3-2-1 Too Much Contact

The Guardians got the swing and miss when they needed. Brad Keller and the Royals simply couldn't and that was that.

I usually write after every game and generally about that particular game. Sure I’ll take a day off here and there, especially when the Royals are frustrating me, but I like breaking down the action from the day before. You probably noticed that I didn’t write specifically about Monday’s game or Tuesday’s game. I took a day to write the newsletter I hated to write, but I felt needed to be written and then I took a day off for my mental health. But I’m back because I simply like writing about baseball. I’m pretty excited to one day write about a win, but I suppose I’ll have to wait another day for that.

Because, yep, it was another loss for the Royals yesterday in a day game that gave everyone their evening back. And I think yesterday’s loss displayed one of the biggest issues with the Royals vs. other teams that can ever be displayed. As the game has turned to more of a three-true-outcomes sport, the Royals are striking out fewer than they have in more than a decade. They simply don’t get swings and misses. We’ve seen the issues with so much of their staff. The MLB average whiff rate, according to Baseball Savant, is 25.5 percent. They’ve had 12 pitchers who have thrown a pitch this year with a lower rate than that.

And Brad Keller, yesterday’s starter, is one of them. He came into yesterday’s start with a whiff rate of 19.3 percent, which is 51st out of 56 qualified starters. Then he got three swings and misses on 47 pitches. He had one whiff each on his fastball, his slider and his sinker. I know the Guardians are a contact-oriented team, but that’s a ridiculously low number.

The fact of the matter is that the Royals have a very good infield defense, but their outfield defense without Michael A. Taylor or Kyle Isbel in there isn’t wonderful. Andrew Benintendi won a Gold Glove and he’s solid, but Whit Merrifield only works as an occasional guy out there and Hunter Dozier is actually bad in right field. So maybe pitching to contact isn’t the best idea in the world for this team. Or any team.

I don’t think Keller looked particularly good yesterday, but I also think he ran into some bad luck. Let’s take a look at the batted balls that drove in runs. The first one was a mistake pitch and Amed Rosario did what you’re supposed to do to a mistake. Honestly, he probably didn’t do enough even though he smashed the ball.

What led to that RBI was a hard lineout (yay pitch to contact!), a relatively hard-hit (but not by definition hard-hit) single, a weak groundout that moved the runner, a walk and then Rosario’s single.

The next inning is when the pitch to contact issues came up so blatantly. First, he walked Josh Naylor. You know what a leadoff walk can do. Then he got a groundout and a hard-hit ball that moved the runner to second. Two outs with a man on second and Keller made a pitch that fooled Andres Gimenez.

It was a good pitch. Maybe it could have been a couple inches higher, but it was a good pitch. But he hit the ball. It only traveled at 76.5 MPH off the bat, but he hit it and it went into center field. The Guardians led 2-0.

Moving into the fifth, Keller walked the leadoff hitter again. Then he made a good pitch to Steven Kwan, who singled to center. He got a lineout from Rosario to move a runner to third and that brought Jose Ramirez to the plate. He made another good pitch!

Keller needed a strikeout. But Ramirez swung at the first pitch, and it was a good one. But he put the ball in play at just 76.1 MPH and the run scored.

And then in the sixth, Keller got two outs before he gave up a soft double to Gimenez and Richie Palacios hit another good pitch at 57 MPH to drive in a run.

And to add insult to injury, the Royals loaded the bases with one out in the fourth. Konnor Pilkington got a strikeout. He also gave up weak contact on the next better, which could have been bad for him as well, but he at least got one of them on a strikeout to make his life easier. In all, Pilkington got 17 swings and misses on the day. He worked five shutout innings while Keller gave up four runs on six hits in six innings. Pilkington walked two batters compared to Keller’s three, but he got the swing and miss and the strikeout when he needed it (and sometimes when he didn’t).

Then fast forward to the seventh. This was almost a carbon copy of so many situations Keller found himself in. The Royals had two on and two out. Eli Morgan got swings and misses from Bobby Witt Jr. and the Royals didn’t score. Again.

Keller isn’t always going to give up hits in these situations that he did yesterday, but you have to be able to get a swing and miss sometimes and Keller hasn’t been able to do that in awhile. His slider is a strikeout pitch for him, but he only had one whiff on it yesterday. It just found far too much of the middle of the plate.

