Weekend in Review: A Close and Frustrating Series, Some Notes and More

A holiday edition looking at the weekend that was for the Royals.

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I know that today is a holiday and the Royals play a day game at Kauffman Stadium, so I’m going to keep this edition of the Weekend in Review brief. Hey, stop laughing, I’m capable. The Royals had one of their more frustrating weekends in recent memory. And, let’s be honest, there are more than a couple to choose from. But in this one, they had a shot to win every single game. They scored first in their two losses and even held a four-run lead in one of them. Thankfully they narrowly avoided being walked off for the third straight game. I think Taylor Clarke summed it up best.

“Just not getting walked off again was really nice.”

On the positive side, I think the Twins are a really good team and the Royals were basically on equal footing with them. Offensive jokes aside, I think the home team would have won two out of three games no matter what and it wouldn’t have mattered which team was the home team. It happened to be the Twins and they did, so it’s easy for me to say that, but I think the Royals showed that they’re right there with them.

The weekend also started with some huge news. The Royals DFA’d Hunter Renfroe before the series began and called up Nick Loftin in his place. Many fans were celebrating, but I just want to say that there’s a fine line between celebrating your team getting better and cheering for someone’s demise. You do you, of course, but I’ve never heard anything bad about Hunter Renfroe and there’s a non-zero chance that his career ended with this move. I’m not entirely sure how you separate it, but my advice is to be happy the Royals improved and maybe let the Renfroe part of it go. Yes, he was bad as a Royal. No, it was not a good contract. Maybe let’s tone the rhetoric down toward the player just a touch. Again, my advice, not a mandate, but some of the stuff I saw was actually a little disgusting. Okay, of my soapbox to talk baseball.

The Games

Friday - Twins 3, Royals 1: Noah Cameron Great Again, But Offense Struggles Again

Noah Cameron might be the real deal. I’m interested to see what happens when a team sees him because the stuff speaks more to his results coming from deception. But even so, to get through his first three big league starts the way he has shows something incredible in the guy. He made a mistake to Carlos Correa in this one, but otherwise, made his best start of the three with a bonkers stat line.

6.2 IP
4 H
1 R
1 BB
8 K

The eight strikeouts was maybe the most surprising given that he’d struck out just six in his first two starts combined. He’d also walked five, but they all came in that debut. That means that in his two starts in place of Seth Lugo, he now has 11 strikeouts and one walk in 13 innings with just two runs allowed. I’m not entirely sure how you send that back to the minors when the rotation is full, but I also don’t know how you move out one of the arms either. I suppose maybe Michael Lorenzen could shift to the bullpen, but a 3.77 ERA in 10 starts shouldn’t be something that loses you your job either. It’s a great problem to have, but a great problem is still a problem.

I loved that Cameron led with his changeup. It was really good. He threw 10 out of the zone and the Twins swung at seven of them. They hit three of them. The contact they made on it was weak. His four-seamer is a pitch that will likely be the one to get him in trouble more than anything, but it was pretty successful too. In all, it’s hard to argue with the results here. He had 14 whiffs. Ultimately, he’s making the Royals at least think about their decision when the time comes to make a move.

Unfortunately, the offense let everyone down again. They scored in the top of the first inning on a two-out double by Cavan Biggio and then didn’t touch home plate again. Pablo Lopez was very good, but it’s not like they didn’t have their chances. They had a leadoff double in the second, two on and one out in the third, one on and one out in the fourth, one on with nobody out and then a runner in scoring position with one out in the fifth, a two-out runner in the sixth, a leadoff walk in the seventh, a leadoff single in the eighth and then went 1-2-3 in the ninth. Of course Ty France walked them off as Lucas Erceg had his third straight shaky game, but if you score any runs in any of those situations, the Royals win.

Saturday - Twins 5, Royals 4: Big Lead Blown

I didn’t get to see this game. I was spending some time with a friend I haven’t seen in years and while I was following the game on my phone, I was upset at first that I did when I saw that they were putting up runs early on Zebby Matthews and the Twins, but after getting their fourth run, they went into a shell and ended up striking out 18 times. The big finish was leaving the bases loaded in the top of the ninth with a chance to take the lead and then getting walked of again in the bottom half of the inning.

