Promoted! Witt Jr. and Pratto earn the call to Triple-A
Losing two of three to Baltimore? Forget about it. The Royals are making moves with two of their top prospects. Let's get excited.
I don’t write about prospects a lot. That’s by design. It’s enough just following the major league team and besides, there are plenty of great writers who have devoted their time and energy exclusively to covering the minors and the prospects coming through the Royals system. But for a rebuilding team like the Royals, it remains incumbent to be at least somewhat dialed into the happenings in the minors. And when the club bumps two of their best hitters from Double-A to Triple-A, damn right it’s grabbed my attention enough to lead today’s newsletter.
Bobby Witt Jr. and Nick Pratto have gotten the call: Report to Omaha. That thing you’ve been doing in Double-A? Keep doing that. But now in a Storm Chasers uniform.
Pitchers in Double-A Central can breathe a sigh of relief. This duo has caused some serious damage.
Entering the weekend, Witt Jr. posted .292/.369/.568 in 271 plate appearances in 2021. He had trimmed his strikeout rate to a still-maybe-a-little-high-but-somewhat-respectable 24 percent. He’s balanced that a bit by walking 9.2 percent of the time.
But the real story here is the fact that he’s just punishing the ball—and the pitchers in Double-A Central. He’s leading all of Double-A with 137 total bases and is second in the Central with 16 dingers.
Let’s just watch his latest triumph. Sorry, it’s not a home run. But doubles can play.
Fine. You want dingers. You don’t have to roll far back into the archives. Here’s Witt Jr. vaporizing a baseball on Friday.
After his time at Summer Camp in 2020 and the extended look during Spring Training in 2021, it just felt like Witt was going to be a short-timer when it would come to riding the buses through the south. Personally, I prefer when teams play it cautiously with the prospects. Get the timing wrong and it can take some kind of work to get back on track. (I may be referring to one Adalberto Mondesi.) So when the Royals smartly assigned Witt Jr. to Double-A, it was probably with the game plan that if he consistently laid waste to pitching—as expected—he would get a bump somewhere around the All-Star break.
Obviously, Witt Jr. more than upheld his part of the bargain. By dominating pitching in the manner he has, things are going almost completely to plan. Which is nice to be able to write given how the 2021 major league season has failed to live up to its even modest expectations. If Witt Jr. can wreck pitching in Triple-A the way he did in Double-A, I would not be surprised to see him get a cup of coffee in Kansas City sometime in September.
For Pratto, this is once again staking his claim to the rarefied prospect air. After a dreadful 2019 season in Wilmington, he dropped in nearly all prospect lists. Well, he’s back. And in a large way.
Pratto entered the weekend hitting .279/.408/.586 with 15 home runs. He’s second in Double-A Central in slugging and third in OBP.
Most impressive for Pratto is how he’s really improved his approach at the plate. He’s challenging pitchers to come in and give him something to hit, laying off pitches that would get him out. He didn’t used to do that.
Pratto is striking out a little more than he did early this season—he’s up to a 28.4 percent whiff rate—but the power is legit and he’s earned the call.
Last year in Wilmington…Oh, hell. Let’s just not speak of Wilmington ever again. A place where hitters go to get their psyche destroyed. I thought his scouting report from Baseball America in the 2021 rankings was interesting:
Pratto’s swing was non-functional in games, so he refined his body and hand movement at the alternate site to find a more efficient bat path and get his bat in the zone sooner.
This is a story of a guy putting in the hard graft and seeing positive results. And now, he’s been promoted in the middle of a season for the first time in his professional career. It’s well deserved.
This is a move that is so very Royals. They love being able to keep groupings of prospects together who have had success. Why bump one when you can move two guys at once? Build a winning combo in the minors and move them through the system together. And the timing is perfect as well, just a week after the Futures Game in Colorado where both featured in the starting lineup and with Omaha coming back home after a road trip to Indianapolis. The Storm Chasers are off on Monday (as usual in 2021) and will open a six-game set against the Twins’ affiliate, the St. Paul Saints, on Tuesday.
When I’m compiling this newsletter, I often react to what I see in games and then try to write about it in a broader context. Monday’s edition, because it covers three games since the previous missive, is a little more challenging to pull together. I generally don’t want to rehash Friday’s action because, by the time you’re reading this, that happened almost 72 hours ago. And in the universe that surrounds the Royals these days, three games or 72 hours ago is a lifetime. Too bad for the Royals offense, which only really showed up just as the weekend was getting started. And then quickly vanished.
It was just another series anyway. Not dissimilar from ones we’ve witnessed all year. An offense that goes AWOL as noted above, but more damningly, a starting rotation that can’t pitch into the fifth inning. I spent the entire break thinking it was coming at a perfect time as the starting pitching was finally looking half-decent and the relievers could get an extended bit of rest.
So much for that. Meet the second half. Same as the first.
Duffy dinged
If you watch enough Royals broadcasts, you’ll hear them talk about luck quite a bit. It’s difficult for me to pay attention when they insist on going down this road, but damn after Danny Duffy took a comebacker off his knee in the first inning on Friday night, it kind of makes you think…
I mean…are the baseball gods still collecting the vig on the Royals’ postseason run from six years ago? This just seems a little harsh.
Duffy, to his credit was able to get through four innings on 54 pitches before his leg really began to tighten up. As you would expect. It’s a shame too, because he was zipping through that lineup. It’s easy to think that he was going to complete seven innings. Maybe even eight. It was setting up to be his night.
But the bullpen came to the rescue, throwing five innings of four-hit ball with six strikeouts.
