Weekend in Review: Royals Keep Rolling, Weekend Takeaways and More

The weekend started off on a sour note, but the Royals decided to start hitting homers and things turned right around.

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It’s not often that you start a weekend getting shut out by a pitcher with an ERA over 7.00 and end it talking about a series win, but here we are. For the second straight week and third Monday of the year, we’re talking about the Royals winning more than they lost over a weekend. That is not a bad thing at all, friends. Now, how they did it this weekend is a little bit surprising with all the home runs, but, if anything, it showed that this team does actually have multiple ways to win a game and isn’t forced to rely solely on the pitching staff to keep it close enough for the offense to scratch across a run or two late.

Something I want to bring up that I’ve actually said quite a bit in the past is that the leadership of this team deserves a fair amount of praise. I first mentioned it during the brutal 2023 season with regard to how they played at the end of the year when they easily could have abandoned that season. We saw it throughout the year last year as they took the jump into becoming a playoff team. I think we’ve seen it again this season. This is a team that was 8-14 after a six-game losing streak. They were facing Tarik Skubal. They’ve gone 11-2 since then. They had a 2-8 road trip the last time they left Kansas City. They just finished a 5-1 trip. Overcoming these things is a hallmark of a team with good leadership, both on the bench and on the field.

I know that some disagree with Matt Quatraro’s moves and the fact that he likes to get everyone playing time (though that complaint is insanely overstated). But the biggest role of a big league manager in modern times is to weather storms and actually manage the people. The bottom line is winning, so if the Royals weren’t doing it, it wouldn’t matter how great of a people manager he is, but the truth is that they went 86-76 last year and are now on pace to go 88-74 after a really difficult start to the season. The leadership of this team deserves a great deal of credit.

Historically, I’ve sort of built a pattern. I like to write a short intro paragraph or two for this weekly newsletter. Then I get into one item I want to discuss a bit more in depth and then I hit the games. I think I need to change that up, so it’ll be a bit unfamiliar but we’ll see how we like it. For now, at least, I’m going to get right into the games and then I’ll write about some takeaways that might inform the bigger picture after the games. Then I’ll get into my player of the week, week ahead and anything else. We’ll see how it goes.

The Games

Friday - Orioles 3, Royals 0: Shut Down By a Pitcher Who Hadn’t Shut Anyone Down

It’s a tale that is seemingly as old as time for the Royals. Put a struggling pitcher in front of them and they will cure whatever ails them. Even when they’re hitting, it sure seems like they have a way to fix a pitcher struggling. Sure, enough, here comes Dean Kremer with a 7.04 ERA and he absolutely shuts them down. Now, I think it’s only fair to remind everyone that Kremer had a 3.85 ERA over the last three seasons, spanning 427.2 innings, so he probably didn’t forget how to pitch, but his longest outing of the season came in the start directly before this when he went 5.2 innings. He also did that while giving up five runs.

In this one, he gave up no runs on three hits over seven innings. He did only strike out two, so the Royals weren’t exactly getting fooled by him and there were some balls hit hard that didn’t find grass. They actually had seven balls hit against him at 100 MPH or harder and only three were hits. They had 12 hard-hit balls and were 3 for 12 on those. The league is hitting .465 on hard-hit balls, so I think it’s fair to say there was some bad luck, but also, for an offense that had consistently struggled all year up to that point, the benefit of the doubt doesn’t really exist.

On the Royals side, I thought Michael Wacha looked sharp. He was through six shutout innings on just 62 pitches. He didn’t really find himself in any real trouble. He had two on and one out in the second, but got a double play to end that inning. He had a runner on second with two outs in the fifth, but struck out the next batter. The lineup had turned over a third time and the middle of the order was up, but I have a really tough time arguing with leaving Wacha in there. More than anything, he simply made bad pitches.

One area I think all managers get a bad draw is when people are able to complain about bullpen moves after the fact. First of all, I’m not sure there’s a manager in the game taking Wacha out in that spot regardless of anything else with 62 pitches through six. But the other thing I don’t believe people take into consideration is the next 5-10 days. The Royals, at that point, where playing their fourth game in a stretch of 16 without an off day. Knowing that the best bullpens are rested bullpens, being able to rely on the guy you gave $50 million to in the offseason to throw a seventh inning is not anything to complain about.

It didn’t work. The offense never got going. And that was that.

