Weekend in Review: Dominant Starting Pitching, A Game Salvaged and More

In the first Monday staple of the season, I'll look at the starting pitching from the first series, break down the games, give a player of the short week and a look ahead.

Phew. The Royals needed that win yesterday. The fans needed that win yesterday. The Weekend in Review needed that win yesterday. Why was the third game of the year so important? The reality is that it wasn’t, at least not any more than any other game is if you’re setting your sights on the playoffs. But in perception, it was pretty vital. The Royals, because of their subpar work for the last six seasons, didn’t have room to dig themselves an 0-3 hole. When you lose 100 games in three of the last six years and tie a franchise record the year before, nobody cares how different this team is than the last one; they only see the record.

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And this team is extremely different. Look at the roster that was put out there for this opening series compared to the one against the Twins last year. Only two of 13 pitchers remain and only five of 13 position players are still there. It would be six if not for Michael Massey’s injury, but even so, that’s a massive turnover. So if you were one of those people who thought nothing was different, I’m sorry to say that plenty is different. But the result is all most people care about, and the result was closing in on being the same, so I get it.

I just want to do the thing that everyone hates in this spot and remind you that literally every team will lose two in a row. Literally every team will get good starting pitching only for the offense and bullpen to not cooperate. Literally every team will struggle so much with runners in scoring position that you want to pull your hair out. That’s not me saying that to give the Royals a full-on pass. It’s me saying that to put it in perspective a little bit. Perspective isn’t easy when the only sample you have is bad, whether it’s two games or 22 games or 50 games or whatever. These Royals may prove to be just as incompetent as the last Royals, but losing those first two games in the way they did has nothing to do with last year’s team even if it did feel remarkably similar in ways.

Stellar Starters

When Cole Ragans pitches one of the games in a series and he has the worst outing of the three starters, you’re generally feeling pretty good. Here’s what Royals starters did against the Twins over the three games to start the year with MLB ranks:

19 IP (1st per game)
10 H (1st)
30.7% K (4th)
6.7% BB (9th)
0.95 ERA (1st)
3.38 FIP (4th)

What’s kind of crazy is they got better in each of the three games. Ragans was very good with the two runs allowed over six and nine strikeouts, but Seth Lugo one-upped him with six shutout innings and just two hits allowed. Then Brady Singer came over the top with seven shutout innings with three hits allowed and 10 strikeouts. This all game against a very good Twins offense. They were sixth in wRC+ last season, fourth in walk rate and fifth in ISO. They hit the ball, the worked walks and they hit for power.

In this series, Twins hitters posted a wRC+ of 82, which is 21st in baseball with a middle-of-the-pack walk rate and next to no power. Most of their damage was done against the bullpen too. And I don’t even think you can look at the weather as a factor. So often, early season numbers can look like a mirage for pitching staffs because you’ve got these dreary and cold days that are just miserable to hit in. That wasn’t the case at all for this series. It wasn’t a typical July series or anything, but the conditions were just fine.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say the starters will see their ERA jump above 1.00 at some point soon, but it’s hard not to be in games when you have good starting pitching. Through 60 percent of a turn, the Royals have gotten some excellent starting pitching. I would wager the bullpen will be better than what it’s been early and I’m guessing the offense will settle in somewhere between the first two games and yesterday’s. If they can just consistently give up two or three over six innings, this team will have a chance to win some games.

The Action

Saturday - Twins 5, Royals 1

This one was tough. Both Joe Ryan and Lugo were really good through this game. I’ll get to Lugo in a second, but I don’t think people realize exactly just how nasty Ryan was to shut down the Royals offense. I mentioned this on Twitter, but it’s so interesting how team-centric the analysis is. As Royals fans, we were impressed by Lugo but were upset the offense was struggling so much. Twins fans were likely impressed by Ryan but were upset their offense was struggling so much. The reality is that both pitchers were doing their jobs.

And Ryan was utilizing a splitter that he threw a lot last year, but it didn’t look like the one he was throwing on Saturday. This splitter was about four miles per hour harder with a way higher spin rate and more horizontal break. For all intents and purposes, it was a different pitch and it was dominant. He threw it out of the zone a lot and the Royals couldn’t stop themselves a lot of the time. So he deserves a lot of credit for what he did. I thought his fastball was about what we’d seen but a little harder. Oh, and his slider was 4.5 MPH harder than last year with way different movement. He was like a different pitcher.

