Pratto and Perez Power, Predictable Pitches and Pouncing on the Pale Hose
It was a night Nick Pratto will never forget, but one Lucas Giolito and Brady Singer might be more than happy to.
I don’t know how many times this can be said before it gets to be too old, but baseball is weird. Brady Singer had pitched at least six innings in nine straight starts and had gotten through four scoreless innings against a team he’s handled with no issues in the past. He didn’t finish the fifth inning. Nick Pratto looked like he probably should have been ticketed for AAA a week ago. He finished the night with the best OPS of anyone active on the Royals roster. And Salvador Perez had two extra base hits since August 13 and doubled and homered in his first two at bats, including a homer on a pitch nobody should be able to hit over a fence. Just a weird game.
Let’s start with the good. Pratto got that double on Friday night to snap an 0 for 21 stretch and now he’s only 8 for his last 17 with three home runs, four doubles and 10 RBI. Of course, a lot of that is that he was 4 for 5 last night with his first multi-homer game and an additional double. He was the 23rd player in franchise history to have a game with at least 11 total bases and it was the 28th time it had happened. Only two other instances were completed by rookies - Kevin Seitzer and Kila Ka’aihue - so it was a pretty special night for the young first baseman.
And, as I said before, I’m going to wonder for awhile if Pratto was ticketed for Omaha had Vinnie Pasquantino not found himself on the IL last week with the shoulder issue. Not only was he not hitting, but it sure looked like everything was in his head. I write a lot about the heart of the plate with Royals hitters and Pratto only swung at 71.2 percent of pitches in the heart of the plate prior to Friday’s game. He was hitting .313 with a .656 SLG there when he swung, but I don’t think he swung enough. I think you can argue he’s still not swinging enough, but he’s at least 5 for 7 with two home runs on those pitches since Friday. You have to do damage on the pitches you can do damage on.
He certainly did that against Lucas Giolito. After a scoreless first, Pratto was up with one out and worked the count to 2-1 before he got a pitch to handle.
This one wasn’t over the heart of the plate, but it was absolutely crushed. That is a swing geared for power.
In his next at bat, I don’t know if he was simply guessing that he’d get a slider he could crush or if he picked it up out of Giolito’s hand or what, but while the first home run as majestic, this one got out fast.
Okay, so those were impressive, but then the White Sox turned to their lefties in the bullpen to handle him. Against Tanner Banks, he took two curves that were just perfectly placed to fall behind 0-2. Then he battled. He took a slider outside. He fouled off a four-seamer that was just off the plate. He took a curve for a ball, fouled off another four-seamer and then took another for a ball to get back to 3-2. And he finally got a slider he could hit hard and he singled to right.
And in the seventh with two on and one out, the White Sox went to Jake Diekman, who can be very difficult for lefties. Diekman made it a little easier for him with three straight balls to start the at bat before ultimately leaving a pitch right in the middle that Pratto hit to left-center for a ground rule double that drove in his third run of the game.
But what may have endeared me to him the most were his postgame comments with Joel Goldberg on the field. Some guys have a great game and talk about the team and you just feel like it’s a little phony. Pratto was talking about the great at bats the team took up and down the lineup and you felt like it was real. I think maybe you felt that way because he also talked about himself. I’ll say this at times that there’s a difference between confident and cocky and Pratto came off very confident. I also appreciated he mentioned that he made one bad decision in his final at bat and on his final swing and it cost him a perfect day. That’s awareness. It’s fun to see him hot now and maybe he can finish the year strong.
But he needed some help because of Singer’s struggles, which I promise I’ll get to, but first I want to talk about Perez and his ridiculous night at the plate. He drove in three runs in the game. The first was with a two-run homer and the second was with a single up the middle. This is where the two pitches were that he drove runs in on.
The guy is ridiculous. The home run was truly ridiculous.
It was his 10th homer on a pitch outside the strike zone since the start of 2021, which is the most in baseball, just ahead of Jose Altuve, Rafael Devers, Wilmer Flores and Rowdy Tellez.