Saturday - Royals 4, Orioles 0: Not Even Rain Can Stop Kris Bubic

The game itself was pretty entertaining, but even a couple of days later, I still can’t get over the fact that they started this game and then it went into a delay for 57 minutes before the second inning started. The Royals got a lot of flack for the way they handled a rain delay without rain on the last homestand, but this was ridiculous. Luckily for both teams, the starting pitchers were able to come back out because that could have been a huge blow to both sides, but, again, noting the off days, it could have been really bad for the Royals.

Bubic did come back out and he was, once again, very good. He made it through five on 72 pitches and ended up getting pulled after five. At first, I didn’t understand it. Obviously, I mentioned why I had no problem with it on Friday night with them leaving Wacha in, so why would they not leave Bubic in. Of course, I wasn’t thinking. They’re different pitchers in different spots in their career. Bubic is back in the rotation for the first time since the start of 2023. He’s in his first full season back from major elbow surgery. Quatraro discussed this a bit on his weekly MLB Network Radio spot, but mentioned they want to be careful with him without babying him and this felt like a good opportunity to get him off the mound with relatively low stress.

I didn’t hear the whole interview, but I’d wager that if he got through five on 72 pitches without having had to sit and get warmed up again after nearly an hour delay that he’d have been back out there for the sixth. The up and down can be as stressful as the actual number of pitches and to have the mechanism cool down and then warm back up can be pretty stressful on an arm. So I actually like the thought in hindsight. It didn’t hurt that the Royals had a 2-0 lead at that point either.

I also didn’t think Bubic was actually “on” in this one. He only had five whiffs. His fastball wasn’t hit hard, but the Orioles didn’t especially seem to be fooled by it. His changeup was good, but not great. His sweeper got a ton of chase, but not a ton of whiff. I don’t know. It was obviously a good outing. Any time you throw five shutout innings with four hits allowed and just one walk, you did well. He just wasn’t as good as we’ve seen in the past.

The offense was kind of like Bubic - effective, but not especially impressive. But they did break out the long ball for really the first time all year. A Maikel Garcia single made it 1-0 in the fourth, but then the bats started to hit the ball over the wall.

First it was one of the unlikeliest sources.

Biggio hit 16 home runs for the Blue Jays in 2019 and hasn’t hit more than nine in a season since. Though he likely would have exceeded that in 2020, but only played 59 games in the short season. Still, he is not a power hitter and has not shown any extra base power with the Royals yet. In fact, this was his first extra base hit of the season. Good timing!

Then in the eighth, the Orioles brought out Seranthony Dominguez who had taken the mound 11 times and pitched 10 innings without allowing a home run. Another unlikely source ended that.

Kyle Isbel has had a weird season. He’s walked just once. He has 20 hits in 83 at bats, so he isn’t really producing. But he seems to almost always come up big. But that isn’t even especially accurate. He’s hitting just .267 with all singles with runners in scoring positions (some bunts are in there and he’s great at that). Late and close, he’s hitting .083/.083/.083, though I’m not sure how much I love this since this was a two-run game in the eighth and he hit a home run and that’s not in there. He is hitting .417 with a .667 SLG when the Royals are ahead, so there’s that.

Anyway, Dominguez got the next two batters, but he gave up another home run on the first pitch to a much more likely candidate.

That’s a rocket home run from Pasquantino, who seems to have found his stroke for the Royals. It gave them a four-run lead and likely would have given Lucas Erceg a day off, but he was already warmed up from when it was 2-0 to start the inning, so he came in anyway and had maybe his best inning of the year. He averaged 98.8 MPH with his fastball and was dotting corners. His last pitch of the night was maybe my favorite pitch of the year I’ve seen from anyone.

That is 98.7 MPH right on the black. Gorgeous. Then John Schreiber handled the ninth and he threw his best inning of the year with some serious velocity, getting up over 96 MPH in this one. If he can throw that hard with that movement, the fact that he’s the fourth or fifth best reliever when everyone is healthy is an embarrassment of riches for the Royals.

Sunday - Royals 11, Orioles 6: Home Run Derby

If you were taking bets on games that will be on the Christmas Eve marathon, this one would be off the board because it’s so obvious. You can see all seven home runs above. There isn’t honestly a whole lot to talk about other than to marvel in the glory of it all. It was so good to see both Jonathan India and Michael Massey get off the schneid and nice to see Witt break his mini-slump that started Friday night when his hitting streak was broken.

