A Texas-Sized Weight Lifted Off the Royals
The Royals longest losing streak of the year remains six with a very complete win over the Rangers.
That is exactly how the Royals figured to win games this year, and it’s a very simple formula. The stars starred, simple as that. The Cy Young runner-up had his second-best start of the season. The superstar had two extra base hits. The emerging cog had two hits and an RBI. The older face of the franchise hit two home runs. Oh, and the bullpen locked it down as well. Add it all together, and it was one of the most complete games this team has played all season long. Maybe that team meeting just took a couple of days to take.
What’s wild is that Globe Life Field in Arlington has been a house of horrors for the Royals over the years since it opened. They’ve now played 13 games there and last night was just their third win. The three runs the Royals scored in the top of the first last night exceeded the number of runs they scored in that park in three games last year. They scored two in the first game last year and were shut out in the final two. They did score some runs there in 2023, but only won once. It has not been a good place for the Royals. Maybe the Royals find it odd playing inside of a Home Depot, I don’t know.
That first inning was exactly what the doctor ordered, though. Coming into the game, Bobby Witt Jr. was hitting .189/.211/.270 in front of his friends and family. He smoked a 109.6 MPH double down the left field line to get things started. Three pitches later, Maikel Garcia hit a hard ground ball that got through to score Witt to make it 1-0. Now, the Royals had done this before. They seem to do it quite a bit. They can get one but can’t seem to make it a big inning or even a medium inning. That sure seemed to not be the case when Vinnie Pasquantino crushed a ball to center field, but it just missed getting out. He hit it 105 MPH and 413 feet, but it was caught at the wall.
There have been 488 batted balls hit at least that hard and at least that far. Of those 488, 10 were doubles, two were triples and 472 were home runs. That leaves four that were outs. If you want one stat to show how this season is going for the Royals, that’s the one. Pasquantino hit a ball that has been a home run 96.7 percent of the time and an extra base hit 99.2 percent of the time and it was an out. What happened next honestly shocked me because I was expecting to see an inning die after that long flyout.