, Vinnie.

Aside from the first changeup, which was very close to the last changeup in the strike zone, Pasquantino was spoiling good pitches in this battle. Can foul balls be productive? I think so. And in this plate appearance, you saw six productive swings and fouls. Had any of those gone in play, the outcome of this at bat would not have been positive. Pasquantino worked and worked…and worked some more.

As you can see above, the ball traveled 389 feet, hitting the top of the wall in right field. A true wall-scraper as it were. But it counts just the same.

After the game, in his postgame interview with Joel Goldberg, Pasquantino said that the way he’s been going, he would throw himself changeups as well. That’s exactly what opposing pitchers have been doing this year against him.

There’s going to be some variance here as his 2024 totals are about 20 percent of the pitches he saw last year, but this is a trend worth monitoring. Of course, one way to stop pitchers from feeding him a steady diet of offspeed pitches is to hit said pitches. Wednesday’s home run was Pasquantino’s first hit against a changeup this season.

When Maikel Garcia swiped third base in the sixth with the Royals holding a six-run lead and Pasquantino at the dish, did anyone else think that Garcia did it to give his teammate a better chance to drive in another run? Because as soon as that happened, I thought to myself, “Now a flyball gets Vinnie another RBI.” After going the first 11 and a half games of the season without driving in a run, every RBI counts. Garcia is a quality dude for setting his teammate up for success like that.

And darn if Pasquantino didn’t lace a flyball to center to bring home his fourth RBI on the night.

Pasquantino capped his day in the eighth, lining a single to center to drive home his fifth run of the game. It was the final tally in an 11-2 rout of the Astros.

Thanks to another stellar start from the rotation—Seth Lugo allowed the two Houston runs in six innings—and another three scoreless from the rotation, the Royals closed play on Wednesday with a run differential of +29, which is the second-best mark in the majors. They’re doing better than heavyweights such as the Yankees (+15), the Dodgers (+13), the Rangers (+21) and the Braves (+26). The only team better than the Royals? The Cleveland Guardians are at +35. Beware the juggernaut that is the AL Central.

The Royals bullpen opened the year allowing 14 runs in 15.2 innings in the first two series of the season. Since blowing a 3-0 lead in the eighth inning in Baltimore at the end of the last road trip, the Royals bullpen has pitched 19.1 scoreless innings.

Sometimes, as we saw with Pasquantino on Wednesday and like the bullpen has done on this homestand, things can turn in an instant.