Pitch Perfect Singer Got No Help

Brady Singer was absurdly good, but the offense's scoreless streak stretched to 27 innings.

The Royals have fallen back into an old pattern that nobody wanted to see again, but this may be worse than at any point all season. They simply can’t score a run. And I don’t mean that hyperbolically. The last time a Royals player crossed home plate was the eighth inning on Monday night when MJ Melendez hit a two-run homer at the end of a fun game against the Angels. Since then, they’ve sent 108 batters to the plate. Those 108 batters have gotten 16 hits and have walked eight times. One batter has been hit and one has reached on an error. That’s 26 base runners in three games. They’ve had some chances, leaving 25 runners on, but this is a team-wide slump. And it’s really too bad because Brady Singer was just filthy good again and has nothing to show for it.

The question to ask is what matters right now? Does a Whit Merrifield 0 for 4 mean anything? I’d argue no. The same is true for Hunter Dozier and Ryan O’Hearn and even Michael A. Taylor. But a 2 for 3 day with a walk for Melendez matters. So does Nick Pratto hitting a triple and working a walk. And Vinnie Pasquantino bunting for a hit to beat the shift. Oh yeah, and so does Singer throwing seven innings of one-hit baseball with just one walk and 10 strikeouts. So let’s talk about that.

When I first started this site, I wanted to look at some crazy things from the previous day’s game. It’s sort of evolved to me breaking down the game, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get back to my roots here and it starts with this stat:

David Lesky @DBLesky

Brady Singer is the seventh pitcher in #Royals history with 10+ strikeouts in back-to-back games. Nate Karns was the last to do it in 2017.

Any time you can be the seventh player in the franchise’s 54th season of existence to do anything, it’s worth noting. First, anyone who would have guessed Nate Karns as the last to do it is either lucky or lying. I have a bizarre memory for baseball and even I saw that and thought, “oh yeah, I forgot he looked good for a couple of weeks before he got hurt.” Second, the other five in order of most recent to farthest back are Yordano Ventura, Zack Greinke, Kevin Appier (he did it three starts in a row), Bret Saberhagen and Bill Butler. That’s a heck of a group of pitchers.

And it started immediately for Singer. He was facing the guy who was his teammate just the day before, Andrew Benintendi. They shared a flight to New York. They probably had a conversation on that flight as teammates and then he’s on the mound against the guy who was making great catches for him in left field previously. Benintendi fouled the first pitch off and then whiffed at a slider before being called out on a sinker. That was a sign of what was to come for his sinker, which was just bonkers all game long.

He ended up throwing 50 sinkers. When it’s on, he’s getting a ton of called strikes. Of those 50, he had 20 called strikes, which is honestly just silly. And if you’re wondering what was different, it was just a simply better pitch than it has been, and it’s usually a pretty good pitch. He averaged 95.1 MPH on that pitch, up from his average of 93.8 MPH. He averaged 17 inches of horizontal break, up from his season average of 14 inches. And he averaged 2357 rpm, up from his season average of 2281 rpm.

I honestly don’t know what you’re supposed to do with that as a hitter. It looks like it’s a ball and not a particularly close pitch and then, bam, it’s a strike. Some of these were strikes that weren’t even especially close to the edge. And the reality is that pitching in Yankee Stadium can be a mental challenge before you even account for the opposing offense. That right field fence at 314 feet feels like you can reach out and touch it. Somehow the 318 feet in left field probably feel even closer. You can pitch in the ballpark if you keep the ball in the middle of the field, but that’s easier said than done.

There’s an easy but difficult solution to that and it’s to stay out of the middle of the plate. Again, easier said than done. But look what Singer did yesterday.

I’ve talked about that hole in the middle before, and I just love when I see it. But I want to break this out to show the sinker separate from the slider. First, the sinker:

Now the slider:

That’s just precision. A couple of sliders maybe caught a bit more of the plate than he’d like, but I would say there were maybe two that he didn’t execute to at least 80 percent of what he wanted. A couple of them were downright nasty.

He was just peppering the strike zone with the sinker all game long. I think he was careful where he needed to be careful (like with the walk of Aaron Judge in the first) and aggressive when he needed to be aggressive. And in the end, he had one of the best starts we’ve seen in a long time.