Keller has had bouts of mechanical issues throughout his career and his slider missing in the middle has often been a sign of those. And not to harp on the pitching coach, but how in the world is he going to fix this? It took until Keller was in front of a certain camera angle in Boston for them to figure out what the problem was last year. So forgive me if I have absolutely zero faith in him to figure out the issue with Keller this time. He’s on his own.

I’m not saying it’s easy. Look at a couple sliders he’s thrown this year. The first one was against the Guardians in that first weekend of the year.

The second is from a couple starts ago against the Twins. I went with two sliders at home just to keep the same camera angle.

The result of the second slider was fine. It was a pitch fouled off, so no damage, but look at the movement on that first one compared to the second. We also know that pitching mechanics are incredibly fickle. Maybe this is nothing, but I’m going to say it’s not.

On that first pitch, look at his left foot right before he starts his arm swing forward.

Now look on the second.

It’s like the smallest difference and maybe it’s absolutely nothing, but he is just a little behind in his turn lately on the slider and I think you can make a pretty strong argument that it’s hurting his movement a bit. These are just a couple of stills from a couple of pitches, but even if what I’ve shown above is nothing, something that small could be what is causing him these problems. And that’s what I’m trying to get at, not to diagnose the issue, though I do wonder if his body is a bit behind his arm.

When Keller’s slider is working, it gives everything else a boost. He needs to find it because with Greinke out and struggling before he was out, they need their veteran to step up in a young rotation. And to Keller’s credit, when he’s good or bad he’s almost always giving innings. He’s pitched into the sixth or later in eight of 10 starts. He’s gone six full in seven of 10 starts and seven full in four out of 10 starts. Even in a rough game, he did enough for the Royals to win, but the offense just couldn’t do anything to make him gutting it out matter.

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Crown Jewels

Guardians Feasting

The Royals do plenty of things that drive us all absolutely up the wall, but one of the things that can be the most infuriating is when certain guys absolutely make their seasons against the Royals. We saw Nick Gordon over the weekend and he’s definitely one of those guys. But Cleveland has a couple of them, who owe the Royals pretty much everything this season. Remember how Steven Kwan started the year with a crazy first series against the Royals? He’s hitting .252/.358/.354 for the year. That’s done with a .189/.285/.255 line against everyone else and .571/.679/.857 in 28 plate appearances against the Royals. He has 12 of his 32 hits against KC and four of his nine extra base hits.

Amed Rosario is hitting .241/.284/.307 overall, which means he’s hit .203/.261/.248 against the rest of the league and .394/.394/.545 against the Royals.

Rosario is still having a bad year even with his Royals numbers, but even so, it is so frustrating to know that every team seems to have two or three guys who do it against the Royals. As a team, the Guardians are now 5-2 against the Royals and 17-22 against everyone else. They have 47 of their 212 runs (22.2%) in just seven of their 46 games (15.2%). Their 6.7 runs per game against the Royals bumps their season average from 4.2 runs per game to 4.61 runs per game. They need to send the Royals a thank you note.

Defending John Sherman

I obviously went pretty hard on the organization on Tuesday. I don’t regret a single word I wrote, but I do regret some words I maybe didn’t write that I should have. There is a growing unhappiness with John Sherman, the Royals new owner following the 2019 season and I think a lot of it is because it feels like he’s actively doing nothing outside of campaigning for a downtown stadium. I believe that the downtown stadium is the number one priority for Sherman, which you can agree with or not, it doesn’t matter for what I’m getting into. What I don’t think is fair is to say that he’s at fault. Yet.

His first season as owner was 2020. I don’t think you can evaluate much of anything in that year. But with his arrival came an edict to get more advanced. The Royals overhauled their minor league hitting, which we’ve talked about a billion times. They also did work on the pitching side, which we haven’t talked about as much because it wasn’t as drastic even though it likely should have been. So 2020 is a wash and 2021 happens and there’s immense success in the organization below the big league level. At the big league level, things weren’t as rosy, but a lot of the young pitching got their feet wet and with the staff led largely by young arms, they went 38-35 after the break, facing a difficult schedule as well.

Look, I get it. The fact that Eldred is employed is a black mark on everyone. But I also get why he wasn’t quick to clean house after his first real season as owner. I think it’s fair to give him the season. If this continues as it’s headed and no changes are made at all, I think it’s open season on Sherman. But I believe the answers about Sherman as an owner will come in October/November. I know it’s easy to be upset with not getting that gratification instantly, but I don’t believe Sherman is one to move quickly and you can see the argument that the issues he’s dealing with now are two months old rather than two years old to him.