Strong Start, Strong Finish and Some Swagger

The Royals won a game they never would have won earlier this season and looked like they gained a little mojo in the process.

I guess I just have one question for you…

First of all, if you’ve never watched Party Down, I highly recommend it. Second of all, Henry Pollard asks the question that I think I know the answer to. Royals baseball is fun again. There’s a part of me that thinks maybe the story is a little tired. The Royals have a lot of young players and those young players lead them to an exciting victory. But can that ever really get old? And the answer is no, it cannot.

I don’t love hypotheticals. There’s just no way to know the answer to them, which I know is the point, but also I feel like they’re silly. I would argue what I’m about to say isn’t a hypothetical at all and should be regarded and treated as fact. The Royals don’t win last night’s game if it’s played on May 10 instead of August 10. It’s as simple as that. I don’t know exactly what would have happened, but when they gave up three runs in the top of the sixth, the offense would have gone into a shell and maybe gotten an extra run or two after the White Sox scored two or three more throughout the rest of the game.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, after Kris Bubic simply ran out of gas in the sixth and was let down by Michael Massey making an error that probably would have been an inning ending double play, the Royals just kept coming back. They went from up 1-0 to down 3-1 and instead of putting the bats away, they got a run from a leadoff single and then a double and then Massey came through with two on and two outs with a big single to tie the game. I’m not saying the Royals are a good team because they almost certainly are not, at least not yet, but they did yesterday what good teams do. And they did it against a team that has dreams of being a good team, but is probably more of a mediocre team.

Before they break, the Royals won 10 games that they trailed at any point. And I mean any point. If their opponent scored in the top of the first and the Royals tied it in the bottom half, I considered that them trailing, which is not the way it’s actually tracked. They’ve already won four such games since the break and they’re now 10-10 in those 20 total games. They’re also 29-29 in their last 58, 26-25 in their last 51 and 7-4 in their last 11. They don’t get prizes for digging a hole and then coming out of it looking competent, but it’s just a much more fun brand of baseball to watch.

One of the most fun things of this stretch has been watching Kris Bubic continue to develop. And last night, I thought he was good and deserved a much kinder final line than the one he received. Even though the official scorer eventually changed the hit to an error on Massey and left Bubic with just one earned run, he pitched so well in the first five innings that I was rooting about as hard as I could for just one more out in that sixth inning to give him five straight starts with six or more innings pitched.

His fastball stood out last night and for two reasons. The first is that he was throwing it hard. He averaged 93 on it, which is well above his season average. He touched 95.3 MPH with one of them and threw 26 of 61 at 93 MPH or harder. As you probably know if you’ve read anything I’ve written about Bubic, he’s at his best when he’s throwing harder. And the second reason is that he obviously really felt good about his fastball because he threw it 62 percent of the time. It’s not the most he’s ever thrown it in a game, but the 61 he threw is tied for the second-most. He was feeling it. And with good reason.

He was moving it around the zone and I thought was pretty effective with it up in the zone.

In all, he ended up with six swinging strikes on the fastball, which is tied for the 10th most in any game he’s thrown. I did wonder a bit if throwing so hard early in the game would wear him down more later in the game and I think maybe it did. The velocity was still there in the sixth, but his command was pretty much gone on it. He threw 11 of them out of the zone and got just two swings and both were fouled off. On the ones in the zone, he got a called strike, a swinging strike, a couple of foul balls and gave up two hits, including the single that scored the White Sox third run.

It got me thinking of if I’d rather have Bubic for five innings throwing 93-95 or for six plus with him throwing a little slower earlier in the game. I don’t know that the Royals can’t have both long-term, but for now, it seems like there’s some work that Bubic would need to do to make that happen. And I think I’d take the five innings he threw tonight and then hand it to the bullpen. In his previous four starts that all went six plus innings, he had allowed four singles and a double with just one walk after the lineup turned over a third time. Opponents were hitting .192/.276/.231 with a 20.7 percent strikeout rate and 3.4 percent walk rate after the first two times through. Yesterday, that jumped to .400/.455/.500 with one strikeout and one walk. So I don’t know, maybe this isn’t better.

But even so, while he didn’t get the fifth straight quality start, Bubic is now someone I definitely believe can be a part of a future big league competitive rotation. In his last 13 starts since returning from Omaha, here’s his line:

72.2 IP
72 H
36 R
29 ER
63 K
32 BB
3.59 ERA

As I’ve said, his peripherals aren’t quite as good as the ERA and the RA is 4.46, but he’s giving length and quality and I’m impressed with what he’s done.

But how about what those Baby Royals have done? Last night, they hit .435/.500/.609 with a double, home run, three walks, seven runs and six runs batted in. The ring leader, once again, was MJ Melendez, who went 3 for 4 with a walk, a homer and has been absolutely on fire since the break. He’s now hitting .293/.360/.560 with five homers and 15 RBI and a good chunk of that has been out of the leadoff spot while playing a relatively new position most of the time defensively. I don’t know if he had the biggest hit of the game, but it gave the Royals the lead.

But something about his message to the Royals dugout as he was trotting to first stood out to me as maybe even bigger than just this game.

Jared Koller @JaredKCTV5

MJ Melendez lets us know this is his house. The go-ahead bomb is the 14th home run for @mjmelendez7. #Royals @KCTV5

Look, this stuff can be stupid. Maybe it means absolutely nothing, but I think back to the brief glory days of a few years ago and we can all remember how much the Royals seemed to be sort of hated by other teams and fans because they were doing things like hand signals after base hits and all of that. They don’t do any of that. Watching Melendez run down the line and proclaim that “this is what we do” or whatever it is that he was saying there shows that the Royals have some swagger. Melendez has swagger. Bobby Witt Jr. has swagger. Vinnie Pasquantino certainly has swagger. You need that.

I was going to mention this before I heard it on Josh Vernier’s postgame show, but he talks before I write, so he got to it first. That felt a little Hosmer-ish when he used to put the backpack on in big situations. That team had some swagger. The difference, of course, is that they did it on the biggest stage and this team won a game in mid-August against a White Sox team that has been between four games under .500 and two games over .500 since April 20.

But there’s always a moment good teams look back on for when it all started. For the 2013 Royals, it was that game in St. Louis that ended after 3 in the morning. For the 2014/2015 bunch, it came from a silly speech by Raul Ibanez telling them that they’re actually a good team. Maybe Melendez’s home run is that moment for this bunch, even if it doesn’t directly lead to a turnaround. Maybe it’s not, but I can safely say that I feel as good about the Royals today as I have at any point since maybe five years ago when they won nine in a row in July to move into a playoff position.

And if this was that moment, they sure did a great job of putting the exclamation point on it in the eighth inning when they poured on some insurance runs. Time will tell on whether it’s just one moment in time that will be forgotten or will be something we can look back on, but I think we can safely answer the question posed at the top of today’s newsletter with a resounding yes.