Weekend in Review: Beaten in Beantown

A chance to enter the break in a playoff position was not meant to be for the Royals, but they still had a busy weekend.

The break is a time for reflection, and I’m going to bring something up I mentioned a few weeks ago here. If you had asked Royals fans on March 15 if they’d be happy with the team seven games over .500 and two games out of a playoff spot at the break, it would be an overwhelming yes. Ask the same question on April 15 and it’s still a yes. Ask it on May 15 when they were 26-19, the answer would start to shift. Ask it on June 15 when they were 41-31 and suddenly people would start to get upset. I don’t think any of those reactions are incorrect, but it’s just interesting how time and results can change the calculus.

So after a weekend series where the Royals had a chance to get to the break in a playoff spot, finishing the weekend two games out feels like a disappointment. In the big picture, it absolutely isn’t. In the smaller picture, it kind of is. I had said after the series against the Dodgers that I’d reached the point where I’ll be disappointed if they don’t make the playoffs. They’ve gone 11-12 since then. Their opponent this weekend, the Red Sox, have been on quite a run. The Astros are sneaking up to the point that the Royals might have multiple teams to leapfrog to get back to a playoff spot soon enough. I may find myself disappointed.

But the Royals have a chance to change the course a little bit as the second half begins. They’ll be home for the White Sox, the Diamondbacks and the Cubs. The Diamondbacks seem to be getting on track, but the White Sox are bad and the Cubs are undecided. Then they finish their season series with the White Sox and head to Detroit before they have a homestand that matches their recent road trip but in reverse as they’ll face the Red Sox and Cardinals. That’s 21 games that will define the rest of the season. Go 5-1 against the White Sox and even 7-8 against the rest and they’re 10 games over .500 before they head to Minnesota. Don’t handle their business and the last two months will be spent with dreams fading. It’s a big stretch of baseball.

Two Picks Down, 18 To Go

The Royals selected Jac Caglianone with the sixth pick in the first round last night and then took David Shields with the 41st pick. If you fell asleep over the weekend and wondered what happened to the 39th pick in the draft that once belonged to the Royals, they traded it for Hunter Harvey, and I wrote about it for paid subscribers yesterday.

In Caglianone, the Royals drafted an absolute beast. I wrote him up in last week’s draft preview as a possibility at six.

The Royals 2024 MLB Draft Preview

I did not, however, actually believe he would be there for the taking with the pick. The draft fell a bit differently than most of the mocks would have led us to believe it would, which happens every single year. The belief was that the Royals were undecided between Hagen Smith and Bryce Rainer. Smith was picked by the White Sox with the fifth selection after the first four picks were Travis Bazzana, Chase Burns, Charlie Condon and Nick Kurtz.

So Caglianone (pronounced Cag-lee-own) was there, and the Royals took him. What’s great about him is that he has insane power. He hit 33 home runs in 2023 and then 35 more in 2024. But here’s where there’s reason to be excited, at least statistically. In 2023, he walked 17 times and struck out 58 times. In 2024, he walked 58 times and struck out just 26 times. Now, 31 of his 58 walks were intentional, but that still means he improved in that regard. The thing that has me concerned, in spite of the single-digit strikeout rate, is that he is somewhat of a free swinger.

Still, he’s a monster physically at 6’5” and 250 lbs. and has, in my opinion, the best power of anyone in the country. And he did chase less in 2024 than he did in 2023, so he seems to be getting there in that regard. If all goes well, the comps you probably heard last night to Aaron Judge and Bryce Harper are within reach. If it doesn’t go well, he’s going to still hit bombs. I don’t think Joey Gallo is exactly the right comp there. Maybe something like a pre-total decline but post-dominant run Chris Davis. I think Caglianone is a big leaguer as a hitter, but the range of outcomes once there is pretty high.

What’s really interesting is that he’s also a pitcher and the Royals appear set to let him pitch. Now, they were also set to let Austin Charles pitch and he hasn’t thrown a pitch professionally, so we’ll see. Caglianone was considered probably a late-second or early-third-round talent on the mound, so he’s not a slouch. But he’s likely a reliever if he’s a pitcher and, quite frankly, I wouldn’t let that stall his development because he could be a big league bat as soon as next summer. I’d guess it’ll take a bit longer than that, but it’s possible he just soars through the system. It’s an exciting pick.

