Hard Hits Had Been Hard to Come By
Last night was actually an improvement, but the Royals bats haven't exactly been stinging the ball.
I wrote exactly one week ago that when we look back on the game from the night before, it might be the ugliest of the 2021 season. Last night’s game gave last Monday’s game a run for its money. The strike zone was ugly. The defense was ugly. The offense was ugly. It was just ugly. And cold. And in watching the game, I was fully prepared to write about something that’s been brewing in my head for a few days and somewhat explains the trouble scoring runs. They just haven’t been hitting the ball hard.
So naturally, four of the five hardest hit balls last night were hit by the Royals. Four of the last five batted balls by the Royals were hit at 100 MPH or harder. Carlos Santana hit three balls at least 106.7 MPH. Of the 12 balls hit 100 MPH or harder, eight were by the Royals. Andrew Benintendi and Nicky Lopez each hit one, which is kind of crazy considering they’d combined for five the whole season coming into last night.
So the good news here is that they hit the ball hard, which may be an indicator of some future success. Maybe it won’t happen consistently this series with the weather the way it looks, but I have noticed that Santana looks like he’s breaking out a bit and Jorge Soler still looks like he’s just on the verge as well.
It hasn’t been like that for awhile, really since the opening series against the Rangers when they scored 28 runs (don’t worry, I’ve got the 28 names picked for free subscriptions when I start charging). They hadn’t had a game before last night with a team average exit velocity of 81 MPH even since that first game against the White Sox when Lance Lynn shut them out. They had seven total barrels on the homestand coming into last night. Here’s a look at the game-by-game numbers including last night:
Ignore the “Team Won Game” part that seems to be a weird Baseball Savant glitch. It just hasn’t been especially pretty, but maybe, just maybe, last night was the start of something.
And here’s the whole team from last night. That’s a lot more red than we’ve seen in a while, which is very encouraging.
My question that I don’t know the answer to is if what we’ve seen for the majority of the last week and a half is a teamwide slump or if this is something to be worried about moving forward. April weather certainly isn’t easy to hit in, and it’s not like Royals opponents are knocking the ball around the park either, so maybe it’s as simple as that. I talked awhile ago about how Whit Merrifield gets it done in a weird way, but he’s actually been hitting the ball hard. I’ve shared my concern about Benintendi and I mentioned that Santana seems to be getting going and we know Salvador Perez is red hot. The Royals need more from Soler and Hunter Dozier, though. And they need Adalberto Mondesi back, but who knows when that’ll be?
But to focus on Soler and Dozier real quick, I’ve said since the move to acquire Benintendi that the offense will go as far as those two take them, no matter who they’ve added. And neither has produced much at all, for various reasons. But with Soler, the last few games have brought some good news. Five of his last seven batted balls have been hard hit (95 MPH+) and four of them were hit at 100 MPH or harder. It looks like he’s getting back to hitting the ball hard.
Dozier, on the other hand, hasn’t been quite so good. He has hit some balls hard, including a 112.3 MPH rocket that was fielded beautifully and turned into a double play that could have potentially changed last night’s game. I liked that swing, though. It’s exactly what Dozier needs to be doing, though it would be good to get some additional lift. If they don’t start hitting, it won’t matter, but I will say it was nice to see some hard hit balls in this one.
In the end, last night was just one of those games. You might argue it belongs in the middle 54 since the Royals threw the ball around and looked ugly, but I would argue it’s one of those 54 a team is just going to lose. And if you were wondering, yes, I do keep track of these things in one of my nerdsheets and the Royals are 6-0 in the games they’re always going to win, 0-5 in the ones they’re always going to lose and 3-1 in the middle 54. I’m not sure they’ll keep up the .750 winning percentage on those, but if they did, that’d put them at about 94 wins. I’ll take the under on that, but they’re off to a good start even with the loss last night.
Crown Jewels
Duffy in Charge
How can you not love Danny Duffy? Forget how well he’s pitched, but think about the answer he gave to Lynn Worthy of The Kansas City Star in his postgame press conference last night. First of all, after another outstanding start, which I’ll get to in a second, he talked for more than a second or two about how he was kicking himself for not picking up Santana after the ugly dropped popup and bad throw. He then went on to talk about how he should have pitched Kiermaier in that plate appearance. This is the plate appearance he was talking about:
He mentioned that he wishes he’d have come inside before going away on him because he could have gotten a little more on the outer edge from Kiermaier if he had pushed him off the plate. That’s just such a great and introspective answer that has me believing in Duffy even more than I already was after a third straight absolutely outstanding start. He deserved better than a loss. His fastball was humming. He had 10 swings and misses on it in 24 swings and averaged 93.5 MPH, which is a shade off his season number, but still within the range of where he needs to be. His slider was pure filth too. He wasn’t enjoying the same zone that Josh Fleming was, but he pitched just as well as Fleming, if not better.
Robot Umps Now
I think some of our complaints with umpiring is simply that we have so much of a better look at every single play than we ever have before that it’s easy to find mistakes. I also think the strike zone overlay on the television screen makes it very easy to criticize umpires. But man oh man was Roberto Ortiz awful last night at calling balls and strikes. I’m going to say first that I don’t think Ortiz had it out for the Royals or anything. I think he just had no clue where the zone was at any point. Take a look at the Rays called balls and called strikes:
Now look at the Royals:
They absolutely got some of the calls, so it wasn’t entirely a pro-Rays zone and that’s not even my point here. It was just a bad zone in general. This is just unacceptable.
The reality is that these are human beings required to make these calls in a split second with velocity higher than ever and pitchers being better than ever at manipulating the ball to get it to move in ways we’ve never seen before. Umpiring is incredibly hard, and while they get paid extraordinarily well to do it, it’s probably too much to ask for a human to get calls right at the rate they need to for the level they’re working. I sincerely hope that the experimentation with the automated strike zone in the minors goes well because we need it in the big leagues just as soon as possible.