Lugo was also a bit different than last year and there are some interesting things to watch with him. He was excellent, but his fastball velocity was down nearly two MPH, though his spin on it was up. His curve was ridiculous with some of the highest spin numbers you’re going to see and some crazy vertical break. I’m just a bit concerned about the fastball if the velocity doesn’t creep back up toward 93 MPH. I saw him in spring training and he was putting up some 95 and 96, so I’m not worried just yet, but it’s something to keep an eye on.

The only plus for the offense was that MJ Melendez came through with a clutch single with a man in scoring position. It was their only hit with a runner in scoring position in either of the first two games. It gave the Royals a 1-0 lead that you probably felt pretty good about after they got to the eighth and James McArthur, but the bullpen imploded again.

McArthur wasn’t bad necessarily. He gave up a leadoff double on a hard-hit ball by Edouard Julien and then got a high chopper that just bounced over Maikel Garcia’s head to score a run. It’s not what you want and it stunk, but that sort of thing happens even if it didn’t happen to McArthur at all in September. What you have to hope doesn’t happen again was Will Smith was a disaster. He hit Ryan Jeffers, walked Willi Castro and then gave up an RBI single to Christian Vazquez. Now, I will say that I don’t think it was a bad pitch, but the point is that the single is meaningless without the free runners ahead of it.

Then a sacrifice fly on a pitch that he was probably lucky Alex Kiriloff didn’t put into the gap made it 3-1 Twins and a double on a slider that didn’t do what it wanted made it 5-1 Twins and that was pretty much it. It was remarkably similar, but worse, to what Chris Stratton did in the ninth on Thursday to put the game out of reach in the bottom half. Maybe the Rangers sent both Smith and Stratton to get revenge on the Royals for taking Ragans.

Sunday - Royals 11, Twins 0

Speaking of revenge, the bats woke up in the series finale and gave us a much better taste in our mouths heading into the series in Baltimore. You never quite know what a slow start will do to an offense mentally, so you hope they can put a big game together relatively quickly. When Garcia had what looked like a single to start the game taken away, my mind went to a not so great place about what that could end up meaning. Thankfully, Bobby Witt Jr. smoked a single and then Vinnie Pasquantino finally got his first hit of the year that set up Salvador Perez for his first knock.

I have some doubts about how Perez is going to age. I guess the fact that he’s made it this long is something that I should consider, but at some point, swinging at everything is going to destroy him. But to get to that pitch on the lower outside edge and drive it like that to left field is going to keep him at least hitting home runs for a long time. After that, MJ Melendez walked and Nelson Velazquez got his first hit of the year, but the Royals couldn’t do anything with first and third and one out to tack on.

In the second, though, Kyle Isbel led off and did some instant damage.

I think it’s kind of interesting that Isbel was one of the players I talked about the most with people this offseason. He’s an elite defender in center field, but the bat just hasn’t been there. He was starting to swing the bat better last year when he had that hamstring injury and I’m really curious what would have been had he stayed healthy. But from July 1 on, he did hit .266/.309/.412 with 14 doubles, a triple and four home runs. That’s a 162-game pace of 37 doubles, three triples and 10 home runs. With his glove, that’s enough. And to start this season, he’s put some nice swings on balls.

The very next batter, Garcia, also put a nice swing on a ball.

I’m not going to repeat what I wrote on Friday. There’s more power in his bat than we saw last season and he’s already halfway to his 2023 home run total through three games. It’s not that he has to be a home run hitter, but he has to be able to do what he did to pitches like that. If he can crush that pitch and other mistakes all season long, he’s going to go see his wRC+ jump from the mid-80s to well above average.

The very next batter was Witt, and he almost made it back-to-back-to-back, but instead hit it off the right-center field wall for a triple. He’s already using the middle of the field (I’ll get to his home run in a minute), but he ended up scoring on a Perez single and the Royals got three more after that and the game was basically over after two.

That didn’t mean they were done scoring, though. I mentioned Witt homered and it was a big boy home run.

When he is going down and getting a pitch like that and crushing it to center field, he is absolutely locked in. I know that I get caught up in exit velocity sometimes, but look at 109.8 MPH to dead center. Come on. That’s just silly. At this point, Witt had a single, triple and a home run in the third inning. It looked like he’d have a great shot at the cycle, but he ended up striking out in his final two at bats, probably trying just a little too hard to hit a double. But the guy is locked in.

The bats were quiet for a couple more innings before Nelson Velazquez picked up his second hit of the year.

