Not So Fast, Mike Minor

The game got a little crazy in the seventh, but it started with another perfectly fine start for Minor.

I promise I’m going to get to what ended up being the meat of the game, but I’m really sort of fascinated right now by pitchers facing teams in back-to-back starts. I’ve talked a lot about it over the last couple days, obviously focusing on the difficulty for a young starter like Daniel Lynch or Brady Singer, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy even for a veteran like Mike Minor. Last week in Kansas City, Minor was pretty good through five innings against the Astros, but ran into some trouble in the sixth and left with the game tied at 3, a score that stood until the 10th inning.

Last week, Minor threw 37 four-seamers, 22 sliders, 19 knuckle curves and 16 changeups. They got him on his curve and his changeup, going a combined 5 for 9 with three doubles and just one strikeout on those two pitches. The Astros went 2 for 10 on the fastball with two strikeouts and a 20 percent whiff rate.

So as he approached his start yesterday, I think he did the logical thing. He threw just 13 changeups and 11 curves in his 94 pitches. That makes perfect sense to me that he’d back off those pitches. And he threw 49 fastballs. Why wouldn’t he after he held them to 2 for 10 with two singles?

Of those 49 fastballs, 13 were called strikes. He got 21 swings and they didn’t miss a single one of them. They did foul nine balls off, but 12 balls in play with an average exit velocity of 90.8 MPH. The Astros were 0 for 4 on the first four at bats that ended on the fastball, but then went to work. Martin Maldonado homered in the third on a fastball left up. In the fourth, Yordan Alvarez homered on a fastball that was also left up. Then Alex Bregman singled on a fastball…left up. Yuli Gurriel and Bregman doubled on fastballs up in the sixth. In all, the Astros were 6 for 12 on the Minor fastball with two homers and two doubles. Here’s where those hits were.

He just simply missed his spots with them. All six hits he allowed were on these fastballs, but it was another quality start and he did pretty much exactly what he was signed to do.

He made his 26th start of the season yesterday. Only Marcus Stroman, Zach Davies and Luis Castillo have made more. There’s value there. It’s not more important than putting up an ERA in the 3s or even the 2s, but there’s certainly value there, especially coming off a season like 2020 was. After yesterday’s performance, Minor has allowed four or fewer runs in 20 of his 26 starts. I think we can all agree that if a starting pitcher allows four runs or fewer, he gives his team a chance to win the game. He’s gone six or more innings in 12 of his last 19 starts.

No, this isn’t an infomercial for Minor, but rather a reminder that a pitcher doesn’t have to be otherworldly to get some praise. Minor has done pretty much everything the Royals had hoped he would. I’m not saying he’s been good. I’m saying he’s been perfectly fine, and in today’s game, $9 million is a drop in the bucket for a free agent. Yes, they’d prefer his ERA to be lower, but to have the certainty that he’s going to go out there and keep the Royals in the game the vast majority of the time is actually valuable. We saw what keeping a team in the game can do yesterday even if they couldn’t come up with the win.

And now we’ll get to the rest. The game was pretty ho hum until the seventh inning really. The Astros offense was two solo homers and then a pair of doubles. The Royals offense was a Salvador Perez home run.

Let’s take a brief break to talk about Perez and what he’s done recently. Before hitting that home run, he worked a walk against Lance McCullers Jr. It was his eighth walk of the month of August, which is just the second month in his career he’s walked at least eight times. The other was in April of 2014, which was a bizarre month for him. He walked eight times in six games from April 4 through April 9 that year. It was one of those things you really had to be there because what?

His current walk barrage dates back to August 8 in St. Louis and he now has all eight of August walks since then. There was even a big story about how he’s learning the value of a walk (about time), but the reality is that the only thing different about his profile is how he’s being pitched. Since August 8, he’s swinging at 42.3 percent of pitches outside the zone, which remains terrible, though slightly better than his full season rate of 45.2 percent. The difference is that he’s only seen 28.9 percent of pitches inside the zone. Which is just a crazy low number.

I’ve never fully understood why pitchers ever give Perez a strike, and with the lack of firepower in this Royals offense, they’ve finally stopped. His season zone percentage is 44.2 percent and his career is just a shade under 50 percent, so dropping all the way to 29 percent means that pitchers have just given up. So yeah, he’s swinging at the same number of pitches outside the zone, but by sheer volume, by maintaining the chase rate, he’s going to walk more. The good news is that he’s still being productive, hitting .263/.362/.649 in that time with seven home runs, so if this is the new way to pitch to Salvy, so be it.

Okay, back to the game. So McCullers was cruising and the Royals were down 3-1, but he was starting to wear down in the seventh. You could see his slider wasn’t moving quite as well and he just wasn’t locating quite so well. Even with that, Hunter Dozier and Ryan O’Hearn started the inning with outs. Michael A. Taylor’s single was pretty innocuous, but then Emmanuel Rivera had a great plate appearance and worked a walk. Rivera hadn’t looked good against McCullers before, so that was an encouraging one. And then Cam Gallagher worked a walk as well in another great plate appearance. The two combined to see 15 pitches and drive McCullers’ pitch count up to 107, which was enough to get him in the game.

