Bad Timing, Bad Luck, Bad Play, Bad Homestand
It was pretty bad, but it's important to remember that it's rarely as bad...or as good as it seems in baseball.
The Royals didn’t play yesterday, which meant that for one day after a series of bad days, they didn’t lose a game. Sometimes the off days find you at terrible times and sometimes they find you at great times. This one is definitely a great time. It’s a very long season and while not every team goes through eight-game losing streaks, every team goes through a rough patch at one time or another. To be able to reset and regroup after those days is just incredibly important.
What I’m curious about today with a chance to look at the bigger picture is how much of the seven-game winless homestand is something that we should be terribly worried about and how much of it is simply a product of a combination of bad luck and bad timing. There might be some eye rolls with the idea that any of it can be bad luck, especially with how the weekend series went, but think back to that Indians series. There were four losses, but how easily could the Royals have won three of four or even swept? Okay, the sweep seems unlikely given that they got shut out in the final game, but they easily could have won the first three games. Any game you have a lead in the middle innings is a winnable game. Anyway, let’s get to it.
The Offense
First let’s compare their numbers to the season totals leading up to the brutal week at home:
So we can see that the average dropped a bit as did the OBP, but their SLG really took a dive during this series. They struck out more, but they also faced some very good pitchers and they also walked more. I thought it was sort of encouraging that they drew four walks against Lance Lynn when he’d walked four all season long before that game.
It kind of felt like they hit the ball hard a lot and defenses were there to catch it just about every single time. As a team, the Royals averaged 90 MPH on their batted balls. Compare that to the 87.8 MPH average exit velocity in the games before this week, and you can see they hit the ball harder.
On the whole, their xBA was actually .252 on the homestand and their xSLG was actually .438. For the season before this past week, they underperformed their expected stats as well, but not so drastically. On hard hit balls this week, they hit .452 with an .808 SLG on 74 of those bad boys. The xBA and xSLG were .501 and 1.044. For the season, they’ve hit .462 (xBA of .515) and slugged .935 (xSLG of 1.090).
So there’s one thing. But let’s ratchet up the exit velocity to 100 MPH instead of 95+ MPH and see what it looks like, especially after their 1 for 10 day on Sunday on those balls hit hard. For the week, they hit .488 (xBA of .570) and slugged 1.000 (xSLG of 1.313) over 43 batted balls compared to .545 for the season before (xBA of .624) and slugged 1.122 (xSLG of 1.394).
It sort of seems like you can find that missing SLG in some theoretical bad luck throughout the week. That’s not to give a pass to the offense. They still didn’t do enough even with some luck, but it’s one of those things that will happen. My thought on offense is hit the ball hard and good things will come. I know that not every hard hit ball is created equal, but if you’re scorching it at 105+ or something, even the ground balls will get through eventually.
What I found interesting was the numbers with runners on and runners in scoring position. So here’s that comparison over the week compared with prior to the homestand:
Clutch hitting is not a skill. Over the course of a long season, you’ll see the numbers with runners in scoring position even out. The Royals overperformed both their season totals and expected totals on the whole for the first few weeks of the season and then it started to even out this past week. Some of it was absolutely swinging and missing too much and chasing pitches and all that. A lot of it was just random variance.
So how does this impact the homestand from an offensive standpoint?
You can’t say for certain, but I think it’s fair to argue that they’re losing Saturday no matter what. Looking game by game in the Indians series, maybe the Royals add a run or two in the second on Monday with some better luck and the same in the bottom of the sixth. They ended up losing by two, so that could have an impact. On Tuesday, maybe you add a couple in the bottom of the third again, but that’s not enough to overcome the four-run deficit.
On Wednesday, maybe an extra run in the third could come across when Jorge Soler hit into a double play to end the inning on a ball he hit at 110.7 MPH. They lost by one. In the third on Thursday, Andrew Benintendi lined out to center to end the inning with two on and two out. The ball had an xBA of .700. Does that change the game? Maybe.
I don’t want to get into the weekend’s games because those were awful and you get the idea, but you can see how some luck and better timing could have changed the homestand from an absolute disaster to one that was a lot more palatable. Of course, it wasn’t just the offense.
The Pitching
On the whole, the pitching during the homestand was atrocious. In seven games, they gave up 45 runs, all earned, struck out 58 and walked 29. I thought that outside of Daniel Lynch’s disaster, the starters weren’t truly horrible. They weren’t good or even really average by any stretch of the imagination, but I think they were fine and let down badly by their bullpen, which I thought was a strength as recently as a week and a half ago.
As a whole, Royals starters went 33 innings and had a 7.64 ERA on the homestand. You obviously can’t do this, but take away Lynch’s start and that drops by more than two runs. My issue is that their bullpen let them down so badly. They came on needing to get one or two outs with runners on base in five of the seven games and ended up letting six out of eight inherited runners to score. That’s brutal. In the previous 26 games, they’d entered with 16 inherited runners and just four of them scored.
Again, this is something you can’t do, but if the bullpen had pitched the way it had all year leading up to this stretch and allowed just two of the inherited runners to score, does that change the complexion of the week enough? They’d still lose all three over the weekend, but it’s easy again to see them winning any or all of the first three games against the Indians if the bullpen stepped up in just relieving the starters.
This isn’t so much bad luck but more the bad timing I mentioned above. It’s not a coincidence that Kyle Zimmer has been one of Mike Matheny’s key arms when it comes to stranding runners (he’s stranded five of six) and he’s been out. Tyler Zuber has been another big time fireman with nine inherited runners and just two scoring. It might be time to rethink Scott Barlow in that role as he’s allowed five of eight to score this season. Of course, he’s also one of your best, so it’s kind of a pick your poison type situation.
And if it seems like every Royals opponent had a big hit, well, you’re not entirely right, but it’s pretty easy to see why it seemed that way during this homestand and not so much before. Take a look at these numbers for opponents with runners in scoring position:
So you have to wonder which is real or if this is just a matter of them coming back to earth and things evening out or if it’s simply a blip on the radar and things will get back to normal after they have a chance to reset with an off day and hopefully get right against the Tigers.
They need to get better without a doubt, but it does seem like a lot of this is some fluctuation in small sample sizes and it clustered during a week when it might have been the absolute worst possible time.
It was a long week. It was a brutal week. Only in early May can a team go from the best record in all the land to below .500 and looking up at two teams in their own division, but that’s where the Royals are right now. They absolutely have to play better. Three against the Tigers gives them that opportunity that they absolutely need to grab. But then they have four against the White Sox, including a double header and seven inning games favor the starting pitcher, which the White Sox have better than the Royals.
It’s easy to get caught up in making absolute statements about teams in small samples without factoring in the luck. There’s always good luck when a team is winning and bad luck when they’re losing. Sometimes it seems to compound, which leads to bad timing. Other times, it’s just noise. An eight-game losing streak is demoralizing and the type of thing that can torpedo a season, but if they can recognize a lot of the nature of the losing streak and pick themselves up this week against Detroit, it can be erased nearly as quickly as the hot start was by the last week of losses.