Weekend in Review: Starting Pitching Strides, Up-And-Down Bats and the Week Ahead

Three good starts from guys who could be part of the next good Royals team were very encouraging. And the bats at least showed the upside.

Some days, it’s nearly impossible to see a world where more than one or two players on this current Royals team are part of an actually competitive Royals team. Other days, you can see a path. And then other days, it feels like there’s actually something there. I think back to the series win against the Padres and the one against the White Sox. Those were nice to see and I certainly won’t complain about such a rarity, but even in those, I didn’t really see them for much more than a bit of a fluke. And then there was this past weekend. It was a losing weekend…again. But in a losing weekend, I personally felt better about the organization than I’ve felt basically all year.

That may seem like a really stupid thing to say, but it’s all about the starting pitching. I’ll get to the details, but for the first time all year, it was the starters doing the job. The Royals started three pitchers who were 27 or younger and all three showed how they could be a part of a winning rotation at some point. It was just the eighth time all year that the Royals had a three game stretch with starters 27 or younger going, but a few of those included Carlos Hernandez as an opener. And none of them saw all three pitch especially well. So if even for a weekend, there was something to look at and hang your hat on. If they can pitch, they can stay in games. If they can stay in games, they can steal some wins.

I’ve decided to alter the format here just a bit. I got to thinking about how I looked at each weekend and if I’m going to sit here and tell you that the end result of the game doesn’t really matter, then why am I taking time breaking down each individual game. It’s about the players more than the actual game, so I’m not going to go through each game like I have in the past. I might get back to that at some point, but at least for this week, the review won’t focus on the scores as much as how they got there.

Stellar Starters

We had to wait an extra 18 hours to start the season’s second half because of some crazy storms on Friday night. I hope everyone is okay (I probably should have mentioned that to start!). But the postponement on Friday changed the weekend rotation from Alec Marsh, Brady Singer and Jordan Lyles to something that added a little more excitement. Instead of Lyles yesterday, Singer got pushed to Sunday and Cole Ragans was brought up to be the 27th man and start the second game. I want to dig in to each starter.

Alec Marsh

In his first start, I said you could see how Marsh could be a successful big league starter. In his second start, I wrote that the Royals might actually have something because of the stuff he displayed. And then in his third start, he put it together. He ended up going six innings and allowed two runs (two solo home runs) on five hits with 11 strikeouts and one walk.

It was just the fifth time since 2018 a Royals starter who was 25 or younger struck out 10 or more in a game and the second-most behind Brady Singer’s 12 against these same Rays in the series after the break. It was only the 57th such game by a 25 or younger starter in franchise history and just the 19th with more than 10. So it was noteworthy.

How did he do it? He relied heavily on his fastball, which was good. It was moving quite well vertically and got the Rays to swing and miss nine times on 29 pitches. What does nine whiffs on fastballs mean? Well, it was tied for the most swings and misses a Royals pitcher has gotten on a four-seam fastball in the Statcast era. He was tied with Lyles earlier this year, so that takes some of the luster off it, but nobody else has ever had more than eight four-seam fastball whiffs in a game for the Royasl. Even one right down the middle at 95 was one that Wander Franco couldn’t catch up to.

He was also able to elevate it to get whiffs, like this one on Jose Siri.

It was an excellent pitch for him and he just kept throwing it. It was almost like watching a pitcher from 15-20 years ago with 57 percent fastballs and the second-most used pitch, his curve, was only used 17 percent of the time. And why wouldn’t he used it when it was working so well?

It wasn’t just the fastball, but Marsh tweaked his slider a little bit during the break, according to Anne Rogers, and the results were there right away on it. It broke vertically a little more, going from his year average of 32 inches to 34 inches, but the horizontal break was very different. Previously this year, he hadn’t had any horizontal break on average, but it broke an average of three inches on Saturday afternoon. He got three whiffs on 10 swings, which is a nice percentage and it’s easy to see how this could become something even more impressive for him.

In all, Marsh collected 15 whiffs for the second straight start, which ties himself for the second-most in a game this year for the Royals. I’m not saying we should ignore the home runs. It’s an issue he’s had throughout his professional career, but if he’s going to throw strikes and get whiffs like that, you can deal with it a little bit. He was let down by both his offense and his bullpen, but that’s three starts for him now and you can really see a path to him being a big league starter for awhile.

Cole Ragans

I was pretty excited to see this velocity job for Ragans that we’d heard about because a guy averaging 92 is sort of whatever in today’s game. But a guy averaging 96 is interesting. And as a starter in AAA, the velocity gains we saw from him in the bullpen at the big league level held pretty well. So I was interested. And then the first pitch of the game came and I was more than interested. It was at 97.6 MPH to Siri. Was he amped up? Maybe! Let’s find out.

He threw his fourth pitch at 99.0 MPH, his fifth at 98.6 MPH and his eighth at 99.8 MPH. Well then. Velocity is certainly not everything. You have to locate because hitters at this level can hit 100 if it’s in a bad spot. But Spencer Strider said it best when he was talking about how every little bit harder a pitcher throws is a little bit more margin for error. And in this one, Ragans ended up averaging 97.5 MPH on 39 four-seam fastballs and the Rays didn’t look especially good against it even when they could hit it.

