Royals Power Display Saves the Day

Would you believe the Royals are now tied for second place?

It’s funny the way a baseball game can unfold. What seems like the biggest story of the game for a few innings gives way to other stories which sometimes give way to other stories. When you’re working to recap a game and pick out the most important thing, sometimes that can be pretty tough when there are very specific segments of the game that are worth discussing. So that’s what I’m going to do today because while a win is a win, there was definitely some good and some bad that went with it for the Royals last night.

Let’s start with the great stories.

Home Runs Lead to a #HEYHEYHEYHEY

The Royals aren’t what you’d call a power-laden team. They entered play last night with five home runs in eight games. Three were hit in one game. Granted, they’d played fewer games than every other team, but even if they’d played more, it likely wouldn’t have mattered much. But the great thing about baseball is that sometimes what happened in the past doesn’t matter a bit and that was the case last night for the Royals.

After putting out the initial lineup with Salvador Perez catching, a switch was made because Perez had some blurred vision, which is the same issue he dealt with in 2020 some and apparently last year though I don’t recall much talk of it. He was moved to designated hitter, Hunter Dozier was moved from DH to first base and Carlos Santana was taken out of the lineup. That proved…wise.

Trailing 2-0 in the bottom of the fourth, Chris Archer was kind of cruising after a tough first and he made a big, honkin’ mistake to Perez. I don’t know if he thought he could get ahead of Perez or what, but he threw a fat slider to him that Perez promptly crushed.

To get it out of there with that wind was impressive for him on that swing. Perez hit .394 with a .904 slugging percentage last year when the at bat ended on the first pitch. He hit 14 of his 48 home runs on the first pitch. And since the start of 2020, he’s hit .387 with a .774 SLG on first pitch sliders heading into last night’s action. So everything about that pitch from Archer was bad. It cut the Twins lead in half and gave a little hope because you always feel like the Royals will be shut out until they score. When their offense is looking like it has, there just isn’t much hope until the dam is broken.

After the Twins got the run back in the top of the fifth, the Royals clawed again in the bottom half, getting that run back on a bases loaded walk by Nicky Lopez before Bobby Witt Jr. hit into a double play to end the inning. That was a huge out because it kept Perez on the bench until the next inning. And while you never can assume that what happened later would have happened earlier, Perez stepped to the plate in the sixth against Tyler Duffey and did Perez things.

That was a 91.8 MPH fastball from Duffey at the top of the zone but in the middle. I mention the velocity because Perez had hit .357 with a ridiculous 1.036 SLG on fastballs between 90 and 94 since the start of 2020. If you don’t have elite velocity, you’re simply not going to get him out on your fastball. And Duffey gave him three straight with the third traveling 388 feet to tie the game.

After the home run, Andrew Benintendi singled to right and was thrown out trying to stretch that to a double, which was pretty frustrating in the moment and even more frustrating a minute later because Duffey hung a knuckle curve that Dozier absolutely demolished.

I’ve been one of the few Dozier backers since the start of last season, so I have to say it’s incredibly satisfying to see him do what he’s done to start this season. Now since the start of last September, Dozier is hitting .276/.338/.569 with eight home runs in 123 at bats. The strikeout rate of 26.6 percent is still higher than you want to see, but that’s even been better this year with an 18.8 percent strikeout rate so far. He’s tied with Perez for the team lead in hard-hit balls with 13 and is tied with Perez for the team lead in balls hit 100 MPH or harder with eight. He’s been very good to start the year and has now hit what ended up being the game-winning home run in each of the last two games.

And speaking of power…

The Bullpen Came Up Big…Again

I’m going to get to Carlos Hernandez here in a minute and that’s the bad news part of the game, but the Royals bullpen did it again last night. Hernandez left with one out in the fifth and he left a very small mess for Amir Garrett to clean up. Garrett was set to face two lefties and got Max Kepler before facing a pinch hitter, Kyle Garlick.

And Garrett simply wasn’t going to throw him a strike.

