Weekend in Review: Hot Starts in MiLB, A Series Win, the Player of the Week and What's Next

The Royals took a rubber match on their third try to win a series for the first time in 2025. Now they've got a big week ahead.

A lot has been made of the Royals’ inability to win a rubber match. Last year, they played 17 series where they split the first two games and went into the finale with a chance to win a series. They lost 13 of those. That’s not what you want. I have to admit that I honestly have no earthly idea why that happens. There probably isn’t an explanation other than that sometimes when you flip a coin 17 times, it comes up heads 13 of them.

There’s probably more of an explanation about how the Royals were often the less talented team (though generally with two or three of the best three or four players in a series). Maybe the bullpen, especially early, was part of it. After three games, a team knew how to beat them. I don’t know. But the point is that they lost a bunch of games last year that if they’d gone the other way would have been a series win rather than a series loss. It didn’t stop them from making the playoffs, of course, but if they’d gone 9-8 instead of 4-13 with one against Cleveland, they’d have won a division. So it makes an impact.

But this weekend, on their third try of the season, they finally won one. It took them until May 1 to win their first last year. Does that mean they’ll be better this season? I don’t know. I don’t think it necessarily does. I suppose if my thought on the bullpen is accurate, it might matter. The back of the bullpen to start 2025 isn’t even playing the same sport as the back of the 2024 bullpen, it feels like. So we’ll see, but man was it nice to get one. The difference between 3-6 and 4-5 feels like a whole lot more than one game.

A Minor League Offensive Show

Before I get to the big league team, I want to take a trip down to the farm because some of the offensive numbers that are being put up are just silly. While the AAA season finished up its first full week after getting a weekend of action last week, the rest of the full season leagues started up this weekend. So there isn’t a ton of data, but what we have is pretty bonkers. Just look at the overall runs scored this week from the affiliates:

• Omaha: 33 runs in six games

• Northwest Arkansas: 43 runs in three games

• Quad Cities: 23 runs in three games

• Columbia: 22 runs in three games

When the team that scored 5.5 runs per game is pulling up the rear, I’d say things are going well offensively down on the farm. I just wanted to take this space to highlight some of the offensive performances we’ve seen.

Omaha

• Drew Waters is hitting .455/.556/.909 in six games to start the season with two homers, two doubles and a triple. He hit for the cycle the other day. Oh yeah, he’s also walked five times. The downside is that he’s struck out seven times in 27 plate appearances, so it’s not like he’s shown a ton of improvement in that area, but he’s someone on the 40-man who could be someone to turn to if the Royals try to go internal to solve some offensive woes.

• Cam Devanney has been putting on a show, hitting .370/.452/.852 in eight games with four home runs. Like Waters, Devanney is still striking out more than you’d like, but I really like Devanney as a future utility infielder. He has legitimate pop and can play shortstop at a high level.

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Northwest Arkansas

• I suppose I could make you all wait until the end of this section, but let’s start with Jac Caglianone. He went 3 for 5 yesterday with a double and hit a ball way out of the stadium on Saturday night. He’s now hitting .385/.412/.692 in three games. The sample is impossibly small and four strikeouts is a touch high for 17 plate appearances, but he’s doing exactly what he did all spring. I’m not saying this point is after three games, but I hope they are willing to update their timetable if he keeps this up. He should be working in right field like yesterday.

• Spencer Nivens went on an impossibly hot run last season, hitting .333/.405/.745 with 15 homers in his final 36 games after hitting .198/.301/.323 in his first 68 games with just six home runs. Through three games in AA, that’s continued. He’s hitting .385/.471/.615 with a homer and three walks. He also has four strikeouts in 17 plate appearances, but he already plays outfield and it’s not like he’s 19 years old or anything. He’s 23. I could see him getting a chance to move up quickly.

• Peyton Wilson kind of fell off the prospect map last year, but he had a nice spring and is hitting .364/.588/.455 to start the season with five walks and three strikeouts in 17 plate appearances. If he could get back on track this season, that would be nice for the system.

