Weekend in Review: Soler