I saw some people complaining about pitching to Brooks Lee with a righty on deck and Steven Cruz on the mound, but I’m not sure I care so much about that. Nobody is hitting Cruz this year and even though Lewis is going through it to start his season, he’s very talented. I think I’d take my chances with Lee there, honestly.

It would have been nice to see Michael Wacha not completely implode with a big league, but that’s rare for him, so I’ll let it go this time.

Sunday - Royals 2, Twins 1: Another Nailbiter, But Better Result

It’s amazing to me how under-the-radar Kris Bubic has been this year. This was his line yesterday:

7 IP
2 H (to the first two batters)
1 R
1 ER
2 BB
9 K

It was probably his sixth-best start of the year. By game score, it was actually his best, but I find myself a little partial to the games he didn’t give up any runs in a similar number of innings. The strikeouts are nice too, but even if you don’t think it was his sixth-best, I think you can probably make a strong argument that it could be, which is just wild in one of the better-pitched games you’ll see.

And now for the year, these are his numbers:

11 GS
68.1 IP
49 H
70 K (26.1%)
20 BB (7.5%)
1.45 ERA

Here are some of his ranks in Royals history for the first 11 starts of a season:

• 2nd in ERA

• 8th in strikeouts

• 5th in hits allowed

That’s just bonkers, guys. I said this on social media, but no matter how much you believed in Bubic coming into the season, there’s no way that you believed this much. If the AL Cy Young vote was today, I’m not entirely sure how you differentiate Bubic from Max Fried and Tarik Skubal and maybe even Garrett Crochet and Nathan Eovaldi. I didn’t even mention Hunter Brown who might join them when he makes his 11th start.

But those four I mentioned all have at least 68.1 innings (Fried has 70 to top the league) with an ERA between 1.29 (Fried) and 2.49 (Skubal). Fried is 7-0 and had the best ERA, but Bubic has a higher strikeout rate than him and a lower walk rate than Crochet. Skubal has the highest strikeout rate and the lowest walk rate, but, again, the highest ERA. I think Bubic is third in that group, but there are fun arguments to be made this early in the season.

The fact that the Royals went into the season with two pitchers who finished top-five in the Cy Young vote last year and now have a third who is well on his way to that is pretty amazing for this pitching staff. And it’s a good thing because the offense is just not good enough and wasn’t good enough again against Bailey Ober.

In this one, it was partially missed opportunities and partially some tough luck. They did hit some balls hard right at people, so I’ll give them that, but they have to be better in big spots. It wasn’t until the seventh inning when Freddy Fermin finally came through on an 0-2 pitch with two strikes to double home Drew Waters, who had another nice day at the plate. Waters doesn’t hit the ball especially hard and doesn’t make especially strong swing decisions, but the results are still there somehow. Then in the top of the 10th, the Royals had the gift runner on second against Jhoan Duran and you’ll never believe it, but it was 0-2 with two outs again when Maikel Garcia came through with a big hit to score Loftin from second.

Taylor Clarke nailed down the save without allowing the runner on second to score and put a bow on a really great day for the bullpen. After Bubic’s outstanding seven innings, Jonathan Bowlan, Carlos Estevez and Clarke combined for three shutout innings with just one hit and walk allowed. Estevez was particularly nasty. He did get some help from Fermin on a fantastic caught stealing to end the eighth, but he was brilliant in the ninth to get himself his second win with the Royals. His ERA is now down to 1.96, which is actually a touch below Erceg’s at this point. Baseball is surprising sometimes.

Some Brief Notes

Since this is a shorter Weekend in Review, I’ll just give you a few notes.

• After the game yesterday, it was announced that Biggio was optioned to Omaha. If you’re wondering how he was able to when it looked like that wasn’t possible, it’s because he has between five and six years of service time and had not exhausted his options. Usually a player will decline to be optioned, but they can consent in these situations if a team asks. I absolutely brain farted on social media, forgetting that part of the rule. As of this moment when I’m writing this, an announcement hasn’t been made as to who will come up.