• Jack Pineda is still just 25 and he hit .357 this weekend with a homer, two walks and two strikeouts. He’s another guy who could have a big league impact at some point, though I think he’s more of a utility player if he gets there.

• It’s crazy that Carter Jensen, hitting .467/.529/.467 is sitting with the fifth best OPS in the Naturals lineup, but that’s the kind of first weekend they had. The concern here is seven strikeouts in 17 plate appearances.

• And Gavin Cross is sort of an afterthought, hitting .333/.412/.400 at the top of the lineup. He had a nice start to his season as well.

Quad Cities

• Carson Roccaforte was disappointing offensively last year, hitting .208/.294/.342. His August showed what he was capable of, hitting .280/.357/.550, but that’s just one month out of five (in the minors, they don’t really play enough in September to count it). But he started off this year on fire with two homers on Opening Day and hit .333/.467/1.083 on the opening weekend. Still a lot of strikeouts with five, but that’s a great start. It’s what he should be doing at 23 and repeating the level, but doing what you should be doing isn’t a bad thing.

Columbia

• Derlin Figueroa was acquired in the Ryan Yarbrough deal, and for a stretch looked like he might be the next great hitter the Dodgers gave up for not much of a return. He hit .571/.659/1.029 in 44 plate appearances with the Royals rookie ball team. But last year was a struggle. He’s still just 21, but opened the year with 5 hits in 11 at bats to go with four walks and three strikeouts and two home runs. Just to show how fickle and early it is, all four walks and both her home runs were in one game, yesterday, but it’s still a great start.

None of it is indicative of much, given that most of these guys have played three games max, but it’s still nice to see some of the hitters get off to a good start. Sometimes that makes all the difference in the world. I’m paying very close attention to the bats this year because it seems like great progress has been made with the pitching development and the changes (maybe tweaks) to minor league development on the hitting side haven’t shown up quite as much yet, so maybe that’s the theme of 2025 on the prospect front.

The Games

Friday - Royals 8, Orioles 2: Garcia, Lugo and Lots of Insurance

It’s always nice when a series starts off on the right foot, and this one certainly did, though it was incredibly sloppy early on. Sometimes a struggling offense needs some sloppiness on the other side. In the bottom of the first inning, Bobby Witt Jr. picked up an infield single and with two outs, Salvador Perez got a pitch to drive.

While Heston Kjerstad played that ball incredibly poorly and played it into an RBI double, the weather and the wind kept that ball in the park. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think that ball carries out in, say, June. But still, that’s a nice way to get on the board.

Down 2-1 heading into the bottom of the fourth, the Orioles helped the Royals again, and it was Perez batting again. He hit a ground ball to shortstop that Gunnar Henderson, in his first game back from injury, couldn’t field cleanly and Perez reached on the error. A single by Cavan Biggio and a wild pitch put runners on second and third for Maikel Garcia with one out. As he’s done often at the start of the young season, he came through with a 107 MPH rocket up the middle to score two. And that was a lead the Royals wouldn’t give up.

But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t stressful because the score remained 3-2 until the bottom of the eighth inning. I’ll get to the pitching in a second, but that means that the offense exploded (kind of) in the eighth. It started with that man, Garcia, again doing what he needed to do to get the runner in. This time it was a double down the left field line.

He really struggled last season, as we all know, but he has just looked so good this season to start the year. MJ Melendez was hit by a pitch and then a Kyle Isbel safety squeeze scored another run to make it 5-2. Eventually, after an intentional walk to Witt, Pasquantino got his chance.

That was not pretty. But you know what it was? A base hit that scored three runs. It was the first three-RBI single for a Royals hitter since George Brett did it in 1985, which is wild. That made it 8-2 and allowed the Royals to tell Carlos Estevez to take the rest of the night off. The six-run lead is one that they felt comfortable trusting Chris Stratton with, and their trust was rewarded with a scoreless inning.