In Shields, they took a player who I mentioned last week, which is a nice surprise given that the Royals like to do some weird things in the draft. Though I guess with it being the first for Brian Bridges, it’s hard to know anything with any certainty. I really like Shields because he has a nice and easy delivery and should be able to add some velocity to a fastball that already isn’t too bad. He’s also just 17 years old, which means there’s more clay to mold with him.

He can command his fastball and he gets good ride on it, which is a nice trait. He already has a good slider, which might be more of a sweeper, I guess. And he has a changeup that I mentioned last week has a chance to be a plus pitch. I talked to a scout friend of mine about him after the pick and he liked the chances for Shields to be a relatively quick mover in terms of high school pitchers because he has a great feel for pitching at a very young age. That doesn’t mean you can expect him to be big league ready in 2025 or anything, but being able to understand pitching is huge for a pitcher that young.

Today, they’ll draft the third through the 10th rounds and the Royals will pick second in each of them. There are some interesting names still available. Dakota Jordan is an outfielder from Mississippi State who can fly, but he doesn’t make consistent contact. He’d be interesting. Mike Sirota was once thought to be a top-10 pick and he’s still available after a down year at Northeastern. Joey Oakie was a high school arm I liked at 41 (or 39) before the draft started and he is still there for the taking as well. It’s hard to predict where things fall with so many players selected, but I really like the start of the draft for the Royals and hope they can keep it going today.

The Games

Friday - Royals 6, Red Sox 1: A Great Start

The weekend started so promising. Cole Ragans was outstanding and the offense put up six runs (or more) for the fourth straight time after looking like a mess for the first two games of their series against Colorado. Okay, it was longer than that, but we sure thought they’d get right in Colorado. I’m not here to relitigate that, though!

Ragans had his third start out of his last four where he registered at least 22 whiffs. He’s been a machine lately. In this one, he got the Red Sox to swing and miss 23 times with 10 of them coming on his changeup out of 17 total swings. He got four whiffs on his fastball, five more on his slider, two on his cutter and two on his curve. The only point of concern, I’d say, is that his fastball was only averaging 93.9 MPH and he topped out at 96.8 MPH. I’ve mentioned his velocity a bit this year as it’s often been down, but I do wonder some if that’s by design.

Something interesting that may be a blip or it may be something in the second half is that his slider and curve both had higher spin rates than normal and not by just a little. They were each up by 100 or more rpms. Both subsequently had a bit more vertical break than normal. Whatever he was doing, the Red Sox couldn’t lay off as they chased on 42 percent of pitches outside the zone, which led to all those whiffs and the weak contact with an average exit velocity of 84.0 MPH.

The offense just sort of made things happen. In the first, they loaded the bases with nobody out and scored on a Salvador Perez sacrifice fly. But they didn’t score again. It felt like a big missed chance to put up more runs until they were able to put up a pretty big inning in the second. MJ Melendez reached on an error, Maikel Garcia bunted him to third and Kyle Isbel walked to set things up. What followed was an Adam Frazier single to score a run. Then Bobby Witt Jr. was hit by a pitch. And Pasquantino hit one of his patented sacrifice flies for another run. Then Perez singled to score Frazier, but Witt was thrown out at home by roughly four miles.

They’d go scoreless in the third, but Witt made up for getting thrown out at the plate in the fourth.

That is a big boy home run, and so cool that a Royals employee caught it. The Royals were quiet for another few innings until Melendez remembered how much he loves hitting against the Red Sox.

That made it 6-1 and the Royals bullpen held it, even after Chris Stratton made it semi-interesting in the eighth by allowing an infield single and a walk before he struck out three in a row to end the frame.

Saturday - Red Sox 5, Royals 0: Thud

I’m going to be honest. There just isn’t much to say about this game. Seth Lugo didn’t have it. His command was probably the worst it’s been all season. He got hit hard and we don’t see that often. He ended up giving up five runs on 10 hits in five innings. It was only the fourth time all year he gave up more than three runs. It was the first time he allowed double-digit hits. He just didn’t have it, and it’s a real bummer because there’s a decent chance it cost him the chance to start the All Star Game.

