Holiday Weekend in Review: An Almost Sweep, Player of the Week and the Week to Come

An abridged version of the Weekend in Review looks at the Royals winning streak ending at eight, but a big week to come.

As we take today to honor those gave their lives while serving, I still wanted to put out the Weekend in Review, but it’s going to be a slightly shorter version than usual. I debated waiting until Tuesday or just skipping this week entirely, but this is the free article of the week, so I thought it was best to definitely still write it and adding another game would make tomorrow’s version way too long. Plus, they start a big series today, which I’ll get to and I wanted to give it the stand-alone attention it deserves.

Up until the seventh inning yesterday, it sure looked like I was going to be writing about another sweep, but, alas, all good things must come to an end, so it was just another winning weekend, not the exclamation point on a nine-game winning streak. But even with that loss, the Royals are now six games into a 26-game stretch that I was hoping to see them go 13-13 during and they’re 5-1. Now, they haven’t faced the tough competition yet, so we’ll see how that goes, but that’s a heck of a start.

I do want to point out one thing before I just get to the games. There’s been a lot made about the Royals record against teams .500 or better. I think, at this point in the season, it’s a silly conversation. But I wanted to address something that was driving me nuts. Let’s take a look at four teams - Tampa Bay, Toronto, Detroit and Houston. The Royals are 2-1, 5-2, 4-2 and 3-0 respectively against them. With their current 34-20 record, the Royals are 6-9 against teams .500 or better.

And I’ve seen a lot of people dinging them for only playing 15 of 54 games against “good” teams. But if their records were reversed against those four teams, all four would be over .500. Suddenly, their 15 games become 34 games and they’re 11-23, but they’re 25-29 overall. They’re the reason those teams are under .500! Okay, it can be any series of games, but the point is that maybe they’re facing a bunch of a sub-.500 teams because they’re beating them. I don’t think it matters, but I just wanted to point that out. Let’s get to the games.

The Weekend Series

Friday - Royals 8, Rays 1: A Drubbing

The Royals trailed for the first time in more than a week after Seth Lugo gave up a first inning run, but that must have made him angry or something because he didn’t give up anything else the rest of the way even though he didn’t seem to really have his best stuff. Without his best stuff, all he did was go seven innings with one run on four hits allowed to lower his ERA to 1.74 on the year and earn his eighth win. Pitcher wins are what they are, but I found this one particularly interesting because Brady Singer led the 2023 Royals with the same eight wins that Lugo picked up before the one-third mark.

It was an eight-pitch day for Lugo, who threw everything but the cutter at least six times. He only threw the cutter three times and it didn’t get a single result other than a ball, so maybe that’s why he wasn’t feeling it. But his slurve continued to supplant his excellent curve as maybe his go-to swing and miss pitch. It was good with four whiffs on nine swings, though the Rays did put four in play and hit them decently well when they did.

I thought what was so impressive was just how he was limiting any kind of damaging contact. Even in that first inning when he gave up a run, he gave up two soft singles and would have been out of the inning if the ground ball he got wasn’t hit so softly. Exit velocities aren’t everything, but he only gave up five batted balls with an expected average of .500 or better. He’s kind of a wizard.

The offense struggled against Shawn Armstrong, the opener, but as soon as he left for Tyler Alexander, they got it going. They had two on in the third (Alexander’s first inning), but didn’t score. In the fourth, though, they broke through. They had the bases loaded and Nelson Velazquez worked a walk and Hunter Renfroe hit into a fielder’s choice to score a run. The long three-inning nightmare of innings trailing was finally over. In the fifth, they got the big hit. Maikel Garcia singled and Salvador Perez was hit by a pitch with two outs, which brought Michael Massey to the plate.

This home run became a bit of a sad exclamation point when Massey left the game with lower back tightness that ended up putting him back on the IL. He has just been so good for them and has given them their number five hitter they’ve needed behind Salvador Perez. Hopefully his stay is limited to the 10 days, but we’ll see.

The Royals scored in the sixth with a Renfroe double and Garrett Hampson single to make it 6-1 and then Bobby Witt Jr. got one he liked in the seventh.

I know I’ve written a lot about Witt and pulling the ball, which he’s started to do, but he has so much power that he is able to just 88 on the outer third and crush it to dead center like that. When I say the sky is the limit for him, I’m not making that up. A Freddy Fermin double would give their Royals their eighth run. They would have tacked on more in the eighth inning, but with the bases loaded, Vinnie Pasquantino hit a rocket right to Brandon Lowe and he was able to double Hampson off to end the inning. Just bad luck there.