The pitching to get to the ninth was impressive. It was a night that was difficult to hit, but we saw the Royals put up eight runs, so it is possible to give up a lot even with the difficulty the weather provided. Seth Lugo was coming off an uneven at best first start of the season. I will say that I would claim he was more fortunate than great, but sometimes that’s okay. I only say that because he allowed a lot of contact with just two strikeouts and two swings and misses all night long. I could look this up, but I don’t feel like it, so I’ll just say that I’d bet that combination doesn’t end up in two runs allowed over six innings very often.

He allowed 12 hard-hit balls in this one and the Orioles had just four hits on them, which is about as good as you can expect in that regard. But still, he threw strikes, which wasn’t really the case in his first start.

Saturday - Orioles 8, Royals 1: The Underbelly of the Bullpen is Exposed

This game, on the whole, was largely forgettable. And if you’re new to the Weekend in Review, sometimes the forgettable ones get a little less digital ink because it’s a long one and there’s only so much attention that can be spent on one newsletter. But I do have a couple thoughts.

The first is that Michael Wacha deserved better than four runs allowed in 5.2 innings. He looked much better than his first start when he allowed just one run in four innings but walked four. It’s funny because I mentioned on social media that he was getting no chase for the second straight start. The Orioles immediately started chasing and he ended up with a 31 percent chase rate, so I guess you’re welcome. His changeup looked better. The four-seamer looked better. Overall, he was just better. So that’s good news moving forward.

Sam Long has been brutal to start the year, but I don’t think he deserves blame on this one as much as the Orioles deserve credit. He gave up three hits. One was on a really nice pitch to Kjerstad who just put it in play softly. One was a ball that hit off Long’s glove that would have been the third out easily and scored the fourth run. And then one was a two-run single that Jackson Holliday couldn’t have rolled up the middle any better. It’s a strong argument for why strikeouts are so important, but also if Long gives up that quality of contact again, there’s a good chance that none of them are hits. Still, he’s been awful and probably has lost the chance to get more big league time this year with some relievers in Omaha pitching well.

The one real highlight was Witt finally getting on the home run board.

It’s hard to overstate how difficult it would be to get a ball out of the yard with the wind, but the way to do it is just to hit a bullet on a line. And that’s what Witt did. So at least we got to see that in this one.

Sunday - Royals 4, Orioles 1: Never a Doubt

There’s a world where the story of this game was the missed opportunities offensively, but Kris Bubic made sure that those were an afterthought. He put together a second straight excellent outing to start his season. Here was his line:

6.2 IP
5 H
1 R
1 ER
8 K
1 BB
16 Whiffs

Remember last start when I wondered why he didn’t throw his changeup more? I don’t have to wonder in this one. He threw 20 of them out of his 99 pitches and it was exquisite. He got 11 swings to go along with two called strikes. Of the 11 swings, eight of them came up empty while one more was fouled off. I actually thought I’d do a search and find the eight whiffs were the top of some leaderboards on changeups the last couple of years, but it turns out, it isn’t that uncommon, though still tied for the 13th-most for the Royals since the start of last year. I guess when you have Cole Ragans and Wacha, changeups are sort of the thing.

Still, he was outstanding. His fastball didn’t generate the whiffs it did against Milwaukee, but it was still effective. And he showed again that even without elite velocity, he’s not afraid to throw strikes.

He hides the ball well, his pitches work well off each other and he’s able to get movement on his fastball that lets it play up at a lower velocity. He didn’t always have that movement. Yes, there will come a time when he pays the price for attacking hitters like this. It’s why pitchers like Max Scherzer have always given up more home runs than you’d expect. But even then, the positive far outweighs the negative. He’s in the zone so much (55 percent in this start) that it allows him to get chase too with some of his pitches with movement.

You can see it on a changeup.

And on a fastball.

And on a sweeper.