I’m going to discuss some more about Garcia in a minute, but man is he locked in. The first home run was a great swing, but the second one really shows that he has the ability to identify a pitch and just rip it. Would I have liked more than one of these franchise-record seven home runs to be more than a solo shot? Of course! Am I going to complain when they produced eight runs in a game via home runs? Not a chance in hell!

It was one of the rare days that the Royals offense needed to be the hero because Michael Lorenzen really struggled in this one. I didn’t necessarily find him to be bad or anything. He just wasn’t good and when he missed, the Orioles hitters simply didn’t. Sometimes it’s as simple as that. Luckily the bats made up for it. What’s crazy is the Royals aren’t even last in the league in home runs anymore. They went from 15 in 33 games to 25 in 35 games, which is pretty incredible to increase your season home run total by 66.7 percent more than a month into the season.

I know the Orioles pitching staff is kind of a general disaster, but I was very encouraged by the way the Royals handled some relievers. Bryan Baker came in and had allowed one home run in 13 innings. He gave up two. Yennier Cano hadn’t even allowed an earned run this year in 10.2 innings and he gave up the back-to-back bombs by Witt and Pasquantino. Matt Bowman had allowed just one home run in 14.2 innings and gave up one. Charlie Morton giving up a home run isn’t worthy of praise and neither was Kyle Gibson as the starter, but the rest were pretty darn impressive.

I appreciated too that they weren’t jumping on a first pitch (though I like when they do that and drive the ball). Garcia hit the third pitch for both of his home runs. India hit the seventh. Witt did hit the first one. Paquantino hit the sixth, Maile the fifth and Massey the third. They hit them off a cutter, two sliders, two sinkers, a changeup and a four-seamer. They were equal opportunity. I have to say that this was pretty fun to watch and if they had lost, I’d probably eventually appreciate how fun this game was even though I’d be seething about it now.

Is the Offense…Back?

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a bit, but the last two games (really last 11 innings) have gotten me thinking about it even more. The Royals hadn’t given us a lot of signs that they were about to break out. But what if they maybe have? I’ve written a lot about them getting runners on base but not getting them in, but I think I’ve been a little slow to either notice or want to notice some trends that finally provided results with their home run barrage over the last couple of days.

Even with the runs not flowing freely, they’ve been much better during the 13 games since their six-game losing streak, averaging 4.4 runs per game (11 in one game and eight in another does help). They’ve hit .283/.325/.445. It’s incredibly skewed due to yesterday, but they’ve hit 14 home runs in those games and only have a 16.4 percent strikeout rate. They’re hitting the ball hard again with the average exit velocity as a team at 89.3 MPH and a hard-hit rate at 39.8 percent. Among teams in this time period, the exit velocity ranks 11th and the hard-hit rate is 17th, so it’s not great, but it’s so much better than what we’ve seen.

In this stretch, as a team, their xBA is third, their xSLG is ninth and their xwOBA is 11th. It’s easy to say that it’s easy to look at this the day after they club seven home runs, but a 13-game stretch is a tiny sample but still big enough to allow for an outlier to not entirely ruin them. Before yesterday, they were third in xBA and 15th in xwOBA. The xSLG did bump up quite a bit, but there’s some regression to the mean that happened yesterday because the reality is that this is not a Royals team without power.

They hit 170 home runs last year. Only two guys hit 20 or more (Perez and Witt), but Pasquantino had 19, Massey had 14, MJ Melendez had 17 and Hunter Renfroe had 15. I just find it very hard to believe that all of those guys completely lost their ability to hit the ball over the wall (though maybe Renfroe did and Melendez is now working on things in Omaha). But 170 home runs is not nothing. They’re not the most powerful team in the world, but it’s just been bizarre about the inability to hit the ball hard and hit the ball over the wall.

Let’s cut off the Rockies series and just look since the start of the Astros series. Massey is hitting the ball very hard with a .327 xBA and .472 xSLG to go with a 56 percent hard-hit rate. He had a nice weekend in Baltimore, going 4 for 13 with his first home run, but he’s just 5 for 22 with a double and that home run in the stretch where the metrics have been good. Pasquantino has been showing signs or a bit now with a 92.4 MPH average exit velocity and 50 percent hard-hit rate in the last nine games. His xBA of .282 and xSLG of .636. Even with four home runs in this stretch, he’s still hitting just .237 with a .605 SLG. There’s more in there and the contact he’s making (enough…a lot) indicates he’s doing much better.

