Hello Again, Last Place

The Royals needed one win in this series to win the season series over the Tigers and to stay ahead of them in the division. They did not get it.

It’s been a bad season for the Royals, but they hadn’t ended a day in last place since August 3. That ended yesterday after they gave up a ton of runs to a very bad Tigers offense to get the doors blown off them. At least in this one when the Royals couldn’t get many runs home, their young starter didn’t deserve a win. Jonathan Heasley looked like he might be in for a great start early on, but absolutely imploded in the fifth inning. I’ll get to his performance in a little bit, but first I want to look at what is going on with this offense with some additional thoughts on what is the issue for them.

The offense wasn’t quite as successful, in general, as Wednesday when they went 10 for 35 (.286) as a team, but they did have a few base runners. They had nine hits, worked five walks and had one reach on an error. That’s 15 runners after having 16 on Wednesday. In this one, they went 2 for 10 with runners in scoring position and left 11 men on, which isn’t quite as bad as the 13 from Wednedsay night. And they did end up getting some big hits in the eighth inning when the game was out of hand.

But it doesn’t matter because they still weren’t successful enough. One issue that I haven’t discussed and didn’t talk about yesterday is that while they aren’t getting hits, they wouldn’t need to string so many together in a row if they could just drive the ball to the wall and over it more often. We saw what happened din that eighth inning yesterday. Two doubles scored their three runs. They’ve had just three multi-home run games in September. They’re averaging fewer than three extra base hits per game all month and that includes their three big run-scoring outbursts this month.

I don’t think it’s that concerning long-term. You can look at their 2023 lineup that will likely feature MJ Melendez, Bobby Witt Jr., Salvador Perez and Vinnie Pasquantino and I feel like you should at least have some confidence in a good chunk of doubles and home runs (and triples in the case of Witt). Add in the potential for Nick Pratto and Drew Waters who have shown some extra base hit ability and it doesn’t feel like an issue that’ll matter moving forward, but boy has it been a tough go for awhile now. Just looking at some of the bigger bats, here’s the last home run for them and their totals in September:

Melendez - September 28 (4)
Witt - September 3 (1)
Perez - September 18 (3)
Pasquantino - September 24 (1)

Melendez has gotten hot lately, but in the course of a six-month season, you’d expect your big bats to do damage and do it consistently. Again, I don’t see this as something to fear in the long-term, but it underscores the need to have a deep lineup. If you rely on four guys and if even two of those four guys slump at the same time (and to be clear, in the case, this is an extra base hit slump), you’re going to find yourself in trouble. If you’re looking for extra base hits from Michael A. Taylor, Nicky Lopez or even Edward Olivares in most instances, you will find yourself disappointed.

Taylor has 22 all season. Lopez has 16. Olivares has 12, albeit in limited plate appearances. They’ve had 10 guys take at least 100 plate appearances this year with an ISO (slugging percentage minus batting average; it shows how much of the SLG is coming from average, aka singles) below .150. They need their power guys to be power guys or else they can get into some of these ruts throughout the season. Why it’s happened on the road and not so much at home is not something I can explain at all, but it’s another reason why this offense just can’t bring runners home.

A 2023 lineup that includes the four power guys plus players like Waters and Pratto, Michael Massey (who hasn’t shown huge power in the majors but showed he can impact the ball in the minors), Nate Eaton and maybe a guy like Tyler Gentry moving forward should be able to plug some gaps. I also don’t mean to use the schedule as an excuse, but young players in September are notorious for slowing down and the vast majority of this Royals lineup is young players. The hope is that they’ve learned how to deal with the full season of baseball, but I guess we won’t know that until next season.

But, as I said, unlike yesterday, the Royals didn’t cost themselves a win with their inability to get runners home. The win was cost by a Heasley implosion in the fifth inning with an assist from Pasquantino’s glove. I was a bit worried about how he was pitching the first time through with a ton of balls in the air. He was getting a lot of early-count outs and had just 48 pitches through four. What was he doing right in those first four innings?

In the first, he was around the edges of the zone. It worked. In the second, he was likely pretty fortunate. Here was the pitch chart:

That’s a lot of the middle of the plate. We talked about this with Daniel Lynch yesterday that you can miss in the middle if you’re setting up pitches, but the Tigers weren’t missing them. This was the inning where he allowed the home run, so that was obviously hard-hit, but two of the three outs were also hit hard and one was barreled. It was kind of more of the same in the third.

That’s in the middle a lot and two of the outs he recorded were hit hard. I loved the location on his sliders in this inning. That’s a pitch that wasn’t great for him yesterday but one that I’d like to see him focus on using more moving forward. Either way, he once again got away with it. He found himself in trouble again in the fourth, but he worked around it. And then the fifth was the implosion. He threw 32 pitches and the command just disappeared.

Sure there’s a hole in the middle, but even a bad offense (and the Tigers are a bad offense) is going to be able to do damage. It started with a walk of the number eight hitter. Then it was a wild pitch to get him to second and Pasquantino made an error on an Akil Baddoo grounder. After that, it was bombs away. Riley Greene hit a ball 111.3 MPH to drive in Baddoo. Javier Baez hit a hanging slider for a two-run homer and then a weird fly ball to left was a soft double for Jonathan Schoop. And that was that for him.

Things got uglier later with Brad Keller on the mound and then Max Castillo and Luke Weaver starting a fire and then trying to put it out with a bottle of bourbon to put the game out of reach and send the Royals to the AL Central cellar.

I just want to touch on one more issue that sort of lends itself to what I was saying yesterday about Lynch. Entering play yesterday, the Royals had allowed a .192/.276/.298 line when a hitter had two strikes on him. On the surface, that looks pretty great. It’s also the second-worst OPS in baseball. The Tigers hit .333/.417/.571 wth two strikes on them yesterday. Every team that entered the day yesterday with a sub-.500 OPS allowed is either a playoff team or has been battling for a playoff spot all year. Sometimes the improvement spots are both easy to find and should be relatively simple to fix with any kind of reasonably decent coaching.

Now they have one series left, albeit a very long one, in Cleveland. They’ve successfully avoided 100 losses and did that with their crazy comeback win on Sunday afternoon. It’s hard to say what kind of series we’re looking at given that all the Guardians have to do is prepare for a week from today when they start their postseason. What I do find interesting is the national reporters are starting to reach a consensus that Mike Matheny (and most of his staff) will be let go. Does that happen during this series? Is it on Thursday after the season? I don’t know the answer to that, but I’m ready to go with 20 managerial candidates when (or I suppose if) it does. So, I guess, stay tuned!