Mistakes Were Made, But Lynch Had His Moments

He had whiffs and great tempo, but three bad pitches ruined his day and the Royals day.

A Royals starter had an outing where he threw 81 pitches and only 24 out of the strike zone. He walked just one hitter for a four percent walk rate and struck out six for a 28 percent strikeout rate. He had six whiffs on 18 swings on his fastball and six whiffs on 16 swings on his slider. And he had three whiffs on eight changeup swings. Everything here is fantastic. You love the pounding of the zone and the swings and misses and everything about this start. Except he made three big mistakes in the game and all three were hit out of the ballpark to allow six runs.

If you’re reading this, I would assume you knew the end result already, but I think what I showed above is that it was a true mixed bag of an outing for Daniel Lynch. At times, he looked like a guy you could count on to start a playoff series. At other times, he looked like a guy who might be pitching in front of AAA crowds at some point this season. And after the failures of Sunday and Monday from the Royals young pitchers, it’s very easy to look at that start and sigh and assume the worst. Honestly, I can’t say I blame you. As I wrote about yesterday, this is an ongoing issue and the Royals invested so much in so many ways in these young arms that they basically have to work.

But to expound upon a point I made yesterday about Cal Eldred and his worthiness of a job, I don’t think I’m going to spend this season harping on that. I guess by writing it two days in a row, it sort of his harping on it and the guy isn’t cut out for the job, which is shown in the results. But what I want to do is just spend less time on pointing fingers and more time actually analyzing these results. There will be times when I look on the bright side. There will be times when you might wonder if the sky is falling in my world. Ultimately, I’m coming from years as a fan who likes to analyze the team and am thankful that there are people who are willing to rely on my analysis to give them information.

In this start, I weirdly feel more optimism than pessimism. The reason I’m excited is that his fastball was giving the Cardinals fits for most of the night. I mentioned the six whiffs on that pitch. He had six swings and misses on his fastball one time in 2021. That was a start against the Yankees in August when he threw 55 fastballs and got 21 swings. So already the whiff rate was lower in that game, but I went back and looked at some of the fastballs and I don’t think the life on them was quite the same. He ended up getting 17 whiffs in that game, which tied his previous start. Both of them featured more total pitches as he wasn’t still building his pitch count at that time. In looking at both of those starts, I thought his stuff looked better last night.

But those mistakes. Oof. Let’s take a look at the location of each one. First, he gave up a single to Tyler O’Neill on a pitch that probably could have been a touch lower or a touch farther outside. Not a big deal until you give Nolan Arenado this pitch:

You simply can’t leave a changeup there to anyone, but particularly not to a hitter as good or as hot as Arenado is right now. Call me an apologist or a sunshine pumper or whatever you want, but this is what makes baseball such a difficult sport on either side. Like the fastball to O’Neill, if he gets that ball three inches lower or three inches more to the corner, we’re likely praising that pitch. If you want to be concerned, he did miss with his changeup more than you’d like, but even those ones toward the top of the zone weren’t as bad as the one to Arenado.

The very next batter was Albert Pujols, who could be 93 and confined to a wheelchair relying on a bell to communicate (where are my Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul fans?) and he’d probably go 3 for 4 against the Royals. He doesn’t have the quickest bat, but he can still go down in the zone and get a pitch that catches too much of the middle.

Just like that it was 3-0 and it felt like a “here we go again” moment. This is a moral victory and I hate moral victories, but Lynch didn’t just pack it in as we’ve seen some pitchers do over the years.

And yet, he found himself in trouble again in the fourth inning after two very good innings. He gave up ground ball singles to Pujols and Tommy Edman before getting both Harrison Bader and Paul DeJong swinging. With the number nine hitter at the plate and a 1-2 count, Lynch tried to finish him with a slider. And he simply missed.

He wanted the ball to ride in on Andrew Knizner’s hands and it just flattened out. The ball traveled 386 feet, scored three runs in a tie game and the Royals were down the same three runs after four that they were after one.