He made one mistake that Garlick missed, but in the end, Garrett got the strikeout to end the fifth, which gave the Royals a chance as he kept the game close. Then in the sixth, he was back out there. After a one-out walk, he got Gary Sanchez swinging before taking on Ryan Jeffers in a battle for the ages.

Yes, that’s 13 pitches. Each one got scarier than the last, especially as Garrett was essentially refusing to throw his fastball to this Twins lineup. In the end, he had thrown 37 pitches to get five very big outs in this game and only four of them were fastballs. The slider was actually doing quite well with the whiff rate before Jeffers fouled off so many, and I would argue it’s a blueprint Daniel Lynch should be following tonight as the Twins had no problems with Hernandez’s fastball before Garrett came in.

From there, we got to see the good and bad of Jake Brentz, put into another high leverage situation after the Royals had taken the lead. Brentz came on and struck out Luis Arraez, which is no easy task before he got Jorge Polanco to pop out, but then he walked Carlos Correa and ended up giving up a hit to Kepler. He had made Kepler look silly on a couple swings earlier in the at bat, but simply caught too much of the middle of the plate with the last pitch. So it was another tightrope act for Brentz with Collin Snider needing to save the day, and apparently he’s just always up to that task as he did it.

It was smooth sailing for Scott Barlow in the eighth, but I was intrigued by his usage as the setup man in this situation. He got the six, seven and eight hitters in the Twins lineup. In previous games when Barlow didn’t pitch the ninth, it was because the heart of the order was up in the eighth, but that’s decidedly not the strength of the Twins lineup, so I found that decision interesting. You might recall I’ve been jockeying for Barlow to not be the closer so he is available for those big situations, but maybe after what Josh Staumont did Saturday, Matheny prefers him in that closer’s role.

Speaking of Staumont, he…struggled. He got an out on the first pitch, but then walked Arraez on four pitches. He should have walked Jorge Polanco, but Polanco gave him an absolute gift.

Correa grounded out to end the game and the bullpen piled up 4.2 more scoreless innings with just one hit allowed. That’s a heck of a formula.

Hernandez Does Whatever the Opposite of Dazzling Is

Last season, Hernandez was the best of all the young Royals starters. He turned it on after the break and was very good until wearing down in September. While the strikeouts weren’t always there for him, he did miss bats a decent amount. In the 43 innings when he was at his best last year from the break to the end of August, he had a total whiff rate of 25.5 percent. By pitch, it was:

Four-seam fastball: 23.4%
Slider: 35.2%
Curveball: 26.5%
Changeup: 17.1%
Sinker: 25.5%

His overall 21.8 percent strikeout rate could and probably should have been better, but he was getting the job done. And so far this year, it just hasn’t worked through two starts. His slider was fantastic against the Guardians, so that was nice for him, but he ended up with two whiffs on 19 swings on all his other pitches. And then last night, it happened again only his slider wasn’t even getting whiffs.

It’s just not good enough. I’m not sure what happened to the slider last night, but he simply didn’t have it at all. And he was hit hard. Of the 20 balls that were put in play against him, nine were it at least 100 MPH and another was a hard-hit ball at 98.3 MPH. He was honestly lucky that the weather was what it was because a couple of those would be home runs in June or July.

What is unfortunate for Hernandez is that he did this on a night when Jonathan Heasley looked quite good for Omaha. Heasley struggled a bit with pitch efficiency, but he did get up to 83 pitches, so he stretched out more. He gave up a run on three hits in 4.2 innings with five strikeouts and one walk. I’ll say that I haven’t been impressed with Heasley at the big league level either at the end of last year or in spring training this year, but Hernandez needs to perform or else there are others fighting for his spot.

The optimistic take is that his schedule has been completely off. Not only was spring training shortened and all that, but he had seven days off between pitching, so he’s probably both not fully built up and not working on the schedule most pitchers like. It was encouraging that he didn’t walk anyone, but he just can’t be leaving fastballs where he did. Good hitters do damage in the zone like this:

But in the end, they got a win and that’s what matters. That’s another win in the middle 54 column, which means they’re now 4-4 there. One of these days they’ll play a game that isn’t stressful. I just don’t know when.