Alec Marsh Might Just Be Something

The Royals lost again, but Alec Marsh showed the sort of stuff that can at least make you dream a little.

The Royals entered Wednesday with 25 wins on the season. On July 5. They will enter Thursday with 25 wins on the season. On July 6. The point that nobody needs a reminder about is that wins and losses are long past mattering. What matters is figuring out who is and isn’t part of the future and who can and who can’t be a part of a team that the Royals hope can compete for a playoff spot within the next two or three years. You can believe that will happen or not, but they’re doing what they should and operating under the idea that they’re determining now which of the players we’re screaming at through the television every night will be players we’re cheering for through the television soon enough.

That brings us to Alec Marsh, yesterday’s starter. Marsh made his big league debut on Friday against the Dodgers. I wrote a bit about it in the Weekend in Review, but I was very excited to see him pitch last night, and maybe moreso than Friday, for a couple of reasons. The first is that I was at the ballpark on Friday night. It can be tough to really evaluate a pitcher from a seat on the first base side. And the second is that the Dodgers are just a brutal draw for a big league debut, so I wanted to see how he could do against a lineup with talented hitters but one that could be beaten.

The results were a mixed bag again, but better than on Friday. He gave up three runs (two earned) in five innings. He also walked three and threw 91 pitches. He gave up a home run to the second batter he faced. But he struck out five. He picked off two runners. He threw first-pitch strikes to 15 of 20 batters. He actually threw 60 strikes in his 91 pitches. And what happened when batters swung was maybe the best part of all of it.

The Twins swung at 42 of his 91 pitches. They came up empty on 15 of those swings. That 35.7 percent whiff rate is the sixth-highest of any Royals pitcher this season among games with 25 or more swings. It’s the 26th-highest in any game by a Royals pitcher with 25 or more swings generated since the start of 2021. It’s a really good number. Maybe more impressive (or refreshing?) is that he was doing it with all of his pitches.

This is sort of cheap because he only threw 10 changeups and got swings on three of them, but he had a whiff rate of 28 percent or higher on all four of his pitches. The four-seamer showed some rare qualities again. He averaged 95 MPH with a spin rate of 2,514 rpms. You just don’t see that often. Velocity and spin rate certainly aren’t everything, but they help get a pitcher where they need to be. With velocity and movement, location becomes slightly less important.

These locations aren’t bad necessarily. Well, a few of them are. But none of those were hits. The one hit on his fastball actually came with one of the two on the lower edge that you can see above. When location isn’t as important, it can make pitching just a little bit easier.

His slider, though, was even better than the fastball. He threw 21 of them and the Twins swung at 12. They missed six of them, fouled off three more and gave up just one hit on it. It was so good.

Now, the one hit was a big one, but if you can imagine a world where MJ Melendez doesn’t make a terrible throw home, he gets the runner at the plate and that’s that for the inning. Instead, it was an ugly play. The throw hit the runner in the head and bounced away and that allowed a second run to score. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t blame the pitcher on a hit, but Marsh easily could have been out of that without even giving up a second run.

And then there was his curve. I don’t know that we’ll see the curve used in this way so much moving forward, but it was sort of his called strike pitch. He threw 23 and the Twins only swung at nine of them. But of the 14 they took, a whopping 10 were called strikes. He really raided the zone with it.

There are a couple of ways to look at it and I honestly can’t tell you which one is correct. The first is that he was keeping hitters so off balance with a four-pitch mix that it was easy to understand taking a lot of curves. An addition to that thought is that he was using it at the perfect times to steal a strike. The other side is that maybe he got a little lucky that the Twins couldn’t pull the trigger on that curve. I’d like to believe it’s the former, but it very easily could be the latter. We’ll get a chance to find that out as he starts more games. I tend to think it leans more toward quality usage, though the real answer probably lies somewhere in the middle.

What really struck me about this start is that Marsh looked like the type of young pitcher who comes up and looks like he can handle big league hitters. We see it against the Royals all the time, so it’s nice for someone to show the kind of movement and stuff that we see from pitchers in other organizations. That isn’t to say he’s a finished product or some sort of guarantee because he obviously isn’t. He has 10 strikeouts and seven walks in nine innings. He’s given up three home runs and seven total earned runs. This is not a perfect pitcher.

But in a season where you’re looking for something you can dream on, the stuff we saw from him is something you can dream on. He found himself on the swing and miss leaderboard on Baseball Savant. That’s fun. The 15 total whiffs were tied for the second-most in a game by a Royals pitcher this season. It’s sort of put up or shut up time for Marsh, who is now 25 even though he only has about 250 professional innings under his belt. He needed to get to the big leagues and show something. Is he a starter long-term? Maybe! It’s nice to have something to hope about.

Because we can beat a dead horse about things we’ve talked about all season. The offense struggled again. It’s tough when your best hitter (Vinnie Pasquantino) is out and your best power hitter (Salvador Perez) may as well be out. You can still score runs, but it requires other guys to step up and while Bobby Witt Jr. and Maikel Garcia have been consistently good for a bit now, they didn’t have a great game, which happens. Someone else needed to step up and they just didn’t. Some of it was Pablo Lopez was at his best, and that also happens, but this offense just isn’t equipped to win night in and night out because they’re simply undermanned. There’s just not much to talk about there.

And then Taylor Clarke came in and struggled. Again. He looked a little better. He finally snapped off a slider that looked pretty good. But he gave up yet another home run. I wrote a week and a half ago or so that a bad week doesn’t change trade value as much as people think. What Clarke is doing does, though, and there’s just very little value there. I think the hope is that he can get back on track after the break and you can maybe move him in the winter, but the dream of a big return for a guy like him is probably gone. It was nice, however, to see Dylan Coleman look pretty good actually. He walked the first hitter, so that’s still a big problem, but the stuff is still there, which is nice to see.

And one thought from Tuesday since I didn’t write yesterday…

Heasley’s Velocity

I was busy with family and friends on Tuesday and actually missed the vast majority of Tuesday’s game (lucky me!). But one thing I noticed when I went back to take a look at some things like I do when I miss a game is what Jonathan Heasley did in relief in one inning of work. It was…striking. He averaged 97.4 MPH on his fastball and he topped out at 98.2 MPH. I know he threw 12 total pitches and just five fastballs, but that blows my mind. He threw four of the five hardest pitches in his career in the bottom of the eighth inning on Tuesday.

It wasn’t just the velocity, but the spin on it. He averaged 2,456 rpms on Tuesday, compared with 2,322 rpms last season. When you go from averaging 93.4 MPH and that spin to what he did the other day, that’s a brand new pitch. I said with Soren Petro a few weeks ago that I don’t know why you don’t see what you have with Heasley in short relief. He has a good enough curve and maybe the fastball plays up. I’m not sure if the spin rate is sustainable. In his last AAA outing, it was actually down, but the velocity was up to 95.6 MPH. And that was up from his previous short relief outing as well.

The point here isn’t that every failed starter should be tried in the bullpen. Well, maybe they should, but I wonder if Heasley doesn’t have a chance to be something. I’m not going to say that he does or doesn’t based on 12 total pitches in a blowout or anything, but even a glimpse of something like that has me at least interested in his next appearance, and I think it’s worth even mentioning when Heasley has anyone interested for what he’s doing. I’ll need to see it again. And again. And again. But as I’ve said before, you can’t do something twice until you do it once, so you have to start somewhere.