Saturday - Royals 7, Rays 4: Sloppy Play, But Still a Win

I thought this one was not as impressive, but it ended up a win. The Royals just made some mistakes that have become quite uncharacteristic for them in 2024. Brady Singer got the start and the end results were fine. He went five innings, gave up two runs (one earned) and lowered his ERA to 2.63. He was the first starting pitcher to not get the win during the winning streak, but that’s fine because a win was gotten anyway. But he just continued to be frustrating to watch, though he did go to his four-seam fastball more and I thought it was actually effective.

No, the results weren’t there on it, but I do think it helped set up his sinker and slider. The problem is he wasn’t landing the slider in the zone enough. He threw 40 of them and only 28 percent of them were actually in the strike zone. That’s not wildly off from the rest of his season, but prior to Saturday, it was 38 percent. I’m fine with the pitch not being a strike, but he has to land it occasionally. It did help him with called strikes on the sinker for the slider to not be in the zone, but he was just a little off with it. Good on him for being able to get through five without one of his two actually usable pitches. I’m not sure he’d have done that in the past. But the slider needs to be better.

This one was a lot more of a slog for the offense than we’ve seen recently, which was bound to happen eventually. They were able to open the scoring early as Velazquez continued hitting and took an Aaron Civale sinker that was up and did what he was doing a lot last season.

I’ll mention him below, but he’s now hitting .286/.364/.548 since he struck out four times in Anaheim. That’s with a 10.6 percent walk rate and 21.3 percent strikeout rate. Those make the line actually feel sustainable. He’s worked some walks, he’s hit some home runs. Maybe the guy we saw for two months last year is actually back. And it’s great timing with Massey’s injury.

The Royals would get another in the third, but the Rays answered in the fourth and fifth. The Royals scored in the seventh on a sacrifice fly from Dairon Blanco after Kyle Isbel fouled a ball off that was going to hit him in the ribs. The reason Blanco came in is that the foul ball went off the brim of his helmet and hit him in the face. It looked bad. The Rays answered in the bottom half to tie it

The 3-3 tie remained into the 10th. The Royals got their Manfred Man home after Blanco walked and Maikel Garcia sacrificed both runners to scoring position. Witt was intentionally walked, but Pasquantino did what he’s done best this year and hit a sacrifice fly to drive home Renfroe, who was on second to start the inning. Unfortunately, the Royals and James McArthur had it down to 0-2 with two outs and their Manfred Man was still on second, but McArthur left a slider on the edge and not off the edge and Johnny DeLuca doubled to drive home the tying run.

So to the 11th and the Royals decided not to leave it up to anything else. They scored three on their old friend Richard Lovelady and Nick Anderson shut the door. I’d say slammed, but he did walk a batter. Anderson became the fifth pitcher to record a save for the Royals this year.

Sunday - Rays 4, Royals 1: Streaking Ends

Michael Wacha was perfect through five and it felt a bit like the Royals winning streak because they couldn’t score any runs. Do I need to explain more? Maybe! The Royals won eight in a row, but didn’t gain a single game in the standings because the Guardians also, annoyingly, won eight in a row. Wacha was perfect through five, but the game was tied at zero. That is, until Witt came up.

He is on fire. You’ll see below. But that mini-slump of his is officially over. He hit just .111/.167/.111 on the last road trip. He’s now hitting .368/.395/.842 with four home runs since and .296/.369/.580 in May. I’d say that works.

Back to Wacha because I’ve already written way more than I intended on a holiday and still have two sections to go. He was filthy for five innings, but got himself into a little trouble in the sixth that ran up his pitch count. He was still manageable so came out for the seventh, which was a mistake in hindsight, but I don’t know if anyone would have done any differently. He gave up a very soft bloop single to Harold Ramirez and then a double to Isaac Paredes. Anyone who says they should have pulled Wacha after a little bloop single was probably not saying that until after what happened next happened.

That said, John Schreiber was put in a tough spot with runners on second and third and nobody out in a 1-0 game. He hit the first batter he faced and then got a grounder to first that I thought Perez made a really heads up play on. He came home when he could have stepped on the bag and then come home. But had he done that, I don’t think they’d have gotten the out at home because it no longer would have been a force play. I know he has those thoughts behind the plate, but for a guy new to first base, that was impressive.

Unfortunately, it was all for naught. Lowe tripled in three on a ball that wasn’t even hard-hit, but it was well placed. It had an xBA of .180. What can you do sometimes? Another soft single, though one that had an xBA of .890, scored the fourth run for the Rays and that was enough.

