Sweep Dreams Are Made of This
The Royals took until their fourth to last series of the year, but they finally got a three-game sweep.
We’ve watched some teams playing out the string in the past. That’s a badge of honor for Royals fans to know exactly what it looks like. And, friends, the Minnesota Twins have reached a point where they are playing out the string. But we’ve also seen the Royals win games late in the season they’re playing out the string and we’ve seen other teams win games against the Royals in those situations. So for them to go out and sweep a series is at least a sign that they haven’t quit on the season when nobody could honestly have blamed them if they did.
And boy, sometimes you just dominate a game. The Royals had the 10 hardest-hit balls of the game and 12 of the top 13. The Twins ended up with just two hits and six base runners all game. It was really the perfect storm for Jonathan Heasley to have a second consecutive good start after getting roughed up by the Tigers on September 10. You might recall he went 6.2 shutout innings last Friday in Boston in the game that the bullpen blew by walking a bunch of guys. And then he followed that up with six innings allowing one run on two hits.
The Twins helped him out a lot, I think, given that it was both a getaway day and all they clearly want to do is get away for the winter at this point. They swung at the first pitch six times against him. It seemed like when they should be swinging they didn’t and when they should be taking they didn’t. Heasley ended up with some quick outs against him and, honestly, he looked like he could go seven or eight before running into a little trouble in the sixth inning when he allowed his one and only run. In that inning, he had runners on first and third, which was the only time the Twins had a runner past second, and he ended up escaping with obviously just the one run scoring.
But it wasn’t just the Twins helping him out. Heasley’s changeup looked very good to me. He threw 22 of them out of 89 total pitches, which is tied for the seventh-most he’s thrown in a game in his career, and it might be a pitch he’s keying in on late in the season. Of the eight times he’s thrown it 22 times or more, four of them have been in his last six starts. And it’s easy to see why. It doesn’t move a ton, with his vertical movement ranking 153rd out of 197 righties and the horizontal movement ranking 147th out of 197, but it just looks like a pitch that can be tough to hit at times and it is all over the zone.
It’s just kind of odd. It seems like it basically drifts and maybe it’s one of those things that it’s just purely messing with the timing of the opposing hitters, but it’s a pitch that works for him. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t throw it to one particular spot but he does generally keep it down. It doesn’t usually get hit hard, though of course it has, but it’s just a pitch he seems to be able to go to and command it decently, especially when he falls into some of his command ruts that we’ve seen from him from time to time on the mound.
And now you start to wonder what Heasley is for the future of this franchise because everything is about the future right now. Since the start of August, he’s now made seven starts. The overall numbers are kind of a mixed bag. He’s posted a 3.49 ERA in 38.2 innings. That part is good. His strikeout rate is just 14.9 percent while his walk rate is 9.9 percent. He has given up fewer hits than innings pitched. But he’s allowed six home runs. He’s gone six or more innings in three of those starts and given up two or fewer runs in five of those starts.
It’s honestly hard to say for me what Heasley is. You can see the stuff at times, but other times, he looks like someone who will bounce around the league forever and get three starts with on team, five with another and so on. There are two things about him that I keep coming back to. The first is that I think if you put him in the bullpen, he’s going to be able to figure out that his fastball can play way harder and then he can find a secondary pitch or two to carry him. So I think that’s interesting.
But I also think he looks the part of a starting pitcher. It’s not just that he’s got a starting pitcher body that you’d think should be able to handle some innings. He has four pitches and he uses them all. But yes, some of it is the body. He’s 6’3” and 225 lbs. That’s a frame that you’d think could handle some work. Like any of these young pitchers for the Royals, I have a hard time counting them out on any role until we see what kind of progress they can make with some competent instruction.
I’m not saying they’ll bring in a new pitching coach (and likely bullpen coach) and suddenly all these pitchers will find themselves looking like the best pitcher in baseball. But I am saying that I think there’s reason to hold off on any full evaluation until we know what they can do with a coach who can help them make quicker adjustments. I just can’t get out of my head the fact that it took until they were in Boston with a straight shot camera angle to fix Brad Keller’s mechanical flaws last season.
We talked earlier this year about what happened when Cal Eldred visited the mound and I’ll repeat what I said. The fact is that he’s not making things worse. He’s just not able to make things better. It’s not like he’s going out there and telling the pitcher to pipe a fastball now. When a pitching coach visits the mound, it’s because the pitcher is struggling, so it stands to reason that he’d still be struggling once the coach walks off the mound and back to the dugout when the coach isn’t able to find an answer. At this point, it’s nearly impossible to evaluate any of these pitchers fully knowing that they don’t have the instruction on hand to be able to help them correct in any kind of quick order, so I’m curious what we see out of guys like Heasley moving forward.
And to that point, I had an interaction with a long-time follower on Twitter yesterday that I’m not going to share in case he doesn’t want me sharing it, but basically I was asked about a move made and what I thought. I actually didn’t have an issue with it, but that’s fine. The point here is that anything Mike Matheny does is, to me, silly to even try to break down other than to acknowledge if it was good or bad. Because the tendencies aren’t going to matter in two weeks. I said it yesterday and I’ll say it again today. I will be legitimately shocked if he is back in 2023. If that happens, something will have changed. You can ask why not just dump him now if they’ve decided and I fully understand and can’t tell you, but it’s just not the way it’s going to happen.
And in a way, it’s kind of comforting. That’s what moving on from Dayton Moore and using the words John Sherman used can do for this fan base over the next couple of weeks. It’s just a weight off our shoulders, I feel like. The number of responses I got both here in the comments and on Twitter when I kept indicating change was coming was plenty of totally understandable doubt. Trust me when I say I’m not calling you out on that because I get it. But knowing change has already come has to be a relief to know that they aren’t just going to sit on their hands.
But anyway, back to the game. Heasley didn’t need much from his offense. They got a run on a Bobby Witt Jr. single, stolen base and another Salvador Perez RBI, his seventh game in a row with one. And then in the fourth, Edward Olivares just kept on hitting.
And in the fifth, Drew Waters showed that when he knows he got one, he knows he got one. This one went out fast at 110.8 MPH and it went far (428 feet)
They only needed as much as the Olivares home run, but a Nate Eaton double in the eighth drove home Vinnie Pasquantino and the Royals had their fourth run to set up Brad Keller for the first save of his big league career, which he got with a 1-2-3 ninth inning.
It was a bit of a concern going into the game how they’d protect a lead if they had one given that they had used Dylan Coleman and Scott Barlow a lot over the last two games, but the trio of Collin Snider, Carlos Hernandez and Keller faced 10 total batters. I’ll have something on Royals Review about the bullpen in September today as well, but they’re posting a 3.09 ERA as a unit this month with the peripherals to match. It’s absolutely too little, too late, but they didn’t give up a run to the Twins this series and look like they’re finishing the year strong.
And now we’ve got some intrigue! The Royals hadn’t swept a three-game series all season, so that was interesting, but that means they now have won three in a row. They have yet to win a fourth in a row. They’ve attempted it six times previously and lost all six. They’ve got Brady Singer on the hill against the Mariners tonight and they’re facing the one Mariners pitcher who opponents haven’t had a ton of trouble with this season in Marco Gonzales. Could it be that the stars are aligning? We’ll find out tonight, but for now, it’s fun that we get to celebrate some good play for the first time in quite awhile.
Good to see guys ready to do damage on fastballs
I know this: I’m looking forward to the first normal offseason since 2019. I’m sure Mr. Sherman and JJ are too.