They swung 23 times, whiffed on five and put five in play with an average exit velocity of 76.3 MPH. That’s an effective pitch. Now, the downside is that they fouled off 13 of them, including five with two strikes. We’ve seen this before from another lefty who was able to get it to the upper-90s, Danny Duffy. Look, if Ragans becomes Duffy, the Royals will be happy. But it would also be nice if he could limit those foul balls. That, to me, comes down to the secondary stuff.

His changeup was really good too, so maybe that’s an answer, but I think he needs a better swing and miss breaking ball. On the changeup, he got four whiffs on 11 swings and the Rays only made good contact against it once. It’s a good pitch. And his curve was really nice too, at times. He threw one that ended up right at the top of the zone for a strike and I thought at the time that if he can throw that every first pitch, he’ll be 0-1 on every hitter because it’s a big curve and I’m not sure how a hitter can even gear up to swing at a pitch that starts so high.

But the cutter just isn’t much of a pitch. It looked better than I expected, honestly, and if he can throw it more toward the 94 he did a couple of times, I’ll feel differently, but I wonder a little if a slider or something would be better. He just needs something to keep hitters off the fastball. But boy was that fastball fun.

Ragans was sent down after the game. He was the 27th man, so we knew this would happen. There was no reason to keep him up because option rules of needing to stay down for 15 days don’t apply and he isn’t available for another five days. It would be silly to keep him on the big league roster based on that. The Royals are sorting through a lot of guys right now and Lyles needs to pitch in the rotation through the trade deadline, so I don’t know if Ragans will be back up for what would be his next start unless Zack Greinke isn’t ready to go, but he showed a lot in this one start and I’m excited to see the next one. He definitely deserves it.

Brady Singer

The cagey veteran of this group had two good starts before getting hit hard by the Guardians in his last start before the break. So when he came out and threw seven pitches in the first and six in the second, I was pretty excited. He really was in control through seven innings when he walked off the mound with just 70 pitches thrown. I’ll get to his eighth inning in a minute, but I was very pleased with how he threw.

He didn’t get the strikeouts you want from him, but I think that had a lot to do with his opponent. The Rays were determined to not let him get deep into counts. He only got to two strikes on three of the first 14 hitters and he only even got to two balls on two of those first 14. In the fifth, things opened up a little. He struck out the first two, but even then, he didn’t hit his first three-ball count of the game until the 17th batter he faced. And then didn’t do it again.

His slider was good. He had eight whiffs on 25 swings and another five called strikes. His sinker was doing what it used to do, getting a bunch of called strikes and enough swings and misses. The CSW% of 30 percent on that sinker is where he wants to be and he nailed it in this one. He did throw seven changes and then one of his sliders was classified as a sweeper that got a swing and miss as well. I’m not going to spend as much time on Singer, but I thought this was his best start of the year.

The eighth was a little surprising to me. He gave up a first pitch home run to Isaac Paredes that was a bit of an ambush. Then Jonathan Aranda had a good at bat, though you could make an argument that ball two was actually strike three. And then he hung a slider to Francisco Mejia. Four batters, four runs and the great start looked a little worse in the box score, but I was still happy with it. I apologize to whoever I’m calling out here because I forgot who said it, but someone in my mentions said that the eighth was on Matt Quatraro for not pulling him.

Come on. He was at 70 pitches through seven with a 7-0 lead and the next day off day isn’t until the 27th. There was literally no reason to pull Singer to start the inning or even have anyone warming up. He gave up an ambush home run, a ground ball single and then a hard single. Even if you argue that someone should have started warming after the first single, the home run came five pitches later. Nobody would have been ready. I know that Quatraro has been a popular target, but let’s not pretend things like that are accurate.

And overall, you have to love what you got from three starters 27 or younger. They only won one game, but that was a weekend you can dream on from the pitching side.

Offensive Ups-And-Downs

The bats, on the other hand, showed us on Sunday why you can dream a little, but on Saturday why you feel like they need to get some help. In 18 innings on Saturday, the Royals scored three runs on 14 hits. In eight innings on Sunday, they scored eight runs on 11 hits. So no matter what you wanted to see this weekend from the offense, you got a glimpse of it.

On the plus side, we saw what happens when Salvador Perez gets a little rest. He had four hits in the first game of the double header and then one in the second and one on Sunday before he had to leave with a hamstring injury. Drew Waters looked great (more on him shortly). Bobby Witt Jr. had a big weekend with three extra base hits (more on him too). And MJ Melendez had four hits in the three games (more on him too).

In game one Saturday, Tyler Glasnow had it working again. His fastball wasn’t as good as the last time he faced the Royals, but his slider was just excellent. He wasn’t even getting a ton of swings outside the zone on it, but it was so good that the Royals couldn’t get to it. You sort of understand that. But in game two, it was a bullpen game for the Rays and the only pitcher the offense stood much of a chance against was Cooper Cirswell, their bulk guy. They got two runs on five hits against him. The rest of the bullpen shut them down as the Royals bullpen got paper cut to death.

