Royals Pitching Woes Underscore Brutal First Half

What started so promising ended like so many others before it.

Four months ago, with the season about two and a half weeks away, the Royals looked like a team that could absolutely surprise and be pretty good. The issue was that they needed their guys to be guys and a couple people to step up. On the pitching staff, Brad Keller building on his 2020 was so important. Mike Minor finding more 2019 in his results than 2020 was important. Brady Singer taking a step forward was important. Danny Duffy just staying healthy was important. And whoever was in that fifth starter spot, whether it was Jakob Junis or Kris Bubic, it was important for them to be serviceable.

If they could gather some quality innings, a talented bullpen could avoid being overworked and could protect some leads from an offense that had similar thoughts.

Brad Keller finished the first half on a very strong note against the Indians, allowing just one run on four hits in 7.2 innings. It lowered his ERA to 5.97 and was just his fifth start with fewer hits allowed than innings pitched. He did that in six of his nine starts in 2020.

Mike Minor had a brutal finish to his first half with a clunker against the Indians, raising his ERA to 5.67. On a bright note, he at least isn’t walking a ton of guys.

Brady Singer has recorded an out in the sixth in just seven of his 18 starts. He’s been generally okay enough, but there is very little progression in him that I can see. He’s now made 30 starts and looks like the same guy in the 30th as he did in the first. He’s just talented enough to get by with that.

Danny Duffy was having the best season of his career before he got hurt again. He’s still been outstanding, but he’s made just 11 starts. The Royals need more than that.

And the fifth starter carousel has had some ups and downs, but while Junis was excellent in a starting role with the results, he was getting hit very hard. He was replaced by Daniel Lynch who was obviously not ready. Then he was replaced by Bubic who was fantastic for a bit, but then lost the command of his changeup and it’s been a real struggle for him. Oh, Jackson Kowar also wasn’t ready. And Ervin Santana has started twice, which isn’t ideal, though one was a double header game.

In all, Royals pitching has gone as far as their starters have taken them, which is not very far at all. After a 16-9 start, they’ve gone 20-44. After rebounding to 29-26, they’ve gone 7-27. There is no way to put this other than a disaster.

What are the biggest issues with the staff?

Put it simply, they don’t throw enough strikes. They throw the seventh lowest percent of pitches inside the strike zone at 47.9 percent. That in itself isn’t a season killer or anything. The Brewers are one of the teams that are worse than them and they have one of the best pitching staffs in baseball, so there are ways to make that work. I’ll get to that in a minute. First, though, while they don’t throw enough strikes in general, their first pitch strike throwing is abysmal as well.

They start batters with strike one in any way, whether it’s a pitch in the zone or out just 56.9 percent of the time. That’s the worst in baseball. There have actually only been 37 teams since the turn of the century with a worse first pitch strike percentage. That’s 37 teams out of 660 possible. There’s really no way around it, but that’s pretty horrendous.

Oh, and they throw the fewest pitches in the zone when they’re ahead in the count. That’s actually not a horrible thing, but they don’t get hitters to chase nearly enough. They do have an 11 percent swinging strike rate, which ranks 19th, so at least sort of in the middle, but with an MLB average chase rate of 28.3 percent, according to Baseball Savant, the Royals have seven pitchers with a chase rate above average. That includes Minor, Duffy and Scott Barlow, so it’s not all bad, but some of the pitchers at the bottom of the list are Keller, Bubic, Josh Staumont and Singer. It’s just too many guys who can’t get hitters to chase.

Of course, it’s not entirely just that they don’t get hitters to chase, it’s that their command is bad and somehow getting worse. We see it during games. No team has thrown more non-fastballs right down the middle since the start of their 7-27 stretch than the Royals. And it isn’t close. They’ve thrown 177 in the happy zone. The second most is the Tigers with 157. It’s not that not leaving pitches in the middle of the plate guarantees that you’ll have a good staff, but leaving them in the middle, especially non-fastballs pretty much guarantees you’re going to get rocked at times.

It’s a staff that just doesn’t do enough well to mask the deficiencies. The lack of command and control is what keeps pitch counts high for their starters and it’s why they’re averaging just a touch over 14 outs recorded per start. There’s a lot of talk about the staff facing an order a third time. Some believe they should never do it. I hope that they’ve realized what happens to a bullpen when a starting staff doesn’t give enough innings. But it would be nice if they wouldn’t get to the third time through in the fourth inning so Mike Matheny would have the option to get them out a little quicker.

But the bigger issue is that they have trouble getting guys out a second time through the order. While they’ve given up a higher average the third time through, they’ve actually shown worse control and given up a higher ISO the second time through an order. This is a team filled with relievers in the rotation. What happened to Keller being a horse? Or Singer being able to use his competitiveness to take down his opponents? None of it is happening right now, at least not consistently enough for it to matter.

I’m not going to spend too long beating this dead horse, but a lot of these issues they’re having should lead to a change in the coaching staff. Maybe it’ll happen today or maybe tomorrow or maybe at the end of the season, but they likely will cost Cal Eldred his job.

It’s not all bad. They do have some swing and miss. The league average whiff percentage is 24.5 percent. Of the current roster, only Bubic and Keller are below that among pitchers who are pitching important innings. Santana and Anthony Swarzak are too, but you’re only seeing them when the game is out of reach (so way too often). And four guys (Richard Lovelady, Jake Brentz, Carlos Hernandnez and Barlow) are actually above 30 percent, so that’s good.

They also do have a talented back end of the bullpen. Some have argued that Matheny leans on some guys too much, but I’d argue that he doesn’t have a choice and he is spreading the love pretty well around to five different guys and has tried to include others as well. Barlow, Brentz, Staumont, Kyle Zimmer and Greg Holland have been the main guys, but he’s clearly tried to get Lovelady and Tyler Zuber involved in different times. This isn’t a matter of Matheny playing favorites. It’s a matter of not getting enough from his starters.

To me, that’s where the pitching issues begin and sort of end. If the starters can throw some innings after the break and allow the bullpen with more than a couple legitimately good arms to stay relatively rested, the Royals could win some games they maybe shouldn’t in the second half. If you’re wondering how they started 16-9, there’s a big part of your answer. The relievers weren’t worn down. They won six games in April where they scored fewer than four runs. They’ve won three since.

And whatever they need to do to make it work is what they need to do to make it work. They’ve used an opener twice. I’d consider a double opener. Get through a lineup one time with Zimmer and Brentz, for example, and bring in Singer to start the third or fourth inning and let him finish it out or hand it to Barlow for an inning. Utilize guys like Hernandez, Kowar and Lynch as piggybacks if they need to. You don’t have to get six or seven from your starters in order keep the bullpen fresh. You just have to figure out a way to keep the key guys from having to cover four or five innings every single night. I know the Royals have torpedoed their postseason chances, but the least they can do is find a way to make them a little more watchable when they come back on Friday.