A Bunch of Puppy Gifs and Some Royals Mistakes
Oh, there's also a Bobby Witt, Jr. home run to look at.
The Royals have lost 10 in a row. They are playing bad baseball, making bad decisions, dealing with bad lucky and might just be plain bad. There is nothing I can say here that will make you go “hmm” or add a significant amount to the discourse.
So here’s a bunch of puppies from GIPHY just being cute. Maybe tomorrow we’ll talk about a win.
This one handles the ball similarly to a lot of Royals on defense.
This one reminds me of some of the team on the basepaths.
This puppy is most Royals fans right now.
This one is the rest.
This is just a puppy as tired of the Royals losing as everyone else.
And this is everyone when the Royals finally win a game again. Maybe soon? We’ll see.
Oh and here’s that Bobby Witt, Jr. home run that can keep us dreaming about the future for at least a couple days.
Okay, I’ll talk a little about this team because puppies are great and cute, but you’re here for some substance. If we’re being honest, I don’t have many answers, but I want to go over just a few of the mistakes this team is making. I don’t know if they’re pressing or if they simply just aren’t thinking, but it’s going to be tough to dig out of the hole they’ve created for themselves if they don’t eliminate these mistakes. Maybe they need Romeo Crennel to come in and hang a sign.
In the bottom of the second, Danny Duffy got himself into trouble by walking Niko Goodrum with one out and then getting a bit unlucky on a really nice play by Hunter Dozier that they just couldn’t record an out on. After getting Willi Castro to fly out for the second out (advancing Goodrum in the process), he faced JaCoby Jones. The Royals defense shifted. And then he threw this pitch and got this result:
I just can’t understand why you’re pitching a guy there when you’re shifted around for him to pull. I know he missed the spot a bit, but even so, he should be spending the at bat on the hands of Jones and not sitting on the outer third with only one defender on the right side.
Then in the bottom of the fifth, Robbie Grossman picked on a sinker that just missed over the middle of the plate and hit a ball to right field that was just particularly well placed. But then Jorge Soler made an ill-advised dive for the ball when he just should have cut the ball off. It probably would have been a double even without the dive, but I’m starting to lose count of the number of times Royals outfielders dive for the ball when they shouldn’t and it leads to additional bases.
Ultimately that dive didn’t actually cost anything because Jeimer Candelario picked on a juicy slider and mashed it over Jarrod Dyson’s head in center. Just look at this pitch.
A big league hitter is going to crush that almost every single time. And then with Miguel Cabrera due up next, the infield shifted again. And once again, where did Duffy throw the ball? On the outer third of the zone. That’s just a massive mistake. This one was more about missing his spot badly because of his command, which was not good at all last night, but I’ll repeat that if the defense is shifted, you have to pitch to that defense or else it’s going to make the shift look bad.
But the Tigers aren’t very good and after getting two to take the lead, Casey Mize started the sixth by walking Carlos Santana on four pitches and giving up a single to Salvador Perez on what was the second hardest hit ball of the night by a Royals hitter at just 101.8 MPH. Last night’s almost hero Soler stepped up to the plate and there was a feeling of hope with him facing a tiring Mize.
And then first pitch swinging at a ball he could do absolutely nothing with led to a double play to essentially take the Royals out of the inning.
What is he going to do with that pitch?
Bad baseball is one thing. It’s frustrating and hard to watch, but when you mix in mental mistakes like these, the product is so bad that it’s difficult to even write about, as you can obviously see with the main part of today’s edition. I just can’t wrap my head around what is happening with this team. I know that this isn’t the 2015 team that was just so incredibly precise but I believed they were better than this.
Maybe I was naive. Maybe they hoodwinked me with a solid spring and then a great first 25 games of the season. I wrote a few weeks ago that I wasn’t sure if they were actually good or lucky to be good. At the start of this losing streak, I thought that they were a little snake bit and just out of sorts. Now 10 games into this, it’s more than being snake bit. They’re compounding mistakes with poor decisions, and they simply can’t do that.
And now they’re putting an 10-game losing streak in the hands of a rookie who couldn’t get out of the first inning of his last start. I still have very high hopes for Daniel Lynch in his career and if he truly was tipping pitches and that’s been fixed, he could get a lot of swings and misses on his slider against a team that swings and misses quite a bit. No pressure, kid, but with four games against the White Sox, the season kind of hangs in the balance with this game as much as any mid-May game can.
I’ll beat this drum again after Edward Olivares went 2 for 5 last night including a game-winning homer in the ninth. He needs to be in the big leagues. He’s better than Ryan O’Hearn and he allows them to get Soler out of right field regularly while actually replacing him with a solid defender. I don’t believe Olivares is anything especially great, but I believe he makes this team better upon arrival, and that’s something they need to consider.
And to wrap up, here’s one last puppy gif, just because I like you.
