Slamtana saves the Royals
A walkoff sends the Royals into delirium as the club closes out a successful homestand.
It was over faster than you could say “blown save.” A Whit Merrifield bloop, a Carlos Santana blast. That’s all that was required. Two runs. Ballgame. The home run was the finishing touch to a successful homestand with four wins out of five games. Since the Royals ended their 11 game losing streak they have now won six of nine.
The April Royals are back!
And the boys looked sharp in their Sunday best. It’s always a great day when they break out the Kansas City Monarchs unis.
Carlos Santana is now hitting .257/.396/.461 with a wRC+ of 140. He’s walking at a rate of 18.2 percent. He’s hitting walkoff dingers. He is quite simply the best hitter in this Royals lineup. He’s the guy you want up with the game on the line in the late innings. Because you know he’s going to create some trouble for the opposition.
It turned what would’ve been a frustrating defeat into a Sunday celebration.
In 45 games Santana (or Slamtana), has bested his home run and RBI total from 2020, nearly matched his walk rate and, with a .252 BABIP, has bounced back from last year’s subpar .212. It’s really too early to render a verdict on Santana as a free agent signing, but it’s looking like an extremely smart “buy low” piece of business from Dayton Moore.
Sunday starters
The Tigers led in Sunday’s game almost from the jump. Starter Kris Bubic was trying to establish his fastball early but was having difficulty commanding the pitch. He fell behind 3-1 to the leadoff hitter Robbie Grossman going almost exclusively with the fastball. He mixed a couple of change-ups but caught far too much of the plate on those. His pitch chart from the opening frame does not inspire confidence.
The result was each of the first four Detroit batters hit the ball with an exit velocity greater than 95 mph. The hardest hit was a fly out by Jonathan Schoop. The balls in play were up the middle or to the opposite field, indicating the Tigers were looking for a change if that wasn’t forthcoming, able to wait on the fastball.
After that rocky start, Bubic settled in. The only hard contact against him in the second through the fourth innings was off the bat of Cabrera. And the only base runners were via a walk.
Bubic gave up his hardest contact of the afternoon in the fifth and final frame. The hard hits in the fifth were likely a mix of sitting on 71 pitches to open the frame and the fact he was facing each batter for the third time. Yet to his credit, after allowing back-to-back singles to start the inning, he was able to roll up a double play ground ball and escape on only nine pitches.
Overall, a successful afternoon for Bubic. The curve, which he featured only six times was an effective pitch. He generated three swings (one miss) and had two called strikes. He threw 23 change-ups and got 10 swings, but no misses. Five of those were put into play with the only two hits coming in the first.
Meanwhile, the Royals’ bats were ice-cold against Detroit starter Casey Mize. It’s an interesting exit velocity comparison between Mize and Bubic. Exit velocity isn’t everything, but sometimes it does help tell the story.
The lone “hit” through the first four innings for the Royals was a Salvador Perez grounder to shortstop that was misplayed. That was a perfect hometown ruling, and an extremely dangerous one given that 2021 is the Year of the No-Hitter. Could you imagine what would’ve happened if Mize had stayed in cruise control and that was his only hit allowed? So you want to be an official scorekeeper…
Mize didn’t give up any hits in the fifth and sixth, but by exit velocity, the Royals were starting to get to him. (Ignore Jorge Soler in the table below for general principles. Just another brutal day at the plate.)
And then it was a Very Royals Inning in the seventh. Back-to-back singles to start the inning, followed by a hard-hit grounder that could only be turned into one out. Mize was lifted and the Royals plated their run on a sac fly. More productive outs! Or maybe it wasn’t all the way so productive given that Kelvin Gutierrez became the second Royal to make the final out of the inning at third on the day.
Friday’s bullpen mismanagement
The hallmark of this most recent stretch of Royals success has been close games. Ten of their last 12 games have been decided by two runs or fewer. The Royals are 4-6 in those games. Sunday’s victory by a single run was the Royals’ first one-run win since April 26 and snapped a skid of five losses in a row by a single tally. They are now 7-5 in one-run games in 2021.
This puts enormous extended pressure on the bullpen. And as you know, what appears to be a strength in April can be exposed in May.
The Royals bullpen has been somewhat…inefficient early in 2021. What I mean is that it just seems like every game there’s at least one outing, sometimes more, where a reliever will require over 20 pitches to get three outs (or through his three batters). And with the lack of bullpen depth exposed with the recent absences of Kyle Zimmer and Jacob Hahn, it seems as if an extended inning from a reliever as Mike Matheny spins the Reliever Roulette Wheel is a nightly occurrence.
In baseball, there’s always a reaction to the action. Given that a large swath of relievers aren’t exactly trustworthy night in and night out and given that Matheny’s Circle of Bullpen Trust appears to be shrinking, the manager is now desperately trying to squeeze as many outs as possible from his starters. Given how quickly things can unravel when a starter is working into a seventh or eighth inning, it’s risky business. We saw the risk explode into a fireball of a loss on Friday, when Matheny sent Mike Minor back out for the seventh.
Minor had thrown 87 pitches at that point and had to be nearing his pitch limit. Prior to Friday, Minor had thrown between 91 and 102 pitches in seven of his eight starts to face the bottom of the Tiger lineup. But would Matheny let Minor face leadoff man Robbie Grossman for the fourth time? Instead of letting a tiring starter pitch into a seventh and knowing he would probably be lifted after two batters no matter what happened, would it make sense for a reliever to come in for a guaranteed clean inning?
The flip side of that coin is that with Detroit’s eighth and ninth place hitters due up, maybe it’s wasn’t such a bad idea. Minor had already retired JaCoby Jones twice and got Jake Rogers to strike out both times he had come up. Go to the bullpen at the absolute latest.
