A Much Better Tune in Another Loss

A sharp Brady Singer was a welcome sight for one night.

Brady Singer offered a ray of hope in a 2022 season that had plenty of downs and only a handful of ups. The 2023 rotation figured to be inconsistent at best and a mess at worst, but at least the Royals had someone they could count on every fifth day to lead the charge. Singer was so good down the stretch for the Royals, and honestly so good in his last spring training tuneup, that I figured he would continue to develop and grow.

And he was pretty good in his first start. He didn’t go deep, but he was dealing with truncated spring because Mark Derosa used him for two innings in three weeks in the WBC. Then the wheels fell off. He gave up five runs in six innings against the Giants and did it with a 2021 signature move of watching an inning snowball on him. He got rocked early by the Braves in his next start, but struck out eight and didn’t walk anyone. From that point on, there were glimpses, but he just continued to struggle. To start the month, he had a great looking start against the Rockies. For the first time, everything looked right.

In his next three starts, he had a 5.94 ERA (which has actually lowered his season ERA) and gave up 21 hits in 16.2 innings with 11 strikeouts and six walks. He had a chance to get right against a Guardians offense that is decidedly not good. Whether or not they’re good is irrelevant, though. He was hit by a bad offense in his last start. The A’s knocked him around in May. A good start is a good start and he had a good start last night against the Guardians.

The final numbers are strong. Six shutout innings will always stand out. It’s easy to look at just three strikeouts and wonder where those are. And while that’s fair, I think it’s important to look at the context of the opponent. While the Guardians aren’t good offensively, they do make contact. They came into the night with the second-lowest strikeout rate in baseball and the seventh-lowest swinging strike rate. So they make contact.

That contact helped to run up Singer’s pitch count a little bit. He threw 95 pitches in six innings, which isn’t horrible in terms of efficiency, but he gave up 18 foul balls to Guardians hitters and 11 of them came with two strikes. Is that on Singer? Probably some. But I do think there’s some credit to a team with a philosophy to make contact at basically all costs. And sometimes, it’s at the cost of actually driving the ball because, as we know all too well, some pitches are strikes and can be swung at but maybe shouldn’t.

And I do think Singer benefited from their offense being on the other side. Look at how much of the middle of the plate he filled up.

The Guardians took some, fouled some off, swung through a couple and went 0 for 5 on those pitches in the heart of the plate. Is that sustainable? The easy answer is no, but the actual answer is probably somewhere that’s closer to no than yes, but also not entirely a negative. We saw Singer find some success last year even in the middle of the plate because of the command on the pitches that weren’t there. And what I did notice was that his command, in general, was much better last night than it had been in previous starts.

It’s kind of hard to see in that big cluster above, but you can see a lot of sinkers and sliders in a spot where he found a bunch of success in 2022. That glove-side location down low is where Singer often lived last season. He wasn’t hitting it much early in the game, but as the game went on, he started looking more and more like what we saw last year.

Here are his spots in the fifth:

And the sixth:

While the start didn’t lead to as much swing and miss as you’d like to see, it did lead to a lot of grounders. He got 12 of them to be exact. That’s on 18 balls in play, so it’s a 66.7 percent rate when he’d been around 45 percent for the season.

That might be a trend for him and maybe an adjustment he’s made. His last start against the Tigers led to 13 ground balls, which is still his season-high, but is his only other game in double digits this season. So that’s something to keep an eye on moving forward. The home run hasn’t been an issue for Singer, but with it certainly won’t if he can continue to keep the ball on the ground. And you can make an argument that with Maikel Garcia, Bobby Witt Jr., Nicky Lopez and Nick Pratto that the infield defense is the safest place to keep the ball.

Everyone wants to know about the changeup and Singer threw three of them last night. I have some thoughts on that and they might surprise you. If the sinker and slider are working, I don’t especially care if he throws the changeup much. He needs a third pitch, no doubt, but I think he needs it for two reasons. One is to keep hitters honest, so he probably needs to throw more than three. And the other is if he doesn’t have one of his other two working. He had them working, so it wasn’t a big deal last night.

I don’t know why he seems to refuse to throw the changeup. Maybe he’s stubborn. Maybe he can’t get a feel for it. I’d bet on stubborn, but I also don’t know the guy.

Edit: Anne Rogers wrote about Singer’s game and mentioned that he is throwing a split-changeup now and getting more comfortable with it. The Royals claim that since it has sinker characteristics that it sometimes registers as a sinker. He threw eight sinkers at slower than 91 MPH yesterday. Based on the article, it seems that the claim is at least some of those are changeups. Going from three to 11 would be a big difference. Heck, even going from three to nine puts it at closer to 10 percent usage, so this is something to monitor.

I was very encouraged by the end of his outing. He gave up a two-out single to Jose Ramirez, which happens. Then he got called for a pitch clock violation because he came set before the hitter was alert to him (which I think is part of the rule that needs to be amended). And then he got the ground ball, but Witt played it poorly and allowed Josh Naylor to reach. That’s a spot where we’ve seen Singer fold plenty throughout his career.

But he went to work on Josh Bell and finished his outing with maybe his best located pitch of the night.

One start doesn’t mean he’s back. I mentioned at the top that he looked great against the Rockies at the start of the month and then reverted back to what he’s been all season. But you can’t have two good starts in a row without getting one first. And he’ll be tested immediately with his next start coming against the Dodgers, who aren’t as good as they were last year when he gave up one hit over six innings against them. If he can carry this over against them, it’ll carry a fair amount of weight for me. Here’s hoping. I’m still skeptical until I see him look like he did in his last two innings for a whole game, but there was a lot to like in this one.

There wasn’t much else worthwhile about this game other than Singer. Okay, that’s not fair. Carlos Hernandez looked great again. Aroldis Chapman continued to bounce back from a couple of rough performances. But the offense was pretty much non-existent against the Guardians top prospect Gavin Williams. I think some of that was that Williams was just excellent. His fastball looks legit, he has that curve that he can throw in there and I thought his slider looked really good too. He came into the game having had a rough first big league start, but he’s currently the number 12 prospect in all of baseball and that’s not by accident.

The offense scratched a run across on an Edward Olivares double in the bottom of the eighth that led to Dairon Blanco pinch running and stealing third and scoring on one of the weirder throwing errors you’ll ever see from a pitcher trying to throw to the plate. For the first time all year, the Royals didn’t win a game they led after eight, so it was a bad time for Scott Barlow to have a bit of a blowup, but even calling it a blowup is probably not entirely accurate.

He gave up a single on a pitch barely a foot off the ground. Then he walked a batter. That’s completely on him. And then he gave up a double on a pitch that I actually didn’t mind either. Sometimes the other team beats you and I think the Guardians beat Barlow far more than he beat himself. It doesn’t make a loss any better, but it should probably make you feel fine about Barlow coming back out the next time he pitches to shut the door.

I don't think it’ll matter for much longer, but the Royals and Matt Quatraro need to do a better job of getting him in more games, lead or not. Barlow has allowed. a.259/.375/.444 line with four or more days of rest between appearances and .215/.292/.354 with three or fewer days. He’s still been excellent since his rough start to the season, even with last night’s blown save, which was just his second of the year. It was just unfortunate that it went that way for him last night.