I thought Lynch was done after the fourth, but Mike Matheny sent him out there for the fifth. It felt a bit like he was a little tired. He had 71 pitches through four innings after a spring where he only threw a handful of innings. Maybe his pitch count was up to 80, which is where a lot of guys around the game are, but I didn’t see quite the same life on pitches in that fifth inning, but he did get O’Neill swinging to start the inning before getting in a bit of trouble with another hit allowed to Pujols and then a double from Edman. But he got his 15th out with a fly out by Bader and that was that.

I think there’s every chance in the world that I’m seeing what I want to see, but I will take a guy throwing strikes and getting swings and misses all day over the alternative. Not to open an old wound, but Kris Bubic couldn’t throw strikes and didn’t get a single whiff on Sunday. Jackson Kowar didn’t walk many, but he wasn’t fooling anyone with 11 hits allowed in 3.1 innings. And Brady Singer also threw strikes, but only got whiffs on his slider while he was hit around as well. I will absolutely take the guy making hitters look silly and making the occasional mistake than any of that.

I feel like the mistakes can be worked out (whether they will is another story), but the periods of dominance are much harder to teach a pitcher. Like I said earlier, the fastball and the lack of an ability to miss bats with it was a concern. of mine for Lynch heading into the season. We saw it at times, but not consistently and he was getting swings and misses with the fastball consistently.

It started in the first to the very first batter with a strong fastball to strike out Dylan Carlson and then he used the slider to set up this beauty to Paul Goldschmidt to strike him out as well.

Unfortunately, that’s one of those “moments just before disaster” gifs given what happened with the next three hitters, but that ball was so well thrown that I wanted to highlight it.

In the bottom of the third, he started O’Neill off with a changeup and then threw this fastball to him that was just so perfect following the changeup.

We know about his slider. That was a pitch he actually got swings and misses with last year with a 42.2 percent whiff rate. The mistake to Knizner aside, his slider looked every bit as good as it did last season. It’s a big league out pitch. I’ll just show you my favorite from yesterday.

Maybe it seems like I’m trying to put lipstick on a pig here, but I promise you that’s not my intention. While the end results were ugly and this is ultimately a results business, the point is that there was a lot to build on in this start. No, he can’t make these mistakes every time out even if his stuff looks as good as it did and he gets as many swings and misses as he did. But there is a real building point in this start. Ultimately he needs to be better, but I like the starting point for him a lot more than his other three 2018 draft classmates.

The Bats Are…Closer?

It’s hard to believe the Royals had two wins and only scored four runs total in those two games. On Monday, they pushed seven across including their first home run of the season in the ninth inning. After scoring seven in the first three games of the season, that was definitely a welcome sight even if the scoring was largely playing catchup throughout the game once again. I said this in the Weekend in Review. I don’t think this is an especially good offense, but I also think they’re better than last season.

So it was very encouraging when the Royals clawed back immediately after being down 3-0 after one. It started with Salvador Perez’s first home run of the season.

He started off the season pretty terribly, going hitless in the first three games. He went 2 for 4 on Monday and then finally got on the board with this home run. He’s one of those guys who you can slowly see when he’s about to get hot.

Then an Adalberto Mondesi infield single led to Michael A. Taylor getting on the board with a two-run shot to tie the game.

You might recall Taylor started last season on fire with two homers in his first two games. He picked up a couple more hits yesterday and he’s off and running again this year. Will he keep it up? It’s doubtful, but at least he’s doing it now.

The Royals got a single from Nicky Lopez in the seventh that led to Cam Gallagher just missing a home run on a ball he hit 383 feet, which was roughly two feet too short to get over the fence, but the double scored Lopez to bring the score to 6-4. And then Perez struck again in the top of the eighth with his second homer of the game and season.

It wasn’t enough, just like it wasn’t enough on Monday. The pitching simply needs to be better, but the offense does look like it’s starting to be able to make some games competitive even if the pitching isn’t perfect. They’re showing the ability to hit the ball out of the park finally and with their team strikeout rate the second best in all of baseball and some speed at the top and bottom of the lineup, you have to feel like they’ll find a way to score some runs, which they have in the last two.