Another Loss Feels Even More Grim

Carlos Hernandez had a disastrous inning, but the offense meant he had to be perfect once again, which doesn't help anything.

The Orioles are a bad baseball team. There is nobody who would dispute that. And in three games in about 27 hours, they mostly outplayed the Royals. The fact that the Royals took one game out of the three-game set could be seen as a boon because they were gifted (and took advantage of the gifts) the victory in the first game of the double header on Sunday and then just didn’t play well enough to win in game two or yesterday. And what we saw yesterday was an example of what I think was a young pitcher trying to do more than necessary to make up for a moribund offense.

That’s not to say that Carlos Hernandez doesn’t deserve a finger pointed at him for the way he pitched in the fifth inning of his start yesterday, but when you pitch for an offense that came into the day barely cracking three runs per game, pitchers know absolutely everything has to be perfect. He was very good in the first four innings. I wouldn’t say he was perfect, but I loved the way he was throwing the ball. He was locating just about everything and was able to get away with a couple of pitches that I thought were mistakes because of the way he was mixing pitches.

He has such good stuff, even with decreased velocity that he actually can miss in the zone some, but I love when I see things like what he did in the first inning.

There’s absolutely nothing here for the Orioles to hit, at least not with any kind of authority. He even had three swinging strikes, including two on his fastball which has been an issue for him at times this year.

The swings and misses dried up some moving forward, but he only threw six pitches in the second. In the third, I liked the way he started mixing pitches and moving eye levels around.

There’s some pitches in the middle there, but when you’re mixing as well as he did, you can get away with that.

And just to give you one more chart from a good results inning, you can kind of see that he was starting to put himself in trouble in the fourth.

That’s a lot of pitches in the middle of the zone. And he was hit hard. He gave up a single and a double and was kind of fortunate that the double hit the bag at third and probably cost the Orioles a chance to score since the ball didn’t roll deep. But he got out of the inning and it was encouraging. But the fifth was a full-on implosion for him that didn’t need to happen.

Rougned Odor started the inning with a lineout on a first pitch that didn’t foreshadow the carnage that was about to hit. Tyler Nevin walked. And I will say it was an especially frustrating walk because I think Hernandez missed with a couple pitches that were in basically the same spot but on the other side of the plate that were called strikes to his catcher, MJ Melendez, in the previous half inning. But a bad call to Melendez doesn’t mean a bad call is coming for Hernandez too. Anthony Bemboom followed with a double on a first pitch splitter that just caught way too much of the plate.

Things were still tenable, though. A run had not yet scored and I think this is where the Royals offense entered Hernandez’s head, whether he’d ever admit it or not. He got Jorge Mateo to swing and miss at a high fastball and on a 1-2 pitch went to the well again. But he reached back and threw it about as hard as it seems like he can now. And he just missed. This pitch should have been six inches higher (he hit the target, to his credit), but it wasn’t and Mateo simply didn’t miss it.

He came back and got Cedric Mullins, but he used the same approach that he had with Mateo. A bad process with good results is fine in the moment, but sustainability is important and a bad process doesn’t lend itself well to good future results. So after getting Mullins to strike out, Hernandez just pumped another fastball in the zone to Trey Mancini, who didn’t miss it.

That made it 3-1 Orioles. And after that, it just kept going. He walked Anthony Santander. Then he hit Austin Hays. Then he threw a wild pitch that scored another run. And then I thought he pitched much better to Ryan Mountcastle. I’d call that a better process with bad results. Mountcastle hit a curve that I liked for a two-run single and before you could really blink, it was 6-1 Orioles and the game was absolutely out of reach for a Royals offense that continues to be lifeless.

I think a few mistakes were made during the inning. Having Melendez behind the plate didn’t help things for Hernandez that inning, and I’m not even talking about the throwing error that allowed a run to score and Mateo to get to third. I think it was pretty clear that things were going sideways and Salvador Perez, for all the faults I have with him as a catcher defensively, does a very nice job of reading his pitchers. This isn’t a knock on Melendez at all. He’s caught all of three big league games after yesterday. He’s only caught Hernandez in spring training (and even then I’m just assuming he has). He’s dealing with his own growing pains of learning to catch at the big league level.

So then it falls on the coaching staff, which I think you probably know I think is just about worthless on this big league roster. Cal Eldred did head to the mound before the Santander walk, but I’d have been out on that mound after the Mateo single or at least after the Mullins strikeout, knowing that the process didn’t match the results there. But they didn’t. And I think that while Mike Matheny has handled the bullpen well, he was a little too lax in getting someone going for Hernandez in that spot. That hit by pitch would have been my last batter for Hernandez. He only had one more after that, but I think that was a mistake.

In the end, it isn’t on the offense or the coaching staff or the catcher that Hernandez imploded after four solid innings, but I think all of those led him to the inning he had that ended up putting the game away for the Orioles, a bad team that has no business outclassing anyone for three games, let alone a team that thinks it has postseason aspirations within the next year or so.

I can spend as many words as we all would like on what is troubling this offense. It’s been the issue since the start of this season. That’s not a secret. Some of it is a simple lack of talent. Some of it is talent not hitting. And some of it is bad luck, though not nearly as much of it is bad luck as the organization would lead you to believe.