• My guess is it’s John Rave, but that’s only based on the fact that he wasn’t in the lineup for Omaha yesterday. Rave has been excellent for Omaha, hitting .299/.383/.521. That’s a step up from what he did last year when hew as solid, hitting .259/.346/.470. The story on Rave is he was a fifth round pick of the Royals in 2019 and has very slowly progressed through the system. It’s been so slow that he’s been exposed in the Rule 5 draft for two years straight and hasn’t been picked. The reality is that the batted ball data didn’t really support him being a big leaguer. It does now. His hard-hit rate is up to 46.5 percent from 37 percent. He’s barreling the ball more and while he’s whiffing a bit more too, the underlying numbers are much better (though still underwhelming).

• If it’s not Rave, I think it’ll be Cam Devanney. He was acquired in the Clarke deal with the Brewers. I had a scout tell me last year that he’s absolutely a big league utility infielder. That same scout told me early in the season that he’s a different layer now, and the underlying data suggests he’s right. His barrel per batted ball event rate is up from 8 percent last year to 21.1 percent this year. His average exit velocity is up from 88.3 MPH to 91.4 MPH. his hard-hit rate is up from 39.1 percent to 46.3 percent. His whiff rate, with all of that, is down. His xBA is .277. His xSLG is .625. He’s been very impressive and he’s an excellent defender on the infield. He played 27 innings in left field in 2022 in the Brewers organization and that’s it, so I’m not sure what the fit is, but he’s more interesting than Rave to me.

• And the elephant in the room is Jac Caglianone who has had about as good of a start to his AAA career as humanly possible. He went two games without a home run and, after hitting two yesterday, he now has five in six games in AAA. Now, it’s worth noting that they played their games this week in a park that might be better to hit in than Coors Field, but his blasts are getting out pretty much anywhere. I have been told by a reliable source that talks are “intensifying” about when to bring him up. Could that mean today? Eh, maybe. But I don’t really think so. My guess is he remains in Omaha for at least another week or two, but I’m also starting to wonder if my date of June 24 is going to end up looking like I overshot it. I do think it’s worth noting that coming into play yesterday, he was still chasing at a 38.7 percent rate, which is not great, but I’m not sure how much it matters at this point.

• On the big league club, I think it’s important to note that Pasquantino hasn’t quite completely erased his bad start, but he’s up to .249/.295/.402. That’s not good enough and I still have questions about the approach, but he had a seven-hit weekend in Minnesota and is now hitting .333/.360/.490. Any and all questions about the offense should no longer include Pasquantino’s name until further notice.

Player of the Week

Speaking of Pasquantino, he hit .458/.500/.625 this week, but didn’t earn the player of the week honors. In the interest of shortening this week’s newsletter for the holiday, I’ll just tell you that Bubic is the guy this week. How do you turn your back on 14 innings with four hits allowed and just one run?

The Week Ahead

The Royals, weather-permitting, will start a three-game set against the Reds in Kansas City that will feature the return of someone we got to know quite well over the years. Of course I’m talking about Scott Barlow. Just kidding! There’s a starter for the Reds by the name of Brady Singer you might remember. He’s scheduled to pitch game two. In fact, here are all the pitching matchups:

• Monday: RHP Michael Lorenzen vs. RHP Nick Martinez

• Tuesday: TBD (The Bullpen Day…probably) vs. RHP Brady Singer

• Wednesday: LHP Noah Cameron vs. RHP Hunter Greene

Here’s your full preview:

After the Reds leave town, the Royals have an off day and then it’s a HUGE series against the Tigers that I’ll get into much more as we get closer.

One last programming note: I will be running a mailbag on Friday, so make sure to leave any questions in the comments and please let me know if it’s for the mailbag.

One actual last programming note: I’m taking the day to be with my family, so the comments are all yours. I’ll be back with you probably tomorrow to discuss the latest.