Not Every Winner is Pretty
The Royals won't apologize for winning or turn it down, but they sure didn't deserve that one.
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes a popup bounces off the second baseman’s head and the right fielder still has a chance at a forceout at second but throws the ball away and then the inning goes off the rails. I might be a little off on that Bull Durham quote, but I think it applies to last night’s game, which was pretty much no fun to watch as a Royals fan until the last two innings. I mentioned this on social media and I know Denny Matthews says this all the time, but good teams find ways to win and bad teams find ways to lose. I’m not sure the Royals really found a way to win as much as it was handed to them on a silver platter, but that also applies.
Let’s not mince words here. The White Sox stink out loud again. I don’t think they’re going to stink out loud for a whole lot longer, though I also didn’t think they’d stink out loud so quickly after looking like a potential long-term problem in the AL Central. But for now, these are games that teams with playoff aspirations need to take advantage of, and it felt for the first seven or eight innings that the Royals were going to do something they did just one time in all of 2024 - lose to the White Sox.
Let’s start at the end and then I’ll cover a couple of things from early in what would have been a forgettable game if not for the late inning insanity.
It actually all started to go downhill for the White Sox in the eighth inning. They had just scored a run to make it 3-1 and they had Steven Wilson on. He hadn’t thrown a ton of innings, but in seven appearances, Wilson had allowed just one hit in 7.2 innings with eight strikeouts and three walks. It’s a small sample, yes, but he’s been really good. And he got out of a two on, one out jam in the bottom of the seventh inning. To start the eighth, he got Jonathan India swinging and then got a flyout from Bobby Witt Jr. He kind of looked like he wanted nothing to do with Vinnie Pasquantino, which sort of makes sense.
Pasquantino had been having a good day. He was 2 for 3 at that point with a couple of singles and a rocket lineout in the first. Add in that Salvador Perez has not looked good since he came back from his couple days off and I can see why they might want to set up the righty-righty matchup. Perez didn’t trigger on the first sweeper that was out of the zone, which was kind of a surprise, to be honest. Then he fouled off a fastball up. Wilson tried the sweeper again. It stayed in the zone. Whoops.
It was a hard-hit ball and I’m sure it had some spin on it that made it tough for Brooks Baldwin to read, but he just simply didn’t get there. That’s a play we’ve seen average left fielders make so often. It would have been a very tough luck out, but I think that’s an out with, oh I don’t know, 60 percent of left fielders. Maybe more? Baldwin was playing his 139th inning in the outfield in the majors after playing 219 innings there in the minors. He’s a utility player and that’s his role, but he’s played a whole lot more infield than outfield.