What was clear by the time the dust settled was Friday’s strategy failed to work. Minor allowed singles to both Jones and Rogers and required 11 pitches before he was lifted for current fireman Tyler Zuber. In six of his previous seven outings prior to Friday, Zuber entered with runners on. He’s generally done a decent job of extinguishing the embers before the fire could spread. On this night, he could only fan the flames.
A single to Grossman loaded the bases. A wild pitch could’ve led to a run but the ball fortunately didn’t bounce far enough away and Jones was late to the plate.
Gifted an out, Zuber returned the favor to the Tigers by walking Jonathan Schoop to load the bases again. He battled to get Jeimer Candelario on strikes.
Each plate appearance was a grind. Three batters, three full counts, two outs, but 21 pitches. Matheny came to get Zuber to bring Greg Holland in to pitch to Miguel Cabrera.
If you watched any of the games this weekend on the Royals broadcast feed, you may have noticed a certain reverence the announcers had for Cabrera. He’s a Hall of Famer for sure. But at this stage of his career his skills have greatly diminished. He’s not the same player he was in his prime. Not even close. It’s one thing to respect his accomplishments. It’s another to treat him like it’s still 2014.
While he’s not going to be elected to the Hall, the same school of thought could be applied to Greg Holland. Yet the Royals insist on using him in the highest of leverage situations.
Holland has struggled this year. His walk rate is stratospheric. After allowing just a single home run in 2020, he’d surrendered three in 15.2 innings. Yet he’s thrown in 20 percent of the Royals’ highest-leverage situations. (The LevHi column of the above table is when the first PA against that particular reliever carries a Leverage Index of 1.5 or greater. A LI of 1 is considered “regular.”) Holland’s overall average Leverage Index (aLI) is the highest among Royals’ relievers, but that’s largely his own doing. He’s creating his own jams.
After facing Cabrera, Holland has now given up four home runs. The grand slam unloaded the bases and flipped the Royals two-run lead into a two run deficit.
On Saturday, Matheny deployed the exact same strategy in what started as the exact same situation. Brady Singer opened the seventh at 90 pitches, facing the eighth and ninth place hitters in the Detroit lineup. He put one on via a walk before the lineup flipped over a fourth time and he yielded to the bullpen. This time, he brought in a better reliever in Scott Barlow. He created a jam for himself, loading the bases on a single and a walk before striking out Jeimer Candelario and that Cabrera guy.
It was an interesting dichotomy that underscored the need to adjust strategies given the personnel he decides to use. Matheny was too slow to go to his bullpen on Friday and when he did, chose the wrong reliever. He might have been too slow again on Saturday, but the right reliever bailed him out.
A brief word on Josh Staumont
As noted last week, Staumont’s velocity was way down in his outing on Wednesday. He wasn’t available on Friday (according to Matheny if Holland hadn’t surrendered the grand slam to Cabrera, Holland would’ve pitched the eighth with Barlow getting the ninth) but his velocity was largely back on Saturday.
Still, what a slog it was for Staumont. One of those aforementioned outings where it just takes forever to record three outs. After 35 pitches, Staumont decided that he had had just about enough of this nonsense.
He was averaging around 96 mph on the fastball before he decided to uncork this monster.
The velocity chart from his outing was a trip.
Injury updates — The reinforcements are coming!
Shortstop Adalberto Mondesi has appeared in three games for the Storm Chasers, going 3-14 with a double and five strikeouts. He’s also swiped a couple of bags. I think he probably still needs a little more work to get his timing back to where it needs to be, but I also think the Royals are running out of patience and are itching to get him back in the lineup. He’s almost certain to get activated this week. Heck, it wouldn’t be surprising if he was on the flight to Tampa. If he’s not going to Florida’s west coast, he’ll probably hook up with the squad in Minneapolis.
Meanwhile, Hunter Dozier has played in two games for Omaha and has three hits (two doubles) in 10 plate appearances. Nice to see he’s had some success. I would expect he will likewise return to the team in Minneapolis. Although it wouldn’t be a surprise if the Royals brought him on the flight to Tampa as well. You never want to see someone get hurt, and the collision with José Abreu was especially brutal, but this has provided the Royals and Dozier the opportunity to take a break and just get back to the basics. A few swings in the minors was a good thing.
After Jesse Hahn left his rehab outing with Omaha after just one batter last week, it wasn’t surprising to see him returned from the assignment and moved to the 60-day IL. The guy just can’t catch a break on the injury front. The Royals moved him to the 60-day IL when they acquired reliever Domingo Tapia from Seattle for cash considerations. The earliest Hahn will be eligible to return is June 11.
Central issues
White Sox 4, Yankees 5
It was a brutal weekend for the Sox in the Bronx as the Yankees walk them off twice in a three game sweep.
On Friday, the White Sox hit into a triple play in the top of the ninth before Gleyber Torres punched the game-winning single to left in the bottom of the inning. On Sunday, it was a bases-loaded walk to Aaron Judge for the honors. Shrimp in the Bronx!
Twins 8, Cleveland 5 — 10 innings
The Twins take two of three from Cleveland, and on the back of a Kyle Garlick three-run home run, win their first extra inning game of 2021. They are now 1-8 in what passes for baseball’s extra inning extravaganza in 2021.
The Royals were able to make up a couple of games on the leaders while putting a little more distance between themselves and the bottom-feeders of the division. That’s a very good weekend.
Up next
The Royals take to the road for three games in Tampa starting on Tuesday. Here’s how the pitching matchups line up.
Tuesday — Brad Keller vs Rich Hill
Wednesday – Mike Minor vs Tyler Glasnow
Thursday — Brady Singer vs Shane McClanahan
The Royals are taking advantage of Monday’s day off to roll with a four-man rotation to cover for the absence of Danny Duffy.