A Different Tune for the Offense While Singer Wasn't Pitch Perfect

A big first inning led to an offensive outburst that supported a decent Brady Singer, who still left something to be desired.

When there are issues with the Royals organization as deep and as visible as there are right now, it almost feels like breaking down an individual game is a fool’s errand. But yet, that’s what I do here, so that’s what I’m generally going to keep doing with a glimpse at the big picture at times. After having been shut out in their previous two games, the good news is that the Royals offense did get back on the board and they did it in the very first inning. This is incredibly sad, but it was one of the most enjoyable innings of the last few weeks at the very least. And they got a win, which I think is worth celebrating.

First, to truly understand how amazing the first inning was for the Royals, you have to know how bad the first inning has been for the team. Forget the pitching, the bats have been even more anemic in the first than overall. They came into the game hitting .218/.274/.361 with just 16 runs scored (it’s actually worse in the second, by the way). In that line, they had walked 13 times in the first inning all season. That’s a 5.9 percent walk rate in an inning where many pitchers are still finding their release points and the league has a 9.1 percent rate. So, like so many things with this team, it’s bad.

But after a Whit Merrifield strikeout, Andrew Benintendi worked a four-pitch walk. Then Bobby Witt Jr. was up 3-0 in the count before Yusei Kikuchi got back into it with a called strike and a foul ball. But then took a fastball inside for the second walk of the inning. Salvador Perez struck out and MJ Melendez spent some time fighting off sliders until he got a fastball. And boy did he do some damage on it.

Okay fine, it was one of those hits that we’d be cursing the baseball gods about if it was against the Royals, but it wasn’t and it gave the Royals their first run since Sunday afternoon. But then Carlos Santana walked and Emmanuel Rivera ripped a single up the middle to score two more.

Okay fine, it was one of those hits that we’d be cursing the baseball gods about if it was against the Royals, but it wasn’t and it gave the Royals three runs in the first, which is their second-biggest first inning of the year, but also more runs than they’ve scored in 19 full games!

But after a great first inning from Brady Singer where he threw seven sliders and five sinkers, he started to struggle some. Santiago Espinal took a slider on the inner third and hit a rocket to third that Rivera made a great play to catch. Now, I don’t know if he went away from the slider because of that hard-hit ball, but he threw six straight sinkers to start the next plate appearance to Raimel Tapia. I have questions about where the changeup was because that seemed like a perfect spot to drop one after the foul ball on 2-0. But he didn’t throw it.

Anyway, on the seventh pitch, he hung a slider and Tapia hit it 441 feet. It was a mistake. It happens. And he threw a couple to Lourdes Gurriel Jr., so maybe it wasn’t something that he actually got scared of, but it sort of felt like it, at least maybe to lefties. And it’s frustrating because the slider was awesome for him. He ended up going just five innings and throwing 98 pitches.

Among them were 55 sinkers, 37 sliders and six changeups. I’m going to get back to the changeup because that’s the pitch people are hyper-focused on with Singer, but I just want him using that slider more. The Blue Jays came into the series with a 31.3 percent whiff rate while hitting .217 with. a.348 SLG against righty sliders, so it shouldn’t have been a game plan to avoid that pitch. And they came into the series hitting .294 with a .475 SLG against sinkers, so to throw more sinkers than sliders is indicative of a bad plan.

Ultimately, the results weren’t terrible for him. He got hurt on the sinker by a home run off the bat of Zack Collins after a missed strike three call kept the at bat alive, then he gave up a couple of hard singles that led to a Vladimir Guerrero Jr. RBI groundout that tied the game at the time. He ended up going five innings, giving up three runs on eight hits with five strikeouts and no walks. I just keep coming back to how sharp his slider was when he didn’t hang it.

By the numbers, he got 17 swings out of the 37 he threw. And on 10 of them, they came up empty. That 59 percent whiff rate was the fourth-highest of his career in a single game. The highest was his last start. And that’s important because I think back to the last start where he gave up seven runs in five innings with three home runs allowed and Mike Matheny said that he just didn’t think Singer was able to get to his slider because it wasn’t set up properly.

Stop.

The slider doesn’t need to be set up. It is A PITCH. The angle on it just makes it so difficult for opposing hitters to even get to it (again, when not hung). And it was especially good yesterday. Right away, he had it working against George Springer.

And Vladimir Guerrero Jr.

This one to Matt Chapman in the second looked a lot like that one above.

And then he got Collins on the slider in the fourth.

