Singer's Odd Notes
The Royals young righty pitched in a way he never really had before.
When Brady Singer took the mound last night at Comerica Park in Detroit, he’d made four career starts against the Tigers. He’d pitched 25 innings in those four starts, allowed 13 hits and struck out 24 while walking three. His ERA in those four starts was 1.44 and he looked every bit that good. Then last night, he gave up four runs on seven hits in 3.1 innings with four strikeouts and two walks.
To me, it seemed like everything was missing glove side, and there were a lot of glove side misses as you can see in the chart here.
But look at that chart, and you might notice a lot more orange than you’d typically see in a Singer start. That’s because he seemed to be shying away from his slider quite a bit last night. In the first, he threw 12 pitches and one slider. And if we’re being honest, the one slider was bad. It caught Robbie Grossman looking, but it was the type of slider that if Grossman had swung on, he likely would have hit hard. It just sat right in the middle of the plate.
So that’s one explanation for him not throwing it. Move on to the second and he threw five pitches to Nomar Mazara. All sinkers. Jonathan Schoop got two pitches, both sinkers. He threw nine pitches to Niko Goodrum, eight of them were sinkers. He changed things up with Willi Castro, throwing him a sinker and a four-seam fastball, but still no sliders. And then came his plate appearance against Akil Baddoo, which I just found incredibly odd and made me start to think about this.
He started Baddoo with a sinker on the outer third that was taken for a strike. Then he got a favorable call on a sinker that was borderline but probably a ball. And then he just kept trying to throw to that exact spot. Only he kept missing glove side and Baddoo simply wasn’t going to swing his bat. This is a guy who came into the game with a .232 OBP. He’d walked four times in 82 plate appearances and struck out 35 times. Throw the guy a slider! I can almost promise that he will swing. But nope, six sinkers and Baddoo ended up on first.
He finally threw another slider on his 26th pitch of the inning to Grayson Greiner. He hit a weak ground ball to end the threat. And it sort of kept going in the third. Four of five pitches to Grossman were sinkers. The one slider, he got a swing and miss on. Then to Harold Castro, he gave up a single on a slider that was in a good location. It maybe could have been a bit more in, but it was a good spot. At least I thought so. Sometimes hitters hit good pitches. He got a swinging strikeout of Miguel Cabrera on another slider. And then he got a popup from Nomar Mazara on a slider.
At this point, I was thoroughly confused because he’d thrown eight sliders through three innings and allowed one hit with the rest either being called strikes, swinging strikes, foul balls or weak contact.
So the fourth starts, and that’s where the disaster came in. He started Schoop with three sinkers (what else?) and then left a slider up in the zone a little bit that Schoop hit hard but should have been a double at most if not for Michael A. Taylor badly misplaying the ball. Just watch this.
Then he walked Goodrum on a slider that should have been the pitch he threw to Baddoo to strike him out, but Goodrum didn’t offer because it was 3-1 after four sinkers. And then all hell broke loose in the form of very soft contact.
Willi Castro hit a changeup 77.7 MPH to center field to score a run. Baddoo got five more sinkers without a single slider and hit a 75.3 MPH single to left to score a run. Greiner made more weak contact, this time actually on a slider, and blooped a single to right to score another run. And then Grossman hit the slider in basically the same spot he took it in the first for a sacrifice fly. Oh and then Singer gave up another hit to Harold Castro on a changeup that was hit 79.3 MPH.
I’m not so worried about the results. It happens. Schoop hit it hard and Taylor put Singer in a really bad position, but the rest of the inning was a whole lot of weak contact. And as I believe hitters will get their hits if they continue to hit the ball hard, I believe pitchers will get their outs if they continue to coax weak contact like Singer coaxed.
And I wouldn’t even say I’m necessarily worried about Singer’s usage last night, but just confused. He threw more sinkers by percentage than he ever has in his big league career. Maybe that’s not a concern at all given that five of his six highest sinker usages have come this season. Or maybe that is a concern that he’s relying on it too heavily. I don’t know.