The other bummer is that the Royals offense was completely stymied by Kutter Crawford. To be fair, Crawford is a good pitcher who is on a good run right now, but the offense just couldn’t do anything with anything he threw. He allowed just four hard-hit balls. Three of them were outs off the bat off Hunter Renfroe and the other was a double by Garrett Hampson. He wasn’t getting strikeouts, but he wasn’t exactly in trouble at any point. It was just a bad game overall, and sometimes those happen. You just don’t expect it with Lugo pitching.

Sunday - Red Sox 5, Royals 4: Bad Singer Appeared

Like Lugo, Singer’s command was kind of a mess. If you remember back to his tough start against the Guardians after he came back from being sick, he had a lot of the same problems. He just couldn’t get the ball to the glove side. You can see the pitch locations.

His slider was sometimes okay, but everything else was a pretty big mess for him.He only got one four-seam fastball and one sinker to the glove side, which is problem, especially against a lineup filled with seven lefties. He couldn’t get out of the third and he gave up four runs on eight hits with two home runs allowed to the 16 batters he faced. That’s just not what you want to see. I found it interesting that he threw more four-seamers than sinkers for the first time in his career. Was that because he couldn’t get to the inner part against lefties with the sinker? Or is he that comfortable with the four-seamer? It’s hard to say, but whatever it was, it did not work.

Singer is still, overall, having a very good year, but if he’s going to struggle with his command like this, it could go south quickly. He turned it around in a big way after that Cleveland start, so I’m not going to say he’s just done, but this is the sort of outing that has me concerned he’s a ticking time bomb. His velocity isn’t good enough to miss spots like that and the stuff certainly isn’t. I would guess he’s starting the Sunday game after the break, so he’ll have a week off and hopefully that should help him get back to what he was doing the last few starts.

Offensively, it was a grind, but not in the same tough way we’ve seen over the last month or so. An unlikely source led off the game with a home run.

Boy it’s hard to lose when Frazier leads off the game with a dinger. They got their second run down 4-2, but it came at a price. Melendez came up with runners on first and third and one out and hit a grounder to second. The Red Sox tried to turn the double play, but Melendez beat the throw. The problem is that he sprained his ankle as he hit the bag. He’s been hitting so much better that the Royals can’t afford to lose him. Four days off are coming at a good time there, though.

Watching the game at home with the score 4-2 in the sixth, I told my wife that the only way they win this game is if they score in that innings. Two pitches later, Perez did this.

I followed that up by telling her that they need to score eight because I thought I had magical powers, but I did not.

It was 5-3 in the ninth when Kenley Jansen was in for his second inning of work, and the Royals were getting to him after he was dominant in the eighth against Witt, Pasquantino and Perez. Michael Massey hit a rocket for a groundout on a really nice play by David Hamilton that would prove big. Renfroe followed with a single and Hampson walked. Freddy Fermin got a big hit, as he does, to score Dairon Blanco, who was pinch running, but Hampson made just a terrible base running error and was thrown out at third for the second out. Nick Loftin, as has been the case most of the time, couldn’t get the job done and the Royals fell 5-4.

What a bummer of a way to end a really fun pre-break schedule for the Royals.

Player of the Week

With multiple off days, the Royals had a short week before their next short week. They only played five games with their doubleheader on Wednesday and the three games over the weekend. So the numbers can really take a swing with just one of the games being a struggle. But even with only five games played, their big catcher, Perez, was a step above the rest, in my opinion. Getting ready for his ninth All Star Game, he wrapped up a big week yesterday with a 2 for 4 day that included the home run you saw above. Overall, he hit .389/.350/.667 with three home runs. That’s a nice bounceback for him before he gets some time off, even with the appearance in the game on Tuesday, because he’d been struggling quite a bit prior to this stretch.

The Week Ahead

There isn’t much with the break starting today. Witt will be featured in the Home Run Derby tonight. And I think that he has a legitimate shot to perform well in the event. He has insane power, as we all know, but in an event that requires the ability to sustain your swing, his athleticism should play well. Anything can happen, but Witt performed well in a derby in high school, so he’s at least got some experience in that sort of event. After the break, the Royals start at home against the White Sox, who continue to stink out loud. You have to assume the Royals will start their second half (I hate that term given that the first game after the break is game 98, but it’s easier) with some combination of Cole Ragans, Seth Lugo and Brady Singer and you assume the White Sox will counter with Garrett Crochet, Erick Fedde and, well, someone.