In all, the Royals offense was held scoreless in the first. And they were held scoreless in the ninth. But they scored at least one run in every inning in between. I suppose I do give you almost all of the home runs, huh? Well here’s Michael A. Taylor’s second in two games.
Serving as the leadoff hitter for the second game in a row, he went 2 for 4 with a homer, a walk and three RBI after going 3 for 6 with a homer and four RBI on Sunday. He’s now hitting .429/.455/.762 as a leadoff hitter this season. I don’t think it’s the right role, but it’s worked when Mike Matheny has pushed that button. Though I think it’s worth noting that since the Royals finally had a day off, they’ve hit .322/.382/.526 as a team with 32 runs scored, so I stand by my thought that this was a young offense that was just worn down toward the end of that stretch of 34 games in 34 days.
And they needed those runs last night, which is a surprise because of how well Singer had been pitching. But I think what did him in last night was that he was a bit too predictable. It was a bit reminiscent of a 2021 Singer start because of how he got hurt when he got hurt. To start, he was good but not great in his first four innings, even though he didn’t allow a run. Okay, that’s not fair. He was great in the first inning, getting some weak contact and running through the top three on eight pitches, but after that, it felt like a bit of a struggle.
I thought his slider was generally good, but I’m still seeing a lot of armside sinkers that run up, which, again, generally indicates some fatigue. But, while the broadcast talked quite a bit about the White Sox unwillingness to let Singer get them with a called third strike, they still took a lot of sinkers for strikes. It was working. But I thought two things muddied his outing in this one. The first was one of the best takes you’ll see. I was sitting at home watching this pitch and literally asked my wife how Jose Abreu took this pitch.
She did not know, so I can’t give you any insight. It was an 0-2 pitch with two outs and a man on first in the bottom of the fifth and I have seen so many batters flail over the top of that. If Abreu does what many others have done and will do again, the inning is over and maybe Singer gets through six or seven without allowing a run. But two pitches later, Abreu pulled a Salvy and hit a pitch way out of the zone for a single and that’s when the White Sox started their real damage.
Eloy Jimenez hit a 101.7 MPH rocket up the middle for an RBI single that brought Gavin Sheets to the plate. This is where I thought Singer’s predictability cost him big time. After getting Sheets down in the count 0-2, to that point, Singer had thrown 86 pitches and three changeups. One of the three changeups was on an 0-1 pitch to Sheets after getting him to foul off a slider. Sheets hit the ball hard, but it was on the ground to Michael Massey and it was an out. Another was a 1-1 changeup to Sheets that he hit softly to third for an out. In this at bat, it was 0-2 and instead of going changeup, he went sinker and it missed badly. But luckily Sheets fouled it off.
To me, if you’re going to feature your changeup, this is the point when you throw it. Sheets is a lefty and that’s who the changeup is mostly for, and you just got away with a sinker in a spot that he probably should have crushed it. But Sheets was geared up for the sinker, got it and even though it was in off the plate, it was up enough that he was able to get his hands in and yank it out of the park for a three-run homer. The ball wasn’t hit exceptionally hard, but he was ready for it. After he gave up two hits to the next two batters, that was that. He couldn’t even get deep enough to qualify for a win in a rare misstep for the young Royals ace.
I’ve mentioned this a couple of times, but Singer has shown me enough that one bad start isn’t going to change any opinions I’ve formed over the last few months. He’s a good big league starting pitcher. The last time this happened when he ran into surprising trouble in the fifth after seeming to cruise through four, he ran off nine straight starts of six or more innings. It looks like he has six starts left this season and, as it stands now, three are against the Tigers. So he has a chance to finish very strong if he can handle their struggling offense. So no, I’m not worried, but I’m also very excited to see how he rebounds. He hasn’t needed to much this season. And, you know what, it isn’t the worst thing to have the offense have to pick him up for a change.
This is really good, thoughtful, thought-provoking stuff, David! Both in your article and in the comments. Thank you for all of that!
Sometimes Salvy has a stretch where I think he's wearing a blindfold at the plate, and then he goes and has a night like last night. You'd think I'd be used to it by now.