Royals Out-Giant the Giants
Okay, maybe they didn't exactly do that, but one team came through situationally and it wasn't the one you'd expect.
Yesterday’s game was a win that might remind you just a bit of the 2014 Royals. They honestly didn’t have much business winning it, but they took advantage when they had a chance. And they did it against a team that reminds me in a lot of ways of the 2014 and 2015 Royals. If you think about those teams compared to this Giants team, I think you can find some parallels in how they simply just do everything generally well. The Royals pitched well both years and they hit well in 2015, but what they did better than anyone was they were simply more fundamentally sound. It’s not that they weren’t good and this Giants team is very good as well, but both teams are probably not quite as talented as some of their opponents, but they get wins because they do those little things right.
Now, all of that said, no matter how much the little things are preached, teams have to do the big things well enough for those little things to matter. Look at that eighth inning for the Royals. It started with Andrew Benintendi pinch hitting for Emmanuel Rivera. While it was probably an obvious decision there with the best hitter on the team getting the day off, Mike Matheny made the right call and sent Benintendi to the plate. On a 1-1 pitch, he picked on a slider down the middle that he hit down the line in right and made it to second. The double is the big thing.
What followed was a team doing the little things. Nicky Lopez laid down a great sacrifice bunts. I hate bunts, but that was one spot where it made a lot of sense. The Royals bullpen struggles might make you believe otherwise, but I liked that bunt there with a hitter like Lopez at the plate. And then Whit Merrifield came to the plate knowing that he needed to get the ball in the air and to the outfield. I think he missed his first and better opportunity on the second pitch, but John Brebbia came back with a fastball just a bit above the belt and in the middle of the plate and Merrifield got the ball to the right fielder and Benintendi scored.
The big thing was done right first and then the little thing. In the first, the Royals did something they hadn’t done all that well earlier in the series and they put the bat on the ball. In the last two games, the Royals struck out three times in the first inning. In this first inning, Merrifield bunted for a hit (and it was an ugly bunt but it worked) and then Bobby Witt Jr. hit a fly ball to center that fell for a double. Salvador Perez popped up, but then MJ Melendez just put the ball in play. Look how fast Witt is.
It reminded me a bit of my favorite tweet from Andy McCullough during the 2015 World Series.
For a minute, the now 21-41 Royals of 2022 looked a little like the Royals who grabbed our hearts eight years ago. But Sam Long and a parade of Giants relievers held the Royals down. They had one hit and one walk between the second and seventh. And the one hit was a bloop single by Witt and he got thrown out trying to stretch it into a double. So they had just one runner and that was on a Melendez walk in the fourth.
That means that leading up to Benintendi’s double, the Royals had gone 1 for 19 since Melendez’s ground ball to score two runs. I’m honestly not sure if that beats the alternative of stranding runners. The end result is the same, but they lead to a different kind of pain. But the good news is that once the Royals sent a pinch hitter up, they were set.
I wish I could explain this. Maybe Matheny is a savant when it comes to knowing when to send someone to the plate. If that’s the case, they don’t have to fire him. He can just be the Chief Pinch Hitting Coordinator or something. But whatever it is, the Royals are the best in baseball by a lot.
That’s a lot of info in one spot, so I don’t expect you to peruse the whole chart, but I wanted to show how much better they are than the whole league. They walk, they don’t strike out, they hit for power. Like I said, I’m at a loss, but I hope it continues because it’s super fun to have an edge in any area of the game. It doesn’t feel like the Royals generally have that edge.
But what I also found so interesting is going back to my first point. The Giants do so much well. They’re obviously a better team than the Royals, but losing two of three in the series didn’t feel the same as losing two of three to Toronto or Houston. They’re just so methodical and they seem to always do exactly what the Royals did in that eighth inning. They get the guy on, they get the guy over and they get the guy in. So it was kind of striking that they didn’t do that when they had their opportunity. In the seventh inning, they had a leadoff double, just like the Royals did in the eighth inning. Taylor Clarke got one batter on a popup before coming out of the game for Jose Cuas, who got a lineout from Wilmer Flores and then made Austin Slater look silly.
The Royals getting that run in the top of the eighth put Cuas in position to get his first career win, which he obviously did, but it was a little surprising to see the Giants not come through. They are honestly just relentless.
They saw 60 more pitches than the Royals yesterday. No, that’s not a typo. They saw 51 more pitches than the Royals on Monday. They actually saw nine fewer on Tuesday, so that doesn’t fit the point, but for a three game series, they saw 485 pitches while the Royals saw just 383. That’s the sort of thing that makes a difference, especially when you get later in a series and you’ve burned through a bullpen. I don’t know. Something about watching them this week was just so striking and I can see how they won 107 games last year. Again, yes, they have immense talent, but it just feels like they execute way more often than just about any other team I’ve seen this season.
And that’s sort of why I’m grading Jonathan Heasley on a curve in this start. He ended up only making it through four innings and he gave up two runs, but I thought he looked better than the numbers. I really feel like he got Giantsed. Looking at this pitch chart, I think you can pretty easily see that he executed what he wanted to for the most part.
The fastballs were in the upper part of the zone, the changeups generally down and on the edges with the sliders and curves missing the middle of the plate. But the Giants just don’t let up. These are the pitches that were taken for balls.
Sure some of these are way off the plate and there are three that were called incorrectly from a very inconsistent zone. But that slider you see just off the plate toward the left-handed batter’s box was a 2-2 pitch to Brandon Belt in the first. He ended up getting him swinging, but that’s extremely difficult to lay off. In the fourth, there was a slider on a 1-2 to Belt that he didn’t swing at. It was a darn good pitch. It was close to a strike. It looked like it even started on the corner before drifting in. Take a look.
Belt extended that at bat and then ended up homering on. That’s a pitch the Orioles were swinging at last weekend. This isn’t to say that pitchers get a pass because a tough offense worked them hard, but I believe this was the most difficult offense Heasley has had to face yet because of the way they battle on every single pitch.
And overall, I liked the stuff. Like I said, I liked the command. If he was pitching tomorrow against the A’s instead of yesterday against the Giants, we might be talking about seven more shutout innings. What I loved was that he was in trouble in both the first and second innings and instead of doing what we’ve seen him do in the past, he went after hitters. With two on and two out in the first, he challenged Belt on a 3-2 pitch.
And then with two on and two out in the second, he challenged Luis Gonzalez with a 3-2 sinker.
I think I would have liked to have seen more changeups from him because I thought that looked good, but all in all, I think you have to like the progress we’ve seen from Heasley. Now in his last four starts, he’s gone 23 innings with 19 hits allowed and just seven walks to go along with 19 strikeouts. He has a 3.13 ERA and looks like he’s progressing into the guy I remember seeing in the minors when I’ve seen him in the past.
So it was a good win and if you’ll recall me talking about sequencing a bit ago, it’s nice to get one going into an off day. There’s always something just a little better about a day off when you’re not thinking about the most recent loss.
Post idea: Are Royals pitchers allowing a lot more foul balls than the rest of the league?
Zero losses in two days! Wooooo!