A Wire-to-Wire Uncomfortable Win

The Royals led nearly the entire game, but that doesn't mean it wasn't about as nerve-racking as can be late.

The Royals put themselves in such a huge hole to start the year that one win doesn’t do much. It doesn’t change the standings. It doesn’t change anyone’s feelings. And it doesn’t change the fact that they have so much work to do that it’s fair to wonder if they can do it all, even in upcoming seasons. But in another way, one win can feel like the weight of the world is lifted off their shoulders, if only for a day. And there’s something different about a game that was led basically from start to finish rather than having to get it done with late-inning heroics. Those games feel a little like flukes after the joy of the moment passes. Winning a game like last night that they’d been losing all season long feels good and maybe a little different.

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The Royals badly need two things. One is more of a collective thing and the other is an individual issue. The collective is the offense. They came into the day 14th in the AL in average, 15th in OBP and 14th in SLG. I wrote last week about how they have absolutely suffered from some bad luck on their batted balls, but they simply weren’t actually getting enough batted balls for the luck to matter too much. It’s a small sample, but things seem to be going a little better over the last few games. In the three games since facing Shohei Ohtani, the Royals had hit .280/.353/.467 with a 15.1 percent strikeout rate.

Last night was more of the same. Against the Diamondbacks starter, Ryne Nelson, they were 11 for 24 with three doubles, but only three strikeouts in 25 plate appearances. They missed opportunities to score, just as they have so often this season, but they continued to do a good job of making contact and that has led to them giving themselves actual chances to score some runs. After going 3 for 10 on Monday with runners in scoring position, they went 3 for 8 yesterday. And with their 14 hits and just four strikeouts, they’re now hitting .306/.365/.486 with a 13.8 percent strikeout rate.

They need to hit the ball over the wall more than they have, but I also don’t think this is a powerless team. Guys like Vinnie Pasquantino, Salvador Perez, Bobby Witt Jr. and MJ Melendez all can be 25-home run types. Franmil Reyes is too, theoretically. I’m not worried about that part so much, but I did worry that they were going to continue to swing and miss so much that none of it would matter. I feel a bit better about that now. And part of that is simply because there are some players getting going who had been a big part of the problem. You might remember that I wrote about part of the issue being that once you got past the first few hitters, nobody could be counted on to do much of anything in a lineup that I expected to be far deeper than it has been.

Part of that is Michael Massey has been a no-show to start the season. But Edward Olivares also has been inconsistent at best. Reyes hasn’t been the run producer or power threat the Royals had hoped. They’ve obviously had their issues with Hunter Dozier. And Kyle Isbel continues to struggle at the plate. But I’ve seen signs. I’ll start with Massey. He came into last night’s game with 22 strikeouts and no walks in 62 plate appearances. But I’ve liked what I’ve been seeing the last few days.

He came into yesterday with back-to-back two-hit games. He did it again and he’s now 7 for 21 in his last six games. I thought he had his best swing of the year yesterday and it was ironically not even one of his two hits.

His numbers are going to take some time to rebound and he absolutely has to be better about swinging at everything, but we saw him do damage in spring training, and it wasn’t just stat scouting that made me believe in him. Many who saw him in Arizona in March saw a hitter with a plan at the plate and an ability to do damage to the baseball. The Royals need him to be better. He’s a good, not great, defender at second but he’s a hitter who can anchor the bottom of a lineup in a way they haven’t been able to see consistently from this offense. I like the signs with him.

With Olivares, he hasn’t been bad really at any point, at least in the batter’s box, so it’s maybe not quite as noticeable as some of the others, but he got a chance to hit cleanup last night and did his job extremely well. In the first inning, he got the runner home from third with less than two outs with a hard single. In the fifth, he hit a rocket to center that ended up as a heads-up double. He ended up scoring on a sacrifice fly to give the Royals their fourth run. He now has a five-game hitting streak, though yesterday was his first multi-hit game in that stretch, but if he can get going, that changes the formula quite a bit as well.