Dusty Baker went with Cristian Javier, who was a starter earlier this year and having a good season, but he was shifted to the bullpen in May and he’s been good there too. Out of 20 relief appearances, it was just the fourth time he’d inherited runners and he inherited three of them in this one for Whit Merrifield.

Javier tried to put a 95.2 MPH fastball up past Merrifield, but Merrifield had other plans.

That was Merrifield’s first home run since late June. It was his second career grand slam with the other also hit in Houston a couple years ago. And it gave the Royals a 5-3 lead with nine outs to go to secure a second straight series win over the Astros. The spot wasn’t great by Javier. Merrifield doesn’t get many hard fastballs up there. He’s only seen 19 this year, but over the last four years, he has three homers in 24 at bats on pitches 95+ MPH in that zone, so he likes to turn on that.

But the Astros are good. Mike Matheny went with Domingo Tapia for the bottom fo the seventh. And he’s been good, so no judgment there. He gave up a soft single to Jake Meyers on what I thought was a really great pitch. Then he got Martin Maldonado to fly out to left and Jose Altuve to ground out to second. The groundout was big because it got Meyers to second base for Aledmys Diaz who hit a soft single to left to drive in the run. I thought this was a really good pitch too.

So in all, he gave up a 71.9 MPH single to start the inning on a good pitch off the plate and an 81.8 MPH single on a good pitch off the plate to drive in the run. But then he walked Yuli Gurriel and Richard Lovelady came in to clean things up and get Yordan Alvarez to line out to left.

Where the issue really came for the Royals, I think, was the eighth inning. Josh Staumont came on and just really struggled to find the zone. It was a long plate appearance against Carlos Correa, but Staumont lost him on the seventh pitch. Then he made a mistake to Alex Bregman, but Bregman was still getting timing back and lined out. Kyle Tucker singled on a ball that caught too much of the plate. Thankfully, Staumont got Meyers with one of his better curves of the day.

With Maldonado due up, the Astros had Michael Brantley on the bench and they went to him, which prompted a move from Matheny. This is a situation where it would have been nice to have another lefty in the bullpen, but with Jake Brentz on the IL, Lovelady is it and he had already pitched to get the Royals out of a jam in the seventh. As soon as Matheny came out of the dugout to get Barlow, I looked it up, and I have to say I don’t fully understand the move from a numbers standpoint.

Barlow and Staumont had almost identical platoon splits, so that wasn’t an advantage. Staumont didn’t seem to have much command of his fastball and Brantley hits slightly better on righty curves than righty sliders, so that’s a small advantage to Barlow, but not enough to make a move. Where Barlow had the edge is that he was fresh, having not pitched since Saturday, and he could have had better command than Staumont, who we knew didn’t have much. But ultimately, he left a fastball over the middle, Brantley singled to center and the game was tied.

I’m not going to get too much into the tenth inning because putting a runner on second to start the inning is a totally different game than the rest of the game, so I’m not a fan of that, but I will say that if you’re going to be a pinch runner as that runner on second, you better not make a mistake on the bases like Hanser Alberto did, so that’s annoying.

And I will show you the last play and defend Joel Payamps just a bit.

That ball hit Payamps pretty hard. When you’re hurting, instincts probably kick in and he threw the ball to first because that’s what you do when there isn’t a play at the plate, which there wasn’t. Was it silly? Absolutely. Did he lower his ERA? Absolutely. It was a tough break, but him throwing to first to get that meaningless out didn’t change the game. It’s not like he had any chance to get the runner at the plate. Good for him for not letting Meyers get a hit. Or something like that.

So anyway, yeah, I think pulling Staumont for Barlow was probably a mistake. But I also don’t know that Brantley wouldn’t have come through against Staumont given that he hits righty curves well and Staumont easily could have made the same mistake with his fastball that Barlow did. I think, ultimately, the Astros are a better team than the Royals and the better team won a game. Sometimes it’s as simple as that. The Royals offense didn’t do enough and the Astros offense did just enough.

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Crown Jewel

I Actually Liked the Broadcast

I don’t love the idea of having something on a streaming channel only for local customers because there was some point that I somehow got a few seconds off from the game and didn’t realize it, ending up having Salvy’s home run spoiled by Twitter. But that can also happen on a cable broadcast. Still, I talk a lot about giving people access to watch their teams and this was free to everyone, no matter where they lived. That’s how you gain new fans. These blackout rules do nothing to further the game, so I really liked that aspect of it, and I also liked the game presentation. I’ve been pretty critical of the Royals’ television broadcast for a number of reasons and not just because they’re obviously reading (hi guys) and using stats from here, so maybe it was simply that it was nice to see something different.

I didn’t love that the broadcast used an actual Astros broadcaster and Jeremy Guthrie to represent the Royals, a team he hasn’t been around in more than half a decade. But, that said, Guthrie was pretty good, and I think with some work, he could be a really good color analyst on a broadcast. I wouldn’t mind him on Royals broadcasts moving forward either. I’d watched some YouTube broadcasts before, but never with the same attention that I did yesterday, and I thought they did a really nice job. My only real criticism is that I’d love for it to be available in local markets on MLB Network or something like that.