The point here is not to say that the offense is fine. They still need a bat (or two). We still need to be keeping an eye on Massey and not just declaring him fixed. The point is that the lack of offense has never made any sense to me. I didn’t think they’d be a juggernaut and I thought they’d come back to the pack some with regard to hitting with runners in scoring position, but I didn’t expect this. Maybe I should have given how bad they were in September when Pasquantino didn’t play. The offense really does seem to run through him even though Witt is obviously the best player and best hitter on the team.

For now, it looks like they’ve bought themselves a little time. That time can go toward developing players to come up and take over for guys who are underperforming. That time can go toward teams realizing they’re ready to sell like the Angels, maybe the Orioles, maybe the Rangers and maybe the Cardinals. And that time can go to seeing if they can get some other hitters going. It may all fall apart this week. The offense still feels like it’s hanging by a thread, but it doesn’t feel quite as perilous as it did two weeks ago, and that’s a positive.

Player of the Week

It’s kind of a weird week here. The Royals went 5-1 and had a couple of games with legitimate offensive outbursts. But there aren’t a ton of great player of the week candidates. Witt, for example, obviously had the long hitting streak, but two hitless games in a six-game week will really tank your numbers. Salvador Perez did have a good week, hitting .375/.375/.500, but four singles and two doubles isn’t getting the job done. Plus he missed two games with the hip issue. Freddy Fermin deserves a special note because he hit .467/.500/.533. It was a great week and would be enough to win in most weeks, but this isn’t most weeks because Maikel Garcia went off.

He hit .500/.538/.833 with two doubles, two home runs and four stolen bases for the week. He’s not going to get past Aaron Judge or Riley Greene or probably even Cal Raleigh for AL Player of the Week, but it was a pretty great week for him with a big ol’ exclamation point yesterday. For the year, he’s now hitting .319/.379/.496 with a 9.1 percent walk rate and 14.4 percent strikeout rate. His wRC+ is 147. He’s second in the AL in fWAR among third baseman, behind only Alex Bregman. He still has to keep it up, of course, but he’s building a very real case to head to the All Star Game. Who would have predicted that a year ago?

Up Next

The Royals will spend the week at home, looking at some Sox. First up, it’s those of the white variety. The team from the south side of Chicago has been…kind of better than last year, but also not really a lot better. They’ve scored some runs in a few games, which you couldn’t say too much for them last season at least. But they’re still not what you’d call a good baseball team. Honestly, calling them bad undersells what they have. They do, however, have a farm system that is quality after trading off some valuable pieces and have started adding some of those prospects to their big league roster already, so their days as a laughingstock may be nearing their completion.

The pitching matchups for the four games are:

• Monday: RHP Shane Smith vs. LHP Cole Ragans

• Tuesday: RHP Sean Burke vs. RHP Seth Lugo

• Wednesday: RHP Jonathan Cannon vs. RHP Michael Wacha

• Thursday: RHP Davis Martin vs. LHP Kris Bubic

I don’t have the video preview fully complete yet, but make sure you check out the Inside the Crown YouTube channel for it when it drops.

It does seem like Smith is a find for them from the Rule 5 draft, which, good for them, but I hate when division opponents find talent in places like that. But he’s been so good that he’s moved beyond interesting. As for the rest, well, it’s good that they found Smith. Actually that’s being a bit unfair. Burke, Cannon and Martin have all had their moments and there’s some very real evidence that things are at least on the way up for the White Sox. They’re not there yet, but I think they’re going to be trouble before too long.

I don’t want to actually put together a full Underdog play until we see the lineups, but here are some of the numbers I really like for the game tonight:

• Cole Ragans higher than 6.5 strikeouts

• Shane Smith lower than 5.5 hits allowed

• Miguel Vargas higher than 0.5 total bases

• Edgar Quero higher than 0.5 total bases

Remember, you can sign up for Underdog by clicking here and using code CROWN to get up to $1,000 in bonus money on your first deposit.

After the White Sox leave town, the Red Sox take their place. They had a big winter, acquiring Garrett Crochet from the White Sox and signing Alex Bregman, but it just hasn’t clicked yet for them overall. They’ve certainly had their moments and you can make a pretty strong argument they’re the best offense the Royals will have faced this season, but they’re just not getting enough out of their pitching staff. Some of it is injury-based and it’s not for lack of talent, so they could get on track at any time, but this series has a chance to be pretty competitive because it’s strength against strength and weakness against weakness.