The Royals Have Lost a Series
The defense let the team down again, but last night, the pitching decided they didn't want the defense to feel lonely.
On the bright side, if you had asked me before the season when the Royals would lose their first series, I would have told you long before April 20th. I guess it couldn’t be that long before, but still, before. On the...dark side (is the opposite of bright side the dark side?), they’ve had two very ugly games to start their series against a Rays team that hasn’t looked terribly impressive to me, but has won both games easily.
The simple fact is that the Royals have been sloppy in both of these games with defense letting them down and last night they let the walks get the better of them. I know things got out of hand late with a somewhat worrisome performance from Greg Holland that I’ll get to in a second, but I feel like the Royals handed the Rays that game. It’s easy to blame Whit Merrifield for his defensive struggles early in the game, but all those walks. I’ll get to Merrifield in a second, but I made a point on Twitter about the walks since Cal Eldred became pitching coach.
Since taking over in 2018, the Royals have ranked 11th, 5th, 15th and this year 10th in walk rate from their pitchers. I actually thought it was worse than that, but that’s still quite bad. I haven’t been shy about my dislike of him as a pitching coach over the years, but you simply can’t put as many runners on for free as they have over the last four years and be as successful as you want to be. A lot of that is the talent on the staff.
A coach can’t be expected to work miracles with guys who have no miracle within them, but it gets frustrating when you see what teams like the Reds and Brewers have done with their pitching program at the big league level and the results they’ve had while the Royals continue to ride with Eldred. And with the young pitchers getting closer, it’s actually something that has meaning to the future of this franchise.
On the defensive front, Merrifield had a very, very bad game. In the first inning with no runs in and one out, Brandon Lowe hit a perfect double play ball.
In the second inning with one on and nobody out, Willy Adames hit a ball right into the shift to Merrifield. Because of where the defense was playing, he couldn’t go to second. But he still did. It sure seemed like he was in his head.
Then in the sixth, they gave Lowe a hit on this, but Merrifield absolutely should have had this one. It was hit at just 73.1 MPH and even though it was a big hop, he was there. Maybe that’s another double play?
It was the least egregious of the three, but it was still 7-5 Rays at this point and I think they could have gotten two there. Kyle Zimmer couldn’t minimize the damage, giving up a solid single to score two and then a 61 MPH bloop to score two more. It was now 11-5 and that was the ballgame.
I’m not trying to single out Merrifield here, but something interesting is happening across the keystone from him with Nicky Lopez, who continues to play well defensively and we know is an elite defensive second baseman as well. But, maybe more importantly, he’s actually hitting. The Royals finally gave a timeline update on Adalberto Mondesi and it sounds like three to five more weeks, so the decision can wait, but if they had to make a choice right now, I think they’d have to keep Lopez both on the big league roster and in the lineup. Moving him to second with Mondesi at shortstop really shores up that infield defense. This isn’t the first time Merrifield has struggled at second. In 2019, he eight outs below average at second in 308 attempts. He’s exactly even this year, but I don’t think anyone would argue they’re better defensively with Lopez at second. It’s just the bat that they couldn’t live with last year.
Again, there’s still plenty of time for this to change, but while the Royals are never going to get serious power out of Lopez, he’s doing what I thought he could when he was called up in 2019. He’s making contact and he’s actually been hitting the ball a bit harder of late as well. It might very well be that the original plan they had in place when spring training started is the one that makes the most sense. Of course, that’s something they don’t need to worry about just yet, but it’s coming relatively soon and good for Lopez for making the Royals have to make a decision.
When you add in the thought that Bobby Witt, Jr. has a chance to be ready to contribute sometime this summer, the Royals have a good problem on their hands, but one they’ll need to figure out. Andrew Benintendi and Michael A. Taylor will go a long way toward determining how much of a good problem they have and how much they’ll just need to move around the parts they already have in place.
And finally, before I get to the couple other notes, I want to just touch on Greg Holland’s outing because it concerns me. I don’t want to make a huge deal about it because coming out of the bullpen when the temperature is in the mid-30s is a chore, so I’m willing to see what happens next time out when it’s a little less frigid (although that won’t be tonight either), but yikes. He couldn’t locate and he was sitting 90-91 and only threw one pitch faster than 91.7 MPH. It could have absolutely been a feel thing with the weather, but this situation needs to be monitored.
Crown Jewels
Carlos Santana is Entering the Hot Zone
I’m going to start with a positive note because there wasn’t a ton of positive, but I do want to mention that Santana looks like he’s getting going after a slow start to his Royals career. In his last four games, he’s hitting .533/.563/.933 with three doubles, a home run and four runs batted in after his 2 for 4 game with a homer, double and three runs batted in last night. And he’s hitting just about everything hard. Even in his first plate appearance when he grounded out, he had three batted balls at 104.1 miles per hour or harder. Yesterday he had three at 106.7 MPH or harder.
This is very good news for a struggling Royals offense and coincides a bit with his move to the number two spot over the last three games. His first game in this stretch was in the cleanup spot, so I don’t want to give that move more credit than it deserves, but I really like Santana hitting second. He typically just gives such a good plate appearance that he sets a tone for a game. Last night isn’t a great example, but he’s such a good handler of the bat and has such a great eye at the plate that he can really do so much from that spot, even if they want to try to play the hit and run game with Whit Merrifield on first base.
Brad Keller is Not
After a really good start against the Angels last week, I was looking forward to Keller evening the good start/bad start ratio, but he did anything but that. I noted above how the defense let him down, and they definitely did. In the first, he could have easily been out of that with nothing allowed, but even though Merrifield made the mental error on the fielders choice, Keller did most of the damage to himself in that second inning. You can see how all over the place he was.
Based on the zone from Monday, you’d argue he got squeezed, and three of those pitches on the edge were called balls, but when you’re all over the place and missing the target constantly, you’re not going to get the borderline calls. His velocity was actually up again in this one, about half a mile per hour faster than normal, but he once again didn’t use his slider, throwing it just 20 percent of the time in his 54 pitches. Why is that important? Last year when he was excellent in a small sample, he threw it 38 percent of the time and opponents hit .187 without an extra base hit.
This year he’s thrown it just 22.8 percent of the time and opponents have hit .385 off it with two homers and two doubles. Is this simply regression to the mean? The spin rate on the pitch is nearly identical to 2020. But it’s just moving less. His vertical movement on the pitch is down three inches. His horizontal movement is also down, from 6.2 inches to 5.9 inches, so that’s not as drastic, but enough to alter the shape of a pitch. Whenever a pitcher has this kind of trouble with a slider, it raises a red flag in my mind. They keep saying he’s healthy, so maybe it’s just a mechanical issue that’s causing all this trouble, but he’s only pitched beyond the fourth inning once now and twice he hasn’t been able to make it out of the second. Whatever it is, the Royals need it to get fixed and it needs to get fixed quickly.