Hard Hits But Yet Another Loss
You'd think three homers in the first and a 4-0 lead would be enough, but well, that would prove you've never watched this team.
As humans, sometimes we see what we want to see. When the Royals made the move to fire Terry Bradshaw and bring in Alec Zumwalt and Mike Tosar to join Keoni DeRenne in the big league dugout, I was hopeful that we’d see a nice change in approach. You might remember that I wrote about the Royals offense having problems with pitches in the heart of the plate, a spot you really don’t want to have problems. So before yesterday’s game in Arizona, I looked at the numbers and got rid of the first couple of days with the new coaches. Is there any way that the new coaches have passed along their message that quickly? To be honest, I don’t know, but I did take a look to see if there was a difference.
And there was. Since Wednesday, the Royals are ninth in runs scored, second in slugging percentage and fifth in ISO (isolated slugging percentage, which is slugging percentage minus batting average). Okay, that’s a good start. On pitches in the heart of the plate in that time, they had a .348 average, which is sixth in baseball and a .719 SLG, which is fourth. And their average exit velocity on those pitches is 95.0 MPH, which is second. So whether it’s a small sample and just pure luck or not, the numbers show that the offense has been better.
And then the game starts and so did the fireworks. Literally on the first pitch.
He ambushed Zach Davies and gave the Royals an early lead with just their third home run in the first inning this season. Andrew Benintendi followed that at bat with a long fly ball to center that was caught. And then it was Bobby Witt Jr.’s turn.
Davies left a changeup right in the middle of the plate and Witt made him pay. It was his fifth home run of the season and his fifth home run of May. He’d single later, which would give him 17 hits for the month with 10 of them going for extra bases. The average and OBP need some work, but that slugging percentage is doing just fine for him. With as hard as he hits the ball and as fast as he is, you have to feel that him carrying a BABIP under .250 just isn’t sustainable.
But we can’t spend too much time on Witt’s bomb because two pitches later, Davies left another changeup too high in the zone and Hunter Dozier didn’t miss that one.
Dozier’s was hit the softest of the three, but traveled the farthest. And the good news is that it was worth the same number of runs no matter the exit velocity, launch angle or distance.
A walk from MJ Melendez was then followed by a single from Carlos Santana and Emmanuel Rivera was hit by a pitch to load the bases for Kyle Isbel, who came into the game with a hard-hit rate of 59.5 percent and an expected batting average of .299 and an expected slugging percentage of .475. So when you see the .278 average and .352 SLG coming into the game, you know that if the batted ball profile stays the same, the numbers will come up. He promptly hit a rocket to shortstop at 105 MPH that was a forceout, but it scored the fourth run and the Royals had themselves another big lead.
Look, you know by now that they didn’t keep it. I’ll get to that, I promise. But that first inning was an incredible array of just knocking the cover off the ball.
The only ball that wasn’t hit hard was the final out of the inning off the bat of Nicky Lopez. And look at the pitches that ended their plate appearances in that inning.
One of the biggest things that the new hitting instruction focused on in the minors was hunting a pitch to do damage. We talk about plate discipline all the time, but it’s so easy to look at it as “swing at strikes, take balls.” And while that’s part of it, it just isn’t that simple. You want to swing at pitches you can crush, especially if you’re still within the first two strikes. And they’re doing that much more. They’ve reduced their swing rate on pitches on the edges by about five percent on top of doing better with the pitches they should be swinging at. Given the offense’s issues to start this season with them not doing much on pitches they should do a lot, it would seem this crew would be a good fit to work with these hitters.
The success in hitting the ball hard continued, even if the results weren’t quite what they did in the first inning. They only had one hard-hit ball in the ball in the second, though they did score on Merrifield just basically never stopping.
You don’t see that too often and I have to admit that when he got up at second and started going to third, I was not happy with him, but I also didn’t realize third was uncovered. And then when he broke for him, I thought he was sure to get thrown out, but not so much. And the Royals had a 5-3 lead.
They continued to hit the ball hard throughout the game. Witt had the hardest hit ball of the night that went off the leg of Davies and sent him packing for the night with an injury that they announced was just a contusion. In the end, their hard-hit rate was 50% and their expected average in the game was .335. It’s just their ninth game with a hard-hit rate that high and their fourth-highest xBA of the year.
But it ultimately didn’t matter in the end. They scored five runs, so I’m not going to put this on the offense, though they didn’t get it done when they needed to. They had the bases loaded with one out in the first inning and got one more run out of it. It was largely unnoticed at the time because they’d already scored three before that situation, but that’s not good. They had the bases loaded in the fourth and didn’t score. They had two on in the fifth and didn’t score. They didn’t score their one runner in the sixth, seventh or ninth. And they left the bases loaded in the eighth. In the end they went 1 for 7 with runners in scoring position, continuing a trend that I don’t know how you fix. They left 13 runners on.
I am going to put this on the pitching staff, even though I don’t have much to say about them. It was an unfortunate game for Zack Greinke to have his first time without command. He walked four batters, which matched his entire season leading up to this game. He did strike out five, which was a season-high and got 11 whiffs, which was a season-high as well. But he was hurt by those walks and some good swings from the Diamondbacks on pitches that most teams likely don’t get many hits on. This is a frustrating chart.
In some ways, you almost can’t get mad. They hit pitcher’s pitches. In other ways, it’s just another game that the Royals got knocked around, and it just gets more and more infuriating every day when you think about the garbage spewed regarding the pitching coach. I’m not saying that a change would make a huge difference immediately or even that a change would have made much of a difference tonight, but it keeps bringing me back to the word they used - accountability. And there remains none.
The only good news for the pitchers was the same good news we keep seeing and it was Joel Payamps giving some big-time innings to keep the team in the game. He threw 2.1 more scoreless innings. He’s now pitched in multiple innings in each of his last seven outings, spanning 16.2 innings with two runs allowed on just 12 hits with 13 strikeouts and three walks. In some ways you feel like he needs to be pushed in higher leverage spots, but in other ways, maybe this is the higher leverage given the struggles with getting innings from starters at times.
I can’t end this without at least bringing up the strike zone, which is absolutely not a reason the Royals lost, but I’m getting so tired of the lack of consistency.
The Diamondbacks were blessed with a generally wider zone and that’s annoying, but at least be consistent.
Let’s add in the look from @UmpScorecards.
I don’t care if you call a small zone or a big zone, but call it the same the whole game. Bring on the automated zone!
The Race for the Bottom
A new feature here on Inside the Crown will feature the race for the worst record since we can’t really watch the standings. The Royals didn’t gain any ground last night, unfortunately.
Alright, we got something to root for now. At least we're in a race for something. Great article, as usual.
Is it bad after the first inning, I was imagining which horrendous way we would go on to lose the game?