But he’s also never thrown his slider so little. He threw it just 16.5 percent of the time last night. Not surprisingly given his heavy sinker usage this year, his three lowest usages of his slider have come this season. But even the previous low of 26.1 percent wasn’t that far from his typical usage of 30.8 percent for the whole season (which does include last night).
What I don’t get here is that it’s a good pitch. Opponents have hit just .235 off it in his career. He gets swings and misses about 30 percent of the time on it. He’s spinning it more than last year, getting weaker contact and everything. So why throw it so much less in favor of a sinker that, by the way, was way down on velocity last night.
He averaged 92.5 MPH on his sinker which was down from his season average of 93.9 MPH. It’s also the softest he’s ever thrown it in a big league start. It was moving similar to his season movement, but I’m just really confused about why it was coming out so much softer. Maybe it was just a matter of him not having very good command and trying to take something off. He missed the target quite a bit, and as I noted way up at the top, it seemed like he was pulling a lot of his pitches way more than normal.
The odds are that it was an off night, but I just find myself perplexed by the pitch usage when the sinker didn’t have the command or the velocity it usually does and simply not trying the slider more often to try to get some swings and misses in certain counts. I don’t know that there’s really a point here other than to just express that confusion and have something to watch for the next time we see Singer on the mound.
Signs of Life?
I had said that I wasn’t going to write today because I just didn’t have it in me, but I honestly woke up this morning so interested in Singer’s outing that I decided to, and if I’m writing, I have to talk about the furious comeback the Royals made last night, which was at least somewhat heartening. A loss is a loss and this was as bad a loss as any of the previous eight given both their opponent and the way they lost, but if you’re a fan of a team, you have to look for glimmers of hope.
Jorge Soler gave us that as he apparently tried to put the team on his back and will them to a win last night. When it was 7-0 in the eighth, Soler came to the plate with two on and two out. It pretty well felt like another inning with runners stranded for the Royals. Until he did this:
When it’s 7-0, that three-run homer is a garbage time home run. But for a team that hadn’t had a big hit or even a hit to score a run since Wednesday, you sort of wondered if it might at least ignite something in them. So it sure seemed like another loss until the ninth inning when the Tigers bullpen (and defense) continued to awaken the Royals offense.
A Hanser Alberto double was followed by another Taylor strikeout (they have to do something about him). Then Nicky Lopez picked up his second hit of the game and Ryan O’Hearn, in the game for Whit Merrifield when it was a blowout, singled as well. Carlos Santana had a pretty rough plate appearance that you don’t see often from him and it was left up to Sebastian Rivero, who came in to give Salvador Perez a few innings off in a blowout.
Now, I think a lot of people might have been pretty upset with Mike Matheny for pulling Merrifield and Perez. A lot weren’t, but a lot probably were at this point. I will argue for Matheny here. This is a team that had scored four runs in their previous four games. I think it’s fair for him, with seven games in six days this week to pull some guys who might have the most wear and tear on them. And as the ball hit Rivero’s bat and traveled weakly to Goodrum at shortstop, I thought the anger was going to be heard pretty loudly.
And then Goodrum couldn’t field the ball cleanly. This is why a team is 10-24. They had a 7-0 lead with two outs in the eighth and because of an error with two outs in the ninth, the lead run was stepping to the plate and it was the only guy who had done real damage. And then he did more damage.
Any other park and it’s a grand slam to give the Royals an 8-7 lead. In Comerica, it was almost caught, but not quite. All three runs scored and it was a brand new game. Soler had six runs batted in between the eighth and ninth innings. That’s pretty good.
Then Scott Barlow came in and showed why a team is on now on a nine-game losing streak. He just didn’t have it last night, which happens with him occasionally. A hit-by-pitch, a strikeout, a walk, a strikeout and then a fastball that caught too much of the plate ended the game. But it was a valiant effort. And for an inning and a half, the Royals looked like the team that captured many hearts in April.
Will it carry over? Who knows? Momentum is a thing, but it also isn’t a thing, so it’s hard to say if anything will come of it, but it was nice for a few minutes to feel like they had some fight in them. Maybe today’s the day the losing streak ends. It’ll theoretically happen eventually, so why not today?