If not for Hunter Renfroe doing what Hunter Renfroe does best and butchering a ball in the outfield, he’d have gone seven shutout innings. Like the offensive stalling, it didn’t matter, so we’ll gloss past it for now. What a start to the season for Bubic, who I was excited for in the rotation, but I didn’t expect this at the start. He’ll get Cleveland the next time out in a big start, so it’s his first against a division foe.

Let this sentence serve as a crude transition from Bubic to Witt because I wonder if the game would have had the same level of comfort without the superstar shortstop. You might think I’m talking about him being 3/4 of the way to the cycle by the fourth, but no. In the top of the first inning, there was a runner on first with one out and Jordan Westburg hit a grounder that sure looked like it had eyes up the middle. Witt wasn’t letting it go to center field.

During Witt’s slow start with the bat, I thought his glove didn’t look exceptional either. There were a couple of plays that I felt like he’d have made had he been playing at the top of his abilities. Maybe this play was an announcement that he’s back. Because this saved Bubic from a two on and one out situation. Who knows what would have happened next?

And in the bottom of the first, he tripled on a ball that probably should have been caught, but to be fair, he wasn’t exactly hitting into the best of luck, so that was probably things evening out. Then he picked up a double in the second and signed in the fourth inning. He was one hit away from a cycle four times last year and all four times, he had the home run in the equation. This time, it as the one he needed and he only had one more chance to get it. He struck out looking. He mentioned after the game that the cycle is overrated. There are better days you can have. Yes, Bobby, but we still want that cycle.

After starting in the first seven games and two at bats hitting .226/.314/.290, the home run on Saturday and his 3 for 4 day yesterday has raised his overall line to .297/.366/.514. Okay, that’s more like it. His buddies right behind him haven’t quite picked it up fully yet, but at least Pasquantino was able to get on the board with his first sacrifice fly of the year in the first. I honestly think his swing looks good, but he’s just not getting rewarded for it yet. At some point, that turns to concern, but not after nine games.

The big hit in the first came from Michael Massey, who seems to have had a bit of a knack for that this season. He doubled in the first inning to drive in a run in Bubic’s first start in Milwaukee and he drove in two with a double in this first to give the Royals the same 3-0 lead after one that they had in Bubic’s first start in Milwaukee. They would score again in the second to go up 4-0 (another parallel), but the runs stopped scoring.

Overall, the offense had a day that you can look at in a number of ways. Because yes, the runs stopped scoring. But they didn’t stop hitting. They had at least one runner on in every inning but the bottom of the eighth. In the third and the fourth, they were two-out singles, so runs not scoring there didn’t sting. But in the fifth, Perez doubled to lead off the inning and then Mark Canha hit a line drive to right. With first and third and one out, Massey didn’t come through and then Renfroe hit into an inning-ending double play. In the sixth, Garcia led off with a single but got picked off second. In the seventh, Pasquantino walked with one out and Tyler Tolbert ran for him and stole second and third, but he wasn’t brought home.

So it was missed opportunities and poor situational hitting. They really hadn’t been getting a ton of runners on period, so to get 13 hits and to hit the ball as hard as they did in this one was encouraging. If you’re glass half full, it’s a sign of things to come. If you’re glass half empty, the hits were an aberration and they didn’t take enough advantage of a rare hit parade. As always, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. This offense is better than it has been, but probably not as good as it was for big chunks of last season. Still, nice to get a series win in a way that there was never any concern.

Player of the Week

Okay, now we’ve got some options. Garcia had a big week, hitting .316/.381/.579. Witt turned it on, especially yesterday, hitting .333/.407/.625. Canha went 5 for 11 this week. That was a nice week. But I have a hard time looking at a week where the Royals won three games and not giving this to the starting pitcher in two of them. So Bubic takes home the honors this week. It generally requires a two-start week for a pitcher to win this thing, but he had two outstanding starts going 12.2 innings with 8 hits allowed to go along with 16 strikeouts and three walks. We all expected a Royals lefty to be in the early-season conversation for best in baseball, but the fact that it’s Bubic is at least something of a surprise. I was excited to see him start, but these first two have been even more than I had hoped for from him.