I want to mention three things before I get to the Player of the Week and I’m trying to be brief, but, well, you know me.

• Wacha developed a slider prior to his start in Anaheim on May 9. This game was played on May 26. So 17 days before this start, he threw it for the first time. In this game, he threw it 26 times, the same as he threw his changeup and sinker. He got 11 swings and five whiffs on it with four more called strikes and super weak contact. That’s…insane.

• Schreiber hasn’t been as shutdown as the numbers might seem. Even before he couldn’t shut the door yesterday, he’d allowed 12 hits and three walks in 8.1 innings in May. Then he did what he did yesterday. He’s still been outstanding this year, but he’s been dancing around trouble for a few weeks. I think we shouldn’t have been surprised.

• On the play Witt was thrown out at home in the eighth inning, I was met with some pushback on social media that it was right to send him. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but nothing will change my mind that it was wrong to send him on the Perez single. Why? It’s all about the situation. Down by three with one out and Nelson Velazquez up is the spot you leave the bases loaded with one out. I don’t care how fast Witt is or how perfect the throw had to be. Velazquez is a fly ball hitter and is hitting well. You need more than one run. That risk was not worth it. If there are two outs, yes, send him. If a guy like Isbel is up next, who hits the ball on the ground a ton, yes, you send him. But in that situation with that guy up next, you don’t.

And, just like that, a streak is over. Time to start a new one today.

Player of the Week

As usual, there were more than enough candidates. Adam Frazier hit .357. Renfroe had 17 plate appearances and a 23.5 percent walk rate and 182 wRC+ with a home run and six runs scored. He even stole a base! Fermin hit well. Velazquez had two more home runs as he continues his revitalization. Maikel Garcia hit .393/.433/.536, but, nope, didn’t win. Even Hampson hit. Actually, it’s quite amazing that a .600 batting average for the week doesn’t win it, but he had some baserunning gaffes and only had 13 plate appearances.

Nope, this week, it’s back to the original - Witt. He hit .385/.433/.923 with two home runs, 11 RBIs and six runs scored. That’s good for a 257 wRC+ with his typically excellent defense. Yep, the home runs are back for him. As we are exactly one-third of the way through the season, it’s easy to look at paces, but here’s the pace Witt is on - .307/.366/.561 with 27 HR, 45 2B, 18 3B, 48 SB, 144 R, 108 RBI, 60 BB, 120 K. It would be just the second season in team history for a player to steal 40+ bases, drive in 100+ runs and score 100+ runs. That was 2003 Carlos Beltran and even Beltran only scored 102 and drove in 100. Witt would obliterate that. It’s fun to watch.

The Week Ahead

Okay, now the meat of the schedule has arrived. Starting today at noon (weather in Minneapolis permitting), the Royals will take on the Twins for four. You may recall that the Royals lost their opening series to the Twins, but pummeled them in the finale. The Twins have had an odd season. They started 7-13. Then they won 12 in a row. Then they sort of hovered and then they lost seven in a row. They’ve now won four of five since. Offensively, they’ve gotten by without Royce Lewis because Jose Miranda is back and playing pretty well and Max Kepler is playing out of his mind, as is Ryan Jeffers. Here are the pitching matchups:

• Today: Alec Marsh vs. Joe Ryan

• Tuesday: Cole Ragans vs. Simeon Woods Richardson

• Wednesday: Seth Lugo vs. Bailey Ober

• Thursday: Brady Singer vs. Chris Paddack

The Royals will miss Pablo Lopez, which I’m good with. I don’t care how much he’s struggled. He’s a good pitcher and I don’t like when the Royals face good pitchers. But Ryan will be tough. He has always had the Royals number with a 1.52 ERA in seven starts and 46 strikeouts in 41.1 innings. Add in that he’s very good early in the year and it’s a tough one for the Royals. The rest are hit-or-miss. Woods Richardson has been excellent overall, but something about it seems unsustainable. The Royals have gotten to Ober in the past, particularly that one Sunday earlier this year. And Paddack throws strikes, but he can be hit.

After the Twins, the Royals will come home to face a Padres team that has all sorts of talent, even after trading all sorts of talent. They just can’t seem to put it together. Tehy’ll win three of four against the Braves, but get swept by the Rockies. It’s hard to know if they’ll turn it on or not during any given series and Xander Bogaerts is on the IL, which hurts no matter how much he’s struggled this year. Still, they have Luis Arraez now and a starting rotation that can shut down anyone…or get hit by anyone.