The umpire strikes out

Cole Ragans shoved but a poor call in the ninth kept the door ajar for the Red Sox and they went ahead and knocked the damn thing down.

After one game in Boston, the series stands as follows:

Royals - 0 wins
Red Sox - 0 wins
Umpires - 1 win

I hate complaining about the umpiring. It’s lame. It’s really kind of pathetic. And sometimes, like in the aftermath of Monday’s game, it is entirely justified.

With the game tied at two entering the ninth inning, the Royals turned to Carlos Hernández to shut down the Red Sox to get the game to the tenth. I thought Hernández threw well, spotting the fastball up and the slider down while staying out of the middle of the zone. He allowed a ground-rule double on a 2-2 slider down and in to Rafael Devers and then just absolutely obliterated Adam Duvall with four fastballs. Each topped 100 MPH. Each was at the upper reaches of the zone. Each was totally unhittable.

With the Royals this close to getting the game to the 10th, Hernández intentionally walked the next batter, Triston Casas, to set up a showdown with Luis Urías. Again, the recipe was fastballs up, sliders down. On a typically elevated 3-2 fastball, Urías attempted to check his swing. He failed. Apparently, this does not matter.

In no world is this a ball. It is a swinging strike. The batter went around. You know it. I know it. Urías, judging by the look of disappointment on his face and the slump of his shoulders, knew it. The fans in the stadium knew it. Everyone freaking knew that it was a swing except for one person: first base umpire Vic Carapazza. He deemed it a check swing and therefore a ball. Ball four, in fact. Judge. Jury. And executioner of the Royals.

As terrible a call that Carapazza made, spare some ire for home plate umpire Nick Mahrley who could’ve rung up Urías. No appeal was necessary. It was that obvious.

Matt Quatraro got run. Again. For those of you who think the manager doesn’t care or get the ass enough, the last three games should have settled that for you. His team is showing signs of life and the umps are hell-bent on screwing his guys.

Yeah! Come on, Vic!

Q is doing what a manager should be doing in those situations by standing up for his players. If the Royals are able to turn things around in the next couple of seasons, maybe we’ll point to these seemingly meaningless games in last July and early August of 2023. A seven-game winning streak and the manager getting tossed in two of the three games after the streak ended. After questioning everything the first four months of the season, this team has a pulse. If anything, it’s good optics for the remainder of the season. These guys do care.

Of course, the coda to this is a walk-off grand slam off the foul pole over the monster. It was a well-played game that ended in the worst possible manner because of a horseshit call from an umpire. The thing is, the umpires lack any kind of accountability. Carapazza will be behind home plate tomorrow night as if his mistake didn’t prematurely end the game. That should be fun. Maybe we’ll see Q hit the showers early for the third time in four games.

Don’t let a garbage call distract you from something very good that happened in that game: the continued emergence of Cole Ragans as a valuable starter in this rotation. The lefty has thrown 17.2 innings in the majors since coming over from Texas for Aroldis Chapman and has thrived—posting a 1.02 ERA with 22 strikeouts and four walks.

He did it on Monday with a five-pitch array, leading with a four-seamer that averaged 96.5 MPH with an elite spin rate. The changeup was a tremendous weapon, coming in with 10 MPH of separation from his fastball and wrong-footing Boston hitters all night. Of the 13 swings they took, they missed on nine…a 69 percent swinging strike rate on the pitch. Filthy.

Ragans also showcased his new pitch, a slider that’s a derivative of his cutter in that it has a similar shape, but it comes in about 5 MPH slower with a ton of vertical break. He got four misses on 10 swings on the slider.

Add it all up and Ragans finished with a 34 percent CSW% (called strikes plus whiffs), which is an outstanding rate. It’s not a surprise that he finished with 11 strikeouts. He allowed just four hits and gave up two runs, one earned. Boston bats lacked balance all night. It was a performance that, at times, felt overpowering. Look at this pitch mix:

That’s just a fantastic variety. Want to keep hitters guessing all night? Showcase those five pitches with an array of speeds and movements. I was struck by this visualization from Baseball Savant:

I’m not going to go out on a limb and call Ragans a Dude at the moment. I will say that if he keeps this up, there won’t be any stopping me. This has the potential to be a scouting and development success.

From Anne Rogers on the Ragans slider:

“That was something that he presented to us,” Royals senior director of pitching Paul Gibson said. “We asked what he wanted to work on. He said, ‘I want to be better against left-handed hitters, and I think the slider is the way to do that.’ We thought the same thing, so let’s go get it.”

…Ragans brought up the idea of a slider -- which he’s thrown before but inconsistently -- to Triple-A pitching coach Dane Johnson and the rest of the Royals staff.

“Dane and I, in catch play and bullpens, we found a grip that was comfortable and the movement was consistent,” Ragans said. "We took it and ran with it.”

Personally, I’m not going to get tired of hearing stories like this. Not after the lack of coaching, experimentation and development the pitchers endured in the previous seasons under the old coaching staff. This season has been an unfriendly grind, full of losses and underachievement, even by modest expectations. Successes should, and will, be celebrated. After three starts, it may be too early to put the Ragans acquisition in the “success” category, but it’s certainly trending in that direction.

I grabbed the AL Central standings since the All-Star break from Baseball-Reference Monday morning.

It’s nothing great. It is respectable, though. And I think at this point in the season, we would gladly take respectable. Entering Monday’s game against Boston, the Royals’ offense since the start of the second half has gone for .262/.305/.455 with a 100 wRC+, meaning they’ve been producing at exactly the league average.

As you’re aware, the improvement has been powered by one Bobby Witt Jr., who is hitting a tidy .318/.341/.624 in 88 PAs over that time. He’s been joined by Freddy Fermin who—as I wrote a couple of weeks ago—needs to be in the lineup as often as possible. He’s posted a 200 wRC+ covering 52 PAs since the break. Other regulars have been close to league-average production. Again, while it’s not all that great individually, it’s enough to let a handful of hot bats carry the load.

On the pitching side, Brady Singer has been channeling his 2022 form and Monday’s starter Ragans has shown well in his three starts. Hernández is clearly suited for the relief role and will probably add to his already increasing value if he can close out a few tight ballgames. Ump shows aside.

The good thing about this stretch of respectability is, despite the seven-game winning streak, this isn’t some sort of roll that will fool fans and the front office into thinking that it’s fine to stay the course. It isn’t the runs of September’s past.

Rather, this is the team most of us thought we’d see this season. A decent, but flawed, ball club. A team that could hang with most of their division rivals in the weak Central, but still had plenty of work to do. I predicted 72 wins for the Royals this year (I know, I know), and would you look at that? A 10-12 record is about a 72-win pace.

What’s important about this is these young players, even the ones who won’t figure in the next good Royals team, but especially those who will, desperately need to find some team success. This pace-of-115-losses garbage isn’t good for anyone, even in a season of evaluation. It’s not good for Quatraro, it’s not good for his staff, it’s not good for the front office and it’s especially not good for the guys in the dugout. (And it’s not good for a team looking for public funding to build a new downtown stadium.) For them to be playing respectably, at this stage of the season, says a lot about the character of the players and the staff. And it’s a welcome change from the first half.