Great Audition for Bubic in a Familiar Feeling Win

The stakes were hardly even close, but it felt a little bit like October 2014 in Anaheim for the Royals.

Close your eyes and picture a close game between the Royals and Angels, late into the night in Kansas City. It’s a tie game into the late innings and a big home run puts things away for the Royals. Your fond memories likely take you directly to October 2 and 3, 2014. In those two games, the Royals and Angels were tied into extra innings when the Royals got home runs in the 11th from Mike Moustakas and Eric Hosmer respectively to come back to Kansas City up two games to none. Last night wasn’t quite as important. All it did was give the Royals a chance to clinch a winning road trip later tonight, but it was at least something to remind us of the brief glory days.

The biggest story for the Royals in this series are the three pitchers taking the hill for them. We’ll see Jonathan Heasley tonight and Daniel Lynch tomorrow, but last night was Kris Bubic’s show. Why are these games interesting for those three? For one thing, any time a young pitcher is on the hill, there’s at least something to pay attention to, but right now, this is about the return of Zack Greinke, likely on Friday night. With Brad Keller and Brady Singer unlikely to be removed from the rotation, one of those three will likely get sent down to AAA unless they go with a six-man rotation.

Lately, all three have given the Royals a reason to keep them in the big leagues. And in his final audition, Bubic showed his strongest stuff yet against the Angels. This is a team that can hurt you pretty easily, but also the right gameplan can take some of the bark out of their bite. The top three in their lineup on most nights (and last night) is Taylor Ward, Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani. All can hit the ball very hard and very far. But last night, they hit Matt Duffy fourth. With Anthony Rendon and David Fletcher (okay, maybe he’s not a difference maker, but he’s had his moments) out and Jared Walsh struggling, the lineup gets rough fast.

But that’s not to take anything away from Bubic’s outing. He had a season-high with six innings and seven strikeouts and paired those stats with just two runs on six hits. It was an excellent outing for him. His fastball looked good again. And, surprise, he averaged 92 MPH on it with 11 coming in at 93 MPH or harder. You might recall after his last start where he threw 25 that hard that he had thrown 25 that hard all season coming into the game. While he’s had some trouble with location on the fastball, he filled up the zone with it last night.

Some of those were a little risky and caught too much of the plate, but the Angels went 2 for 14 on that fastball with four strikeouts and a walk. On the whole, he picked up six swings and misses on the fastball, and what I liked is that there appeared to be a plan against a guy like Mike Trout. In the first inning, he had a 2-2 count on him and tried to get a fastball into that upper, inner third part of the zone. That’s the spot the Royals showed to the league in 2014 that could get Trout out. Well, in the first he missed his spot and Trout hit a hard single.

But in the third, he tried it again with two strikes.

That time it worked. That’s just a nice pitch with a fastball that had been a problem for Bubic this season but is starting to look better, partially because he’s simply throwing it harder.

And I appreciate what he was doing with his changeup as well. He absolutely made some mistakes on it, particularly two to Ward, who had a homer and an RBI single.

The reality is that he’s going to make mistakes with the changeup. It happens. It’s a pitch that is supposed to mess with timing more than anything and often, the bottom is supposed to drop out of it. Sometimes it doesn’t happen. This is where sequencing comes into play. He made a big mistake to Ward with nobody on base in the third. It’s not that solo home runs can’t hurt you - they obviously can and do - but they also obviously hurt you less than homers with guys on base. And then he did make a mistake with one with a guy on base to Ward and it got hit hard. Luckily for him and the Royals, Ward just singled on it (and got thrown out at third). But again, the fastball allows him to make some mistakes in the middle with his changeup, especially against weaker parts of a lineup.

And in general, the changeup was quite good with good movement. He had six whiffs on it as well, including one in his final inning that I thought was just a gorgeous pitch.

In the end, the Ward/Trout/Ohtani trio went 4 for 7 with a home run, two walks and two strikeouts. The rest of the team went 2 for 10 with just two singles and four strikeouts. That’s how you handle this lineup.