In many ways, these issues will work themselves out. Bobby Witt Jr. is going to be fine. Melendez is showing an approach that actually looks like there’s a plan for him. Perez has started to awaken from that weeks-long slumber that plagued him. I said this on Twitter, but the approaches from hitters in the minors are almost all better than what we’re seeing at the big league level. That remains a bit of a coaching issue at the Majors, but also something that likely will look better when we see guys like Vinnie Pasquantino, Nick Pratto and maybe even someone like a Michael Massey later in the year. Should the young guys be better than the veterans? No, but on a team sitting at 9-17, you’d prefer that to the other way around.

I hope what I’m about to say is screenshot and mocked in a couple of months. I hope that the young starters all turn things around and the offense finds its way to relevance and people can look at this and say, “wow, what an idiot.”

It’s time for some people to lose their jobs.

I don’t find joy in saying that. I have honestly been way more pleased with Matheny than I expected to be, but there are some things that I just can’t bring myself to let go. The biggest is the insistence on playing Ryan O’Hearn as much as possible and in the fourth spot in the lineup and what it represents. That has kept at least one of Kyle Isbel or Emmanuel Rivera out of there, as I wrote about yesterday. And there’s a way to get both of them in the lineup, but O’Hearn being in there is stopping that as well as Merrifield’s consecutive games streak apparently meaning more to the organization than actually winning games. I’m not saying Merrifield can’t figure it out, but he is clearly not worthy of regular playing time either. Not right now anyway.

But all that said, this has become a mess. The hitters are unprepared. The pitchers are unprepared. Every basic tenet of this team that was praised so heavily during the 2013-2016 run was about preparedness and being more ready than any other team. Can you imagine this particular version of the Royals being able to exploit something like Jose Bautista throwing to second on a ball down the line? Maybe it’s unfair, but I can’t. I think it’s at least worth considering that the Royals didn’t extend Matheny this year. They picked up his 2023 option, but that’s just to keep him from being a lame duck manager. Maybe I’m reading more into that than I should, but they need performance.

If I’m being honest, I don’t especially care if Matheny goes or not though if I was making the call, he would. Cal Eldred has to, though. It just hasn’t gotten better since he’s been here. There were years with very little pitching talent, so you could argue that it doesn’t matter either way, but they invested a lot into this pitching staff and they’re not getting nearly enough out of them. Kris Bubic has had one of the worst seasons in the big leagues. Brady Singer lost a rotation spot in the spring and is now in AAA in the hopes of him figuring something out. Jackson Kowar is a mess down in the minors. Daniel Lynch has looked good, but even that only came with Zack Greinke’s arrival.

And I’ve talked about the bats. I still don’t think the hitting coach plays an especially big role in the day-to-day outside of one thing and that one thing is simply being prepared and ready to go and Royals hitters seem surprised by everything they see. I can tell you from conversations with people in the organization that there are worries regarding Terry Bradshaw finding a connection with his hitters, which probably matters more than anything. I think it’s time to try a new voice and, as I’ve said before, Keoni DeRenne was added to this staff and it wouldn’t surprise me if he was added because the Royals thought this might happen.

That brings me to the front office. If you’ve read me for any length of time, you know that I haven’t agreed very often with what Dayton Moore has done as the general manager. Well now he’s team president, but it’s pretty clear that he’s still in charge of just about everything that we see on the field. JJ Picollo is the GM and he’s doing more than he had before, but the power structure clearly hasn’t changed. The positive for Moore is the Royals making the World Series in back-to-back years and winning one. He built a great farm system that brought a championship to Kansas City. But on the flip side, this is the 16th full season since Moore came to KC and the Royals have three seasons with more than 81 wins.

What I appreciate, and this came from John Sherman’s arrival I believe, is that the Royals have revamped a lot of what they do in the minors. The hitting development has been completely overhauled and I love what they’ve done. The pitching development hasn’t seen a complete overhaul (though maybe it should) but they have become far more advanced in what they do. I think it all depends on your perspective here, but if every change made for sustainable winning is based on the minors and most of the guys who will be a part of that change aren’t in the big leagues, an argument could be made that it’s only fair to see that through. I’m not going to argue with you if you think that’s insane. I’m just saying there’s an argument to be made.

However! If obvious changes are necessary at the big league level and no change is ever made for whatever reason, I believe Sherman has a duty to the organization he purchased to make sure those changes get made. And if the person he has entrusted will not make those changes, then Sherman himself has to make changes. And if he will not do that, then he becomes complicit as well. A new downtown stadium to make that ownership group gobs of money is great, but we’ve seen enough stadiums open to big crowds for a year or two that end up being as sparsely attended as games at the old stadium to know that the most money is there to be made through winning.

Yes, I’m frustrated. It seems like there is not nearly enough change in an organization that has had as little success as the Royals have had. I will never forget those World Series runs and the victory that culminated it all, but the Royals have played less than 100 meaningful games in September in the last 19 seasons and they haven’t played a single actually meaningful one since 2016. Failure shouldn’t be rewarded with longevity and after another terrible series, I think something is going to need to change because whatever they’re doing simply isn’t working and hasn’t worked for a long time.