He ended up with a game score of 84. That’s the second best he’s posted in his career, trailing just the near no-hitter against Cleveland in September 2020. And it just continued the trend of what he’s done since he’s been back from Omaha. Just to fill you in on the numbers:

13 GS
79 IP
68 H
31 R
29 ER
85 K (26.9%)
20 BB (6.3%)
3.30 ERA

I’ve said in the past that I feel like Singer is showing us that he’s a mid-rotation starter. I don’t want to get too caught up in the hype of one great start in a venue where it’s tough to have that start, but those numbers are worth celebrating. His strikeout and walk rates are in the ball park of guys like Justin Verlander and Luis Castillo. This season, there are nine pitchers with a strikeout rate of 25 percent or higher, a walk rate of seven percent or lower and an ERA of 3.50 or lower. What Singer is doing needs to be talked about as that of a number two starter at worst. His last two starts have vaulted him there, so we obviously need to see more of it, but the turn to something special has to start somewhere and I’m looking forward to seeing Singer’s next time out to see if he can continue this run.

Even if this is just is just a hot streak and he’s more the guy who had the 3.82 ERA in the 11 starts before these last two, there’s value in that pitcher. Let’s bring in those other two starts. He’s gone at least six innings in seven of the 13 starts. He only went fewer than five innings once and was just one out away from getting to five in that start. He’s allowed three runs or fewer in 11 of the 13 starts. A solid starter keeps his team in a game. A good starter wins some games and keeps his team in the rest. A great starter is the guy you can count on to shut down a top-notch lineup. Last night and on Saturday night, Singer was a great starter. I think we’ll get an answer the rest of the year if he’s more good than great, but either way, I think the Royals have to feel good about his future and knowing that they have something for 2023.

Now, what’s going on with the offense? The easy answer is they’re just missing some bats. Bobby Witt Jr. being out hasn’t helped. Losing Benintendi in the trade didn’t help last night, but he was there for the first two shutouts. Hunter Dozier has been a bit of a mess the last few days, while he’s been counted on to hit in the middle of the order. Whit Merrifield has struggled a bit over his last few games. There’s a number of reasons why they might not be hitting.

They’re simply not driving the ball. Maybe that’s a matter of personnel, but they only have three extra base hits total over the last three games and two of them came yesterday against the Yankees. My first thought was maybe they were struggling some with pitches in the heart of the plate again. And they kind of are. They’re hitting .273 on those pitches, which is low for a pitch they should be mashing. And they’re slugging just .364. So that’s part of it.

They’re 3 for 42 in the shadow zones over the last three games though. That’s with three singles. They’re not hitting that ball hard and they’re not getting the job done. I think some of it is they are being pitched well, but I think some of it is they’re just simply struggling right now. And it doesn’t help that when they do have opportunities, they’re not cashing in on them at all. They’re 1 for 18 over the last three games with runners in scoring position. They had opportunities in the first three innings yesterday and blew them all. This goes back to what I was talking about in the Weekend in Review, but now they’re not even getting that many men on base, so the missed chances loom even larger because they’re the only chances they’re getting.

My big concern at this point is that it starts to really snowball. They know they haven’t scored in three games. Their chase rate is 31.2 percent over the last three days, which is above their season average of 28.8 percent. Pressing doesn’t lead to results and they’re basically back to needing some lucky hits to get the pressure off, which is not a spot you want to be in as a team.

The good news is that Witt seems likely to be back in the lineup today or tomorrow. It appears they’ll be getting Salvador Perez back in the lineup this weekend as well. Add in that Melendez is hitting well and Pasquantino continues to hit the ball hard and Pratto looks the part and you can see this being a slump we would likely barely notice if they’d found a way to push a run across in a couple of innings over the last three games. It won’t be easy with Gerrit Cole and Nestor Cortes the next two nights, but I still have faith in this offense long-term and think they’ll be just fine.

One last thing that I hesitate to bring up because I think it might come off as an excuse is that the umpiring last night was once again just brutal.

I guess you can argue that the Royals should have worked that edge more than they did. But there are plenty of pitches the Yankees were getting that the Royals were not. We can talk all day about framing and all that, but boy am I tired of all of that. It looks like the Royals had one pitch called a strike off the plate while the Yankees had six or seven. What’s so frustrating is that five of the pitches the Yankees got were:

• On a 3-1 count to Pasquantino. It would have been a walk and he grounded out on the next pitch.

• On a 2-2 pitch to Kyle Isbel, so he obviously struck out.

• On a 2-2 pitch to Taylor, so he obviously struck out.

• On a 3-2 pitch to Maikel Garcia, so it turned a walk into a strikeout.

• On an 0-2 pitch to Taylor, so he obviously struck out.

Would those pitches have changed the game? It’s hard to say, but I am so sick of umpires dominating a game.

Of course, score some runs when you get the chance and I don’t think we’re having that big of a conversation about this. Still, though, it’s frustrating and it’s magnified when a start as great as Singer’s gets wasted by the combination of bad umpiring and bad offense. They’ll get back to it tonight.