So now Bubic hands the baton to Heasley. While these starts are so important for the three starters in this series, the Royals rotation has been so much more fun to watch on this road trip. In now seven games, they’ve gone 37.2 innings, so they could stand to get deeper. But they have a 3.13 ERA with a 27.1 percent strikeout rate and 10.3 percent walk rate. The walk rate is still too high, but also if you’re striking out more than a quarter of the hitters and limiting hits like they are (29 hits), you can afford a couple of extra walks. That’s big for this team.

Not a single starting pitcher on this trip is older than 26 years old. Soren Petro said something interesting on his show yesterday, talking about not wanting to root for your opinions. Personally, I think the data is overwhelming that Cal Eldred is beyond unqualified to be the pitching coach of this team. But he’s the guy in the role, and if this rotation is starting to get stabilized, I’ll be happy to be wrong. I don’t think I will be, but this is at least a good start. The sample is way too small, but you can only pitch one game before you pitch two and two before you pitch three, etc.

And while the eighth and the ninth innings weren’t stressful, when Dylan Coleman came into the game in the seventh, it was still a 3-2 Royals lead. He had some high stress pitches to make, even though they weren’t against the difficult spot in the lineup. And he looked like the guy who I was hoping would be the closer by the time this season got to the trade deadline. In fact, he was downright nasty. He threw a perfect inning with a 97.7 MPH average fastball and a slider that was just unfair. It was nice to see that from another young arm.

Offense Comes Through

The game started on a very high note with Whit Merrifield singling on the third pitch of the game and Andrew Benintendi pulling an Alcides Escobar and picking on the first pitch he saw.

But then things sort of went the way they have for the past few. They had guys on base, but missed opportunities in a big way. First, Noah Syndergaard shut them down pretty quickly in the second and third. But in the fourth, they got the first two on. Then Hunter Dozier hit into a forceout. With Salvador Perez on third, he decided to steal, which isn’t the worst idea with Syndergaard on the mound, but he just sort of stopped short of second base and was tagged out, which basically put an end to that threat.

In the fifth, they got a leadoff single and then another fielder’s choice put Nicky Lopez on first. He attempted to steal and made it, but only moved up to third with a groundout.

The seventh felt like it was about to be the same story. Dozier led off with a single, attempted to steal and made it, but was standing on second as both Kyle Isbel and Michael A. Taylor struck out. That’s when Lopez came to the plate.

You’re forgiven if you were surprised to see Lopez come through there because it was just his sixth RBI of the season. Coming into tonight, he’d come to bat with 131 runners on base with 58 in scoring position. And five of them scored. The average big leaguer had 24 RBIs in Lopez’s situation. Not to pile on, but yikes.

But after Coleman’s great inning, the offense did a little more damage. A Benintendi single brought Perez to the plate after a Bobby Witt Jr. strikeout.

That was loud. That was long. That was something. Salvy has been a bit of a different voice these last few days. It was reported that he came into the clubhouse with a message before Sunday’s game and you could see him being a bit more of a vocal leader on the field. Then after this home run, he showed some additional emotion. You might remember that I talked about this team needing someone to be that voice in the clubhouse. Maybe that’s becoming Perez, which would make a lot of sense.

And two batters later, Dozier had to put his mark on the game.

With his single in the seventh and home run in the eighth, the late inning Dozier legend continues. He’s now hitting .327/.391/.538 with five home runs and 15 RBIs. That’s pretty good.

Now the Royals are 4-3 on their nine-game road trip. For a team that’s just 12-21 on the road this season, it’s hard to argue with a winning road trip so far. The season is lost, but this team is a generally inexperienced bunch. Winning is important to development, and it’s nice to finally see a few of them. And this one was big because it was just the sixth time all season the Royals have headed off a losing streak by winning a game after just one loss. And it was the first time since May 28 when they beat the Twins after losing the night before. More of that and it might still be fun to watch some baseball this summer even though they’re not playing for anything.