Your Monday Underdog Play

Every Monday, I’ll give you my Underdog entry because, hey, gotta pay some bills, right? I have not been good this year, so maybe I should start going less on bigger ones and bunch some smaller more likely events, but I’m going to plug away at it.

I think Witt has gotten it going so he’s an easy one to pick the positive on. And I think Salvy generally has the Twins number. Add in that Lorenzen will walk a batter or two and a couple of Twins lefties seem to get the Royals, this feels like a pretty decent one to win a few bucks.

Please remember to only play if you’re able, but if you are able, you can sign up by clicking the image above or just clicking here. Use code CROWN and get up to $1,000 on your first deposit. I don’t know. I like playing. It makes the games a touch more interesting to follow along with these. Hopefully you’ll give it a go too!

Up Next

It’s a big week for the Royals if they want to make good on my division-winning prediction. They get four against the Twins and then head to Cleveland to try to avenge the series loss from the Opening Weekend. Let’s look deeper into the Twins series as it’s directly on the horizon and start with the pitching matchups.

• Monday: RHP Simeon Woods Richardson vs. RHP Michael Lorenzen

• Tuesday: RHP Pablo Lopez vs. LHP Cole Ragans

• Wednesday: RHP Joe Ryan vs. RHP Seth Lugo

• Thursday: RHP Bailey Ober vs. RHP Michael Wacha

The Royals start with the back of the Twins rotation, but it turns around to the front, and they get the 1-2-3 starters for the final three games. The Twins can say the same thing from their perspective, I guess with Lorenzen getting the first start before turning it over to the top of the Royals rotation.

Woods Richardson didn’t have a great start in his first time out this year, giving up two runs on five hits in four innings against the White Sox. He threw 82 pitches in that outing, which led to the early pull without a ton of runs allowed. What’s interesting about him is that he saw a pretty big bump in velocity last year, going from below 91 MPH in the previous two seasons (in limited) action to 93.1 MPH last year. In his first start this year, he averaged 91.6 MPH. That’s a pretty big dip. We see it a lot early in the year, but it’s something Twins fans and brass are going to keep monitoring. Otherwise, he throws a slider, a changeup and the occasional curve. All three can be really good. I’ve seen it. But I don’t think any of them are truly great pitches necessarily. It’s kind of a profile where you’d expect command and control to be at the forefront, but he hasn’t been great in that regard in his MLB career.

We know a lot more about the next three. Lopez is a stud. He’s gotten off to a nice start this year, though with way fewer strikeouts than you expect to see from him. Just from looking at the numbers, a lot of that is from the fastball not getting whiffs in his first two starts. It’s a good pitch, though. I imagine it’ll come. Then it’s Ryan, who has allowed a run before against the Royals even though if you told me he hadn’t, I’d look it up because it would be believable. He hasn’t walked a batter this year, but he has hit four, so that’s something that may mean nothing or it may mean nothing. The series wraps with Bailey Ober who had his issues with the Royals last year. He gave up eight runs in 2.2 innings in his first start of the year but bounced back some against Houston, giving up a run on three hits over four innings, but he did need 84 pitches to get through it.

So that’s an important series given that any non-White Sox team can win this division. But then it’s on to Cleveland where the Royals right now are set to face Tanner Bibee, Luis L. Ortiz and then Logan Allen. We know the Royals played the Guardians tough last year, but that first series was borderline ugly and saved by a late rally in the second game of the series. The Royals will counter with Bubic, Lorenzen and Ragans. Nobody is playing exceptionally well yet in the division, so it’s kind of a good time for everyone to catch everyone, but the Royals could really use two of three in this series even though there’s plenty of time to make it up if they don’t do that.