Singer scorched
I’ve written a ton in this space about Brady Singer. He’s the current “Exhibit A” in how Royals’ pitching seems to plateau almost immediately when they reach the majors.
This isn’t exactly a secret: The dude needs to utilize a third pitch. You know it, I know it, your friend who doesn’t watch baseball knows it. So does Mike Matheny.
“Obviously, we’re going to continue to challenge Brady to develop and use that third pitch. He’s had an impressive amount of success just using the two, but it’s going to be trusting his stuff a lot like we’ve talked about…in the zone.”
Matheny made that comment prior to Singer’s start on Saturday. Exciting! The Royals are going to really emphasize Singer developing that elusive third pitch. Let’s see what happens when he rocks that changeup a little more than we’re used to seeing!
Here’s Singer’s pitch chart from Saturday.
Do you see use of a third pitch? I’ll wait.
Singer threw 60 pitches before he was yanked in the third without retiring a batter in that inning. Of those 60, here’s the breakdown.
I’m not sure that I’m willing to classify three four-seam fastballs as a “third pitch.” Although I will give credit to some nice running action on his sinker.
That came in the first inning. If you want to see what an effective Singer outing should—and could—look like, take some time to view the first inning from Saturday. He’s not always pitching ahead in the count but Singer was getting Oriole batters to swing at his pitch, on his terms.
Then you can probably just ignore the second and those batters blasting through the third. You’ve seen those innings plenty in 2021.
It’s frustrating to see a guy use the same process over and over again, only to wonder why he sees the same results.
At this point, I wonder if the Royals just shouldn’t send him to Triple-A. One, it could be an effective wakeup call, letting him know that yes, contrary to public opinion, there are consequences for a string of subpar results. And two, it can be an opportunity to refine that changeup into a third pitch. Send him down and demand that over a quarter of his pitches in any outing be changeups. Let’s stop with the lip service and see some action. It’s time.
Hernández heat
The Royals like to do this thing where they keep everyone guessing for as long as they possibly can. It’s just an organizational DNA sort of thing. They’ll insist they don’t plan things this way, and maybe there aren’t nefarious reasons behind holding back information, but if that’s truly the case, then it just makes things strange.
For example, the Royals held back naming their starting pitcher for the first game out of the break until Friday afternoon. A little odd given that teams had several days to realign rotations with the All-Star game in the early part of the week. So the Royals announced their Friday and Saturday starter on Friday afternoon, but didn’t immediately name Sunday’s starter. It was just kind of assumed they wanted to see at least how Friday’s game went. After Duffy only went four innings, it was a slight surprise for them to have Carlos Hernández start on Sunday.
Not that Hernández isn’t potentially capable as a starter. He was originally slated for the start the Sunday prior to the break in Cleveland that was washed out. And in his previous outing back on July 6, he was sharp in relief, throwing 3.2 innings of six-strikeout baseball. He’s been on the big league roster for most of this season, but has thrown over 50 pitches just three times prior to Sunday. Could he provide the depth the Royals would need?
I pose that question because while Hernández has electric stuff, he has yet to master the economy of pitches necessary to get deep into games. His talent does seem a bit wasted as an exclusive long man out of the bullpen, so it’s great to see him get the opportunity to start. The Royals were probably hoping for five innings. They got four. But those four were highly entertaining.
I’m mean, 100 mph running in to a right-handed batter for strike three is about as much fun as you can have outside of the home team hitting dingers. That’s just smoke in its purest form.
With 78 pitches, Hernández threw more than any of the starters this weekend, but he was only able to navigate four innings. It’s probably not a huge issue given the Royals have two off days this week but it sure would be nice if the second half could see starting pitchers go just a little bit longer in ballgames.
Random weekend thoughts
Kris Bubic really saved the bullpen on Saturday. He was fantastic going six innings and requiring 81 pitches. It was reminiscent of how he looked in his return to the rotation in late May. More please.
With a four-hit game on Sudnay, his first of the year, Hunter Dozier is definitely back on track. He was hitting .145/.217/.323 on June 19. In the 23 games he’s appeared in since then, he’s hitting .304/.356/.456. He made some comments over the weekend about how his early season thumb injury really hampered his start, which was fairly obvious. Nevertheless, it’s good to see him doing some damage at the plate.
More runner in scoring position woes. After going 6-12 on Friday with RISP, the Royals offense went a combined 2-17 with RISP on Saturday and Sunday. That a lot of that came against Jorge López and Matt Harvey is quite suboptimal.
Central issues
Tigers 7, Twins 0
I’m starting to think the Twins should be sellers.
That’s a joke. Of course they should be sellers. They’re buried in the Central along with the Royals. Getting swept three games in Detroit to open the second half only underscores their miserable season where they’ve failed to live up to preseason hype. The Tigers outscored Minnesota 13-4 in the three games.
Astros 0, White Sox 4
Solo dingers from Yoan Moncada and Tim Anderson provided plenty of offense for Carlos Rodón who threw seven innings of one-hit baseball. He didn’t walk a batter and whiffed 10.
Cleveland 4, Athletics 2
After blowing a one-run ninth inning lead to drop Friday’s game in Oakland, Cleveland rallied to take the next two. Daniel Johnson broke a 2-2 deadlock in the seventh with his first career home run.
Up next
The Royals have named their starting pitchers for the series in Milwaukee. Note the start time for Tuesday’s game has been moved due to the Bucks game in the NBA Finals.
Tuesday - Mike Minor vs Eric Lauer — 3:10 CDT
Wednesday — Brad Keller vs Brett Anderson — 1:10 CDT
A couple of afternoon weekday ballgames. Can’t beat that.