I don’t think they were having terrible at bats or anything, but I don’t think they were good. I honestly don’t even know what to say was the issue other than a lack of quality players to get the at bats. Now, that is something I’ve discussed some. You’re missing Vinnie Pasquantino. That hurts. We rag on Edward Olivares for his defense, but he’s a quality bit in the lineup. He’s out. That hurts. But even still, those two guys aren’t turning this offense around. If either the hitters you can count on aren’t producing, like in game two, it doesn’t matter much what the bottom does. Or if the bottom isn’t producing, like in game one, it doesn’t matter. There just isn’t enough depth on a daily basis in this lineup.

But in game three on Sunday, we saw it come together. The Royals scored one in the first on a two-out single by Perez and then a two-out double by Melendez that actually proved costly. Melendez was thrown out at third, but Perez got himself hurt on the plate. That’s not great and we don’t know the severity yet, but I’d guess that unless the hamstring is fully torn, he’ll be back soon because of who he is and how the Royals never seem to make him sit.

But the second was fun even if it started with an out. Kyle Isbel singled and then Drew Waters hit a ball to center that maybe should have been caught and definitely could have been played better, but it was an RBI triple. Then Nick Pratto singled with two strikes. That was his third two-strike hit of the series, so maybe there’s some adjusting going on with him. After a single to center for Nicky Lopez, Witt came up and crushed a ball.

That was 109.7 MPH off the bat and somehow only his third-hardest hit ball of the game. The Royals kept tacking on with solo homers throughout the rest of the game. The highlight home run was this one from Waters:

That was hit out at 112.2 MPH and traveled 465 feet. That’s the 16th-longest home run of the 2023 season and tied for the third-longest home run by a Royals hitter in the Statcast era. It was a tank.

Witt tacked another on in the fifth.

Then Melendez got one in the eighth after the Rays had just scored four.

The big games by Witt, Waters and Melendez seem to be pretty important for this club. We know what Witt has done since the start of June, but let me remind you. He’s hit .308/.354/.514 with eight doubles, two triples, six homers and 10 steals. He’s 17th in baseball in fWAR in that time at 1.6. Part of that is on the strength of his defense. A month and a half isn’t enough to declare a player anything, but what he’s done in 38 games is star quality.

Waters and Melendez have obviously been a bit more mercurial. Since the start of the series in Tampa, though, Waters is hitting .333/.368/.556 in 19 games with three doubles, a triple and three home runs. I’m a little skeptical with 25 strikeouts in 68 plate appearances and a .500 BABIP really jumps out, but the talent when he’s able to make contact is very apparent. The metrics like him quite a bit in center field, though Isbel is still better defensively. There’s at least something to hang your hat on with Waters for the rest of the year. I hope he can stay healthy and give the Royals an answer one way or another on him.

With Melendez, we all know the type of year he’s had. It’s been rough. But he did a lot of work over the break as well and I thought he was super candid on the postgame show when he talked with Josh Vernier about how the mental grind has gotten to him a bit. But he had a nice weekend with four hits, including two extra base hits. He did strike out three times in the first game of the doubleheader, but then none in the last two. Look, I still think he could probably benefit from a few weeks in Omaha, especially because I think John Rave deserves a look, but the Royals need Melendez, so hopefully the last couple of games are a nice jumping off point for him.

The Week Ahead

The Royals will welcome the Detroit Tigers to town for the second and final time this year. They’re playing some pretty okay baseball right now, but just because they’re within shouting distance in a bad AL Central doesn’t make them a good team. They’re just better than the Royals. Spencer Torkelson seems to be getting closer and closer to figuring it out. They’ve got Riley Greene back and he’s having a very good year. They’re getting work out of some role players like Matt Vierling and Zack McKinstry (though he’s cooled off a lot) and Kerry Carpenter is emerging.

On the pitching side, Tarik Skubal is back and he’s looked very good in a limited sample. Matt Manning is back and he’s had his moments. Eduardo Rodriguez and Michael Lorenzen have also been good, though both of those guys could get traded at any time. And Reese Olson has looked good in the rotation. The bullpen isn’t great, but they’ve got some nice arms, so things are looking up for the Tigers, I’d say. The Royals will see all of the starters I mentioned but Olson in this four-game set and they’ll counter with Lyles, Daniel Lynch, Ryan Yarbrough and then it’s TBD. It could Marsh, though Greinke could be the guy or maybe Ragans. I feel like the Royals don’t have the edge in any of those matchups, though Marsh vs. Lorenzen is probably the closest.

Then the Royals will head to New York to take on the Yankees, who just fired their hitting coach and are in fourth place. Of course, fourth in the AL East comes with a 50-44 record, so let’s not feel too sorry for them. The rotation could easily change with Greinke and/or Ragans working in, but as of right now, it looks like Singer vs. Clarke Schmidt, Lyles vs. Gerrit Cole (eek) and Lynch vs. Luis Severino. I’ll be interested to see how Melendez attacks that short porch if he’s going to look to turn on the ball more. They’re all tough weeks when you’re the second-worst team in baseball and this one is no different.