I’ve also seen a lot to like from Isbel, who has had multiple big hits in the late innings against a lefty on this road trip and had two good swings to double and triple last night. It seems like Perez might be getting going. In spite of some struggles the last couple of nights, Witt is hitting .316/.349/.533 since getting some home cooking in Texas (that’s 63 plate appearances). There are positive signs for this offense that we haven’t been able to point to for awhile, and I’ll maintain that it’s from simply making a lot more contact. They face a heck of a test later today when they see Zac Gallen, but tests are a good thing.

The individual they need to be better is Singer. He was the breakout star of the pitching staff last year, as you all know, and then found himself throwing just two innings over two plus weeks during the WBC this spring. Did that set him back? It’s kind of hard to think it didn’t, but I suppose we’ll never really know. What we do know is that his season has started quite poorly. He had a solid start against the Blue Jays to start the year, but then gave up 18 runs on 24 hits in 16 innings over his next three starts. You might recall I said that I wasn’t worried about him after his start against the Braves but that the last one against the Rangers had me concerned.

The line last night was excellent. It’s hard to argue with one run on five hits with no walks in six innings. I’m not going to even begin to complain about anything there. But I still think Singer has a little work to do to get back to what he was last season and what we all thought he could be this year. That’s okay, though. Six innings like that without what I think is his best stuff is worth celebrating. His location was considerably better last night than it was in either of his his last two outings.

Catching the plate isn’t a problem when you’re not exclusively living in the middle. And if you look you can see a lot of white in the actual middle of the plate. That isn’t to say he didn’t make any mistakes, but he did what I was suggesting for Brad Keller yesterday. By throwing sliders in the zone, that allowed him to get chases on sliders out of the zone. The Diamondbacks found themselves swinging at half of his sliders that were outside the zone and he had a 32 percent whiff rate on that pitch. He only got one whiff on his sinker, but had a ridiculous 15 called strikes on it for a 40 percent CSW%. That’s truly outstanding.

I also don’t think it’s a mistake that he went back to his changeup early and he found success. My thought is that he doesn’t need a good changeup but just needs to show the changeup to help the other pitches play up and give the hitter something different to think about. But it certainly doesn’t hurt when the changeup is also a good one.

Still, pretty much everything plays off Singer’s two-seamer. When it’s right, it’s generally peppering the glove-side edge of the zone. And it was much better yesterday.

With the way it fades back arm-side, by living there, it can be an extremely difficult pitch for a hitter to pick up but when he’s tunneling his slider well, it leads to some very ugly slider swings with that pitch moving the opposite direction.

That’s the game for Singer. He doesn’t have truly elite stuff, but when he’s right, he is excellent at putting the ball where he wants it and keeping a hitter guessing. I’m not the first person to say this and I won’t be the last, but the key to pitching, whether you throw 88 or 95 or 103 is to mess with a hitter’s eye level and to mess with a hitter’s timing. When Singer is on, he’s doing that and that allows him to even make a mistake here and there. He’ll get the Twins next, and their offense has had their ups and downs but they’ll provide another test for him.

The late innings were again a concern. Taylor Clarke walked a couple of hitters and gave up a run. Aroldis Chapman had another weird inning with an infield single that led to him getting banged up followed by a single and a grounder up the middle that Witt made an incredible play to stop and then he just tried to do too much and made a terrible throw that scored the fourth run for the Diamondbacks. Thankfully, Scott Barlow looks back to form. He came in with a runner on second and one out and got strikeouts of both Gabriel Moreno and Alek Thomas.

Then in the ninth, he put himself in danger by allowing a leadoff double. After the runner moved to third on a groundout, he got a huge popup from Ketel Marte, who had a brutal game, and then walked Corbin Carroll. On the third pitch to Christian Walker, he put a slider in a good spot and it was grounded to Nicky Lopez who threw across the diamond to seal a rare victory for the Royals. Can this be a jumping-off point? Sure. Will it be? I have no idea, but I’m sure glad to be writing about a win instead of another gut punch loss.