These are obviously among his best pitches of the day, but when you have the whiff rate he did on the pitch, it was clear that he should have been using it more than he did. It’s not that the sinker is a bad pitch. As we all know, he gets a ton of called strikes on it, and he had a nice chunk of them in this one as well. But it’s not his best pitch.

That said, Singer has also moved a bit away from his changeup that looked so good for him in his first two starts back. He threw 8.9 percent changeups in his third start and 9.7 percent in his last start. It hasn’t been a swing and miss pitch for him, but it’s allowed him to set up that sinker a little better than in the past and opponents were just 1 for 8 against it. But he completely went away from it in this start, which is at least a bit worrisome moving forward. As I said earlier, he threw just six, but if you really break it down, it wasn’t even mixed in as well as that makes it seem.

That’s because after giving up the home run to Collins, he faced Cavan Biggio and threw him four consecutive changeups. The first one was actually quite good and was a called strike. I thought the third pitch was a good one if it wasn’t the third straight changeup he threw, but Biggio took it for a ball. And then he left the fourth one out over the plate and it got hit hard for a single. But then he threw two more the rest of the game.

His fifth was hung to Tapia and Tapia hit it hard, but right at Nicky Lopez. And then his sixth and final was another to Biggio that got away from him for a ball. So maybe it’s as simple as the fact that he just didn’t have a good feel on it, but Blue Jays lefties came into the game hitting .186 with a .254 SLG against right-handed changeups. It just feels like a pitch he needs to be forced to throw a little more (again). If he does, it can help boost his sinker and really play everything up.

The good news is that the offense didn’t crawl into a shell after Singer gave up the lead in the third inning, which is something they’ve done quite a bit. They scored two more in the fourth and then single runs in the fifth, sixth and seventh to take a five-run lead while Singer and the Royals bullpen shut them down at least through the eighth. Scott Barlow came on for some work in the ninth and didn’t give up a lot of hard contact other than a Bichette rocket single, but did let the Blue Jays chip into the lead a touch before ultimately closing the door.

The fourth inning runs for the Royals were on a walk, a couple singles and a groundout. It was nice to see them moving runners, but that wasn’t that much fun. The fifth inning run was on a double from Michael A. Taylor that scored Carlos Santana. It was nice to see Santana get on and Taylor get him in, but that wasn’t that much fun. The sixth inning was fun, though. Salvador Perez took an Adam Cimber at the bottom of the zone and let the wind help him out.

That was the 11th triple of Perez’s career and his first since July 19, 2017 in a win against the Tigers. Watching him run was certainly something. He was driven in on Santana’s third hit of the game, a double, which was also less fun than a Salvy triple. And then they scored again in the seventh after a Taylor HBP and a Merrifield double.

Crown Jewels

Taylor Making a Case

It’s easy to understand if you’ve missed this, but Taylor has been…good. We know the defense is a difference-maker, but something I’ve talked about a bit is that he’s vastly improved his plate discipline this year and is now carrying a 13.6 percent walk rate with a 20.5 percent strikeout. That walk rate is more than double what he showed last year and the strikeout rate is nearly seven percent lower. Those numbers come after a 1 for 2 day with a double, a walk and a hit by pitch. That’s after he went 2 for 2 on Monday with a walk. He’s now hitting .259/.364/.357. The power is not there, but it’s hard to argue with that OBP.

I wrote about him in the trade piece from a few days ago, but you can’t tell me there aren’t teams interested in a guy who will work a walk, doesn’t strike out a ton and plays the defense that he does. I know that a lot of people didn’t like the contract extension for him last season, but I maintained then and still now that even if he’s nothing more than a great defensive fourth outfielder who can occasionally hit some homers, $4.5 million per season isn’t anything to get worked up about. I think Kyle Isbel has shown he can handle center just fine and Nick Loftin is on the way and looking pretty solid in center down in AA. Taylor’s improvement in the batter’s box is providing them with an opportunity to get more value from him than they probably ever expected. I hope they don’t turn that down.

Santana’s Big Day

Do I believe Santana can do enough to get traded? I actually do think it’s possible, but I’m not entirely sure there are reasonable odds you can give me that would make me bet on it. But even so, you can’t take away the day he had yesterday. He tried to make an out in the ninth, but a double on a fly ball that Tapia lost in the sun meant he went 4 for 4 with a walk, which was his fifth game with the Royals with at least three hits and his second four-hit game since joining the organization last year. With Hunter Dozier on the bench with a bit of a side injury, I’m not sure what that means for a certain Italian prospect, but I have to relay that Santana is now hitting .538/.647/.692 in June. You hear that, baseball? Come get him!