I believed Nick Pratto earned the big league job over Velazquez in the spring. The Royals believed in the games that mattered more, which is certainly defensible. It’s early yet, but it’s hard to deny the kind of power Velazquez has.

All this talk about this game and I haven’t even mentioned Singer yet, who was dominant over seven innings. I’m going to revisit his Statcast numbers in a few days because it shows that he threw 53 sliders, 41 sinkers and four changeups. But after the game, Matt Quatraro mentioned that he threw some four-seamers too, so it could just be that the system doesn’t know which pitch is the four-seamer yet. While that might seem a little odd, it happens.

Edit: It happened fast! The new data is below from Baseball Savant. You’ll see 14 four-seamers now with spin and movement you generally like to see from a four-seamer. He threw it for strikes and didn’t get hit hard with it, so that’s a good first impression for it.

Regardless, Singer’s slider is what I want to focus on because holy cow. I mentioned he threw 53 of them. He got 26 swings from the Twins and 16 whiffs on those. To put that in context, only three pitchers had more whiffs on a slider in a game last year. There were only four instances of it in 2022 (two were Dylan Cease). And there were only seven instances in 2021 (two were Clayton Kershaw). To get 16 swinging strikes on a slider is just silly, and it was an excellent pitch.

He wasn't perfect with it, but when you see the kind of grouping below where you see most of the sliders, you know you’re going to see some swings and misses. They’re mostly close enough to to the plate that a hitter has to make a choice and then he’s in trouble if that choice is to swing.

I think there are still some things that concern me about Singer. His velocity is up but not as much as I’d hoped to see. He averaged 92.6 MPH on his sinker after averaging 92.1 MPH last year. I’d have liked to see 93. I would have liked to see him get some more changeups in there, but at the same time, you have the extra pitches if the bread and butter isn’t working and it was. I don’t know. I’m probably just a Singer skeptic because I was turned off by him in 2021 and can’t get some of that out of my head.

But he got a ton of called strikes to go along with his 19 whiffs. He didn’t allow hard contact with just two hard-hit balls all game. And he worked around trouble a couple of times. The leverage wasn’t terribly high, though it was just 3-0 in the second when he had two on and two out, but it was nice to see him get through it. It was really nice to just see the results. He went seven or more innings just five times all year last year. He gave up 0 runs in a start just three times. And he struck out double digit batters just once. He looked like 2022 Singer. That’s a pitcher the Royals need.

Player of the Week

I’m going to start looking at a player of the week, and this week’s was super easy. It’s a small sample, of course, but Bobby Witt Jr. hitting .545/.615/1.273 with five extra base hits in just 13 plate appearances is a pretty easy choice. It’s early, but his 391 wRC+ is a full 78 points ahead of Mookie Betts in second place. He’s also walked twice, which is pretty amazing and scored four runs, which is more than 30 percent of the total scored by the team in the first series. Like the starting staff, I feel pretty confident in saying he won’t hit over .500 all year, but when a historically slow starter gets off to a start like this, it’s worth taking notice.

The Week Ahead

The Royals have a tough start to the week as they head to Baltimore to take on the Orioles, who took two of three from the Angels to start their season. They won 101 games last year and seem to have an endless supply of young talent ready to come up at a moment’s notice. After trading for Corbin Burnes in the offseason, they are clearly the team to beat in the AL East, so this is a test for the Royals. The pitching matchups for the series are:

• Monday: Michael Wacha vs. Dean Kremer

• Tuesday: Alec Marsh vs. Cole Irvin

• Wednesday: Cole Ragans vs. Corbin Burnes

You feel pretty good about the pitching matchup today and then Marsh vs. Irvin could theoretically be a toss-up, but it’s quite a first test for Marsh against that offense after he won the fifth starter job. But Wednesday’s matchup should be a fun one to watch with one of the better young starters in baseball against an elite veteran. Burnes was phenomenal in his Orioles debut. Weather may play a part in this series. Tonight’s game looks like it should be okay, though there will be some sprinkles in the area. Tuesday’s could be played through some rain if the totals stay the same. And then Wednesday may not happen. Forecasts change, but it’ll be a good test for the Royals, assuming the games actually happen.

Then it’s back home for the Royals for them to face the White Sox, who feature a lot of former Royals from recent years, which really isn’t a great strategy. The White Sox got swept by the Tigers to start their season and look like their march to 100+ losses is well underway. Still, I can’t help but remember how excited we were for the A’s to come to town last May to get the Royals on track only for the Royals to lose two of three, so it’s never wise to count on wins against anyone.