Weekend in Review: A Winning Formula, A Day to Forget and What's Next

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The weekend was a lot of fun for the Royals and for Royals fans until about 1:14 CDT yesterday. I’ll get to that when I get to the games. If you’re new to Inside the Crown since the end of the season, this is what you’ll get on Monday mornings right in your inbox. Since I typically don’t write on the weekend, I’ll go back over the weekend’s games to give a slightly briefer story than normal about what happened and get you ready for the week ahead. While I will eventually start charging a small amount for Inside the Crown, this weekly article will always be free. Let’s dive in.

Winning Formula

It’s easy to watch yesterday’s game and scoff a bit at this, but this Royals team has the looks of one that will likely win some games it shouldn’t and likely won’t lose too many games it shouldn’t win. The starting pitching will be such an important point to watch throughout the year. It obviously has to be better than what we saw on Sunday, but if they even get competent pitching, the defense and the bullpen should be able to save some runs and protect some leads and/or keep games close.

We saw it on Thursday with that great play from Nicky Lopez. We saw it on Saturday with two fantastic plays in the 10th inning. The defense can go get the ball as well as anyone. And, as I mentioned on Friday, it’ll likely only get better whenever Nick Pratto is eventually called up. That guy can play first base as well as just about anybody. So what does that mean for the team? I think they might be the type of team that the runs scored and runs allowed numbers simply won’t tell the whole story. They’re positioned well to win close games and come back, as long as the offense does their part. They haven’t yet, but I would bet on them scoring more runs than last year’s team and last year’s team still averaged 4.24 per game.

There might be some bullpen hiccups here and there because as much as I like this unit, it’s not the 2014/2015 team, but we saw a lot of what they could do on Thursday and Saturday when they combined for 7.1 scoreless innings. Scott Barlow, Josh Staumont, Jake Brentz and Amir Garrett are they key guys. I think you all know I believe Dylan Coleman will be there too eventually. If the starters can get them the ball after five or six, I feel pretty good about what they can do and how they can eek out a couple wins above what will likely be expected.

Leashes

The baseball season is super long. You’ll hear a lot of talk about that over the next couple weeks as things are still very young. I’m going to do the NFL season equivalent thing because it’s fun. After three games, we’re at the equivalent of about 11 minutes to go in the second quarter of the first game. It’s amazing how fast things can change as we saw very clearly from Saturday at about 6:00 to Sunday at the aforementioned 1:14. I hope nobody thinks I’m calling them out negatively here, but no team is making a decision based on the third game, and the Royals, who notoriously have a longer leash, aren’t either.

Sure, Kris Bubic may not be the guy to make the next start when his turn comes up. Maybe it’s Jackson Kowar or Brady Singer or Jon Heasley or Angel Zerpa or whatever, but I told you all last week that the rotation will be fluid for the first few weeks. Bubic threw 29 pitches yesterday. I think it’s more likely that he doesn’t make that next start because he’s used in relief between now and whenever that next start is. My point is that this is my hopefully not condescending reminder that small samples are so finicky that the leash is longer than many will want.

The Games

Saturday - Royals 1, Guardians 0

If you’re a fan of quick games, you loved this one. Brad Keller came out and set the tone with a 13-pitch first. It did include a one-out walk, but he got the double play to wipe it out three pitches later. He threw 13 more pitches in the second, 10 in the third, eight in the fourth, seven in the fifth and then he labored just a touch in the sixth with 18 to finish his outing with 69 pitches in six innings. I found the outing interesting because he was sort of a cross between 2018-2020 Keller and the last nine starts Keller from 2021.

What I mean by that is he struck out five out of the 19 hitters he faced for a 26.3 percent strikeout rate. He has 13 starts in his career with a strikeout rate above 25 percent, including Saturday. Five of those are now in his last 10 starts. But he also has 41 career starts with a ground ball rate of higher than 50 percent, including Saturday’s game. Four of those are in his last 10 starts, but just two of them in games where he had a strikeout rate of better than 25 percent.

I don’t know if this is part of the transformation or if the Guardians lineup is just not very good (obviously yesterday notwithstanding), but he used to be the guy who didn’t get strikeouts and limited hard contact. It’s just one start (and remember that sample size warning), but his average exit velocity, hard-hit rate and all that looked a lot like the 2018-2020 Keller while the strikeouts and whiffs were a pleasant surprise.

His pitch mix at the top was basically what we saw last year. He threw his slider a lot and his four-seam fastball a touch less. What I liked was that he backed off the sinker some and replaced it with a changeup that I thought looked good. He got four swings on it and those led to one whiff and two weakly hit grounders along with a foul ball. It was a good pitch that set things up well and I think was a big part of him getting whiffs on four out of 10 swings on his fastball. It’s just the fourth start of his career that he’s gotten a whiff rate of 40 percent or higher on his four-seamer. If he can throw it like this all year, he’s going to keep getting whiffs.

You know I can’t resist that high fastball. I also can’t resist that mixed with his slider:

If you can live up with the fastball and there with the slider, that’s tough on opposing hitters. Ultimately, the success came because he mixed pitches well and commanded them quite well.

I don’t love some of those changeups up or the sliders that seemed to hang in the middle, but as I’ve said quite a bit, you can make mistakes if you’re mixing pitch and location well. I spent a lot of time on Keller because I think with how the game ended, his fantastic start was sort of forgotten, so I wanted to draw some attention to it again. He’ll have a tougher matchup against the Tigers on Friday night, but that was a heck of a start in an effort to rebound from 2021.

The Royals offense was stuck in neutral as well for most of the game, and it wasn’t until the 10th inning that things came alive. As much as I hate that runner on second, I have to admit that it did create some drama. And I have to give the Royals credit for having some serious stones to go with Collin Snider in the top of the 10th of a tie game with a runner on second and nobody out. It was Snider’s big league debut. I have to admit to not loving adding him to the 40-man roster. Last season was the first time he showed he could get some strikeouts and that was in AA, but after his promotion to AAA, he went back to middling or worse numbers.

What he has always done well is get ground balls. With Owen Miller on second, he got Amed Rosario on a first-pitch groundout to short. It couldn’t have been more perfect. Then the defense stepped up. Ernie Clement hit a ground ball that was destined for center and would give the Guardians a 1-0 lead. But Adalberto Mondesi had other thoughts.

That is one truly fantastic play. He didn’t get the out at first, though it was close, but it absolutely saved the run, which set things up for Oscar Mercado to be the first to lose an RBI because of Bobby Witt Jr.

I mean come on. That is just a ridiculous play. At first I was kind of scoffing at the throw, but the fact that he was able to keep that largely on line is seriously silly. And let’s not ignore the play by Salvador Perez on the back end to grab the ball and turn his body to get the tag down. That is just simply one of the better defensive plays you’ll see when you factor in everything.

Snider got his first career strikeout to end the inning and the Royals were up against Emmanuel Clase, who is very good but also doesn’t strike out quite as many batters as you’d expect with a 100 MPH cutter. He got one by Hunter Dozier on the first pitch, but he tried one at 99.2 MPH on 0-2 and Dozier hit a rocket to right field to set up Mondesi.

That was a 100 MPH even cutter that Mondesi just put an easy swing and blooped to center to win the game. So after saving it, Mondesi won it. He hadn’t looked very good at the plate in his first few plate appearances, but he walked in the time up before that and then got that hit. It’s always good to get a win like that against a tough pitcher and while the bats were largely silent, it was a good win in the end.

Sunday - Guardians 17, Royals 3

Bubic was terrible. Kowar was also bad. Brady Singer, too, was bad. Witt had another double. There’s nothing more to say here. Woof.

Okay fine, you want a little analysis? Pitchers will have games like Bubic did. He’s had big league success and likely doesn’t have quite enough to be a consistent part of the top of a big league rotation, but I feel comfortable with him in the back of an actually good rotation. But when you look at Kowar, I just don’t see how you can project he’ll figure it out. The stuff looks good when you watch it, but there just isn’t enough behind it. It moves horizontally, but it’s below average in vertical movement. And he just doesn’t get enough spin. Among 317 pitchers who threw at least 300 fastballs, Kowar’s spin ranked 230th last year.

It was up a touch over last season, but it’s simply not good enough. I don’t know what the answer is because as much as we like to rip on the Royals for their pitching development, they aren’t dumb. They know that it’s not enough. It’s not allowing his changeup to be as good as it should be. I’m not saying that he can’t get better, but what I saw yesterday for him was pretty much identical to what we saw in 2021 and what we saw in 2021 was historically terrible.

I also will continue to maintain that Singer needs to be better with his pitches, but I still don’t think he handles any kind of controversy. Yesterday was a perfect example. He worked inside on Steven Kwan and hit him. The Guardians bench was not happy with that, I guess thinking Singer was throwing at him because he had four hits. I mentioned this on Twitter. I don’t know if they actually believed he was throwing at Kwan, but I think it’s reasonable to think they know that he doesn’t respond to that well.

And sure enough, he threw one more pitch inside to hitters in that inning. He hit Kwan with his third pitch and then threw 22 more pitches with just one in and off the plate to hitters. Was he rattled? I don’t know, but given the history, that’s going to be my assumption. He needs a changeup, but he also needs to figure out how to let things go.

What’s Next

The Royals have the rare Monday series finale as this series wraps through around the weekend. Carlos Hernandez was the best of all the young starters last year but got hit around a bit in spring training. After their offense came alive yesterday, it’ll be a tougher start for him than I would have guessed after Saturday’s game. He should be working with the same plan of attack Keller had as they can be similar pitchers.

After that, the Royals head to St. Louis for two where we’ll get the chance to see Jordan Hicks as he begins to take his 100 MPH+ fastball to stretch out as a starter. He’ll be opposed by Daniel Lynch. Then it looks like we’ll get what I’d assume is one of the oldest starting pitching matchups we’ve seen with 38-year old Zack Greinke against 40-year old Adam Wainwright. Then the Royals return home for four against Detroit where Miguel Cabrera will be looking for his 3,000th hit. He’s currently 11 hits away. It doesn’t matter if he’s still 11 when the Tigers get to town. I’ll assume he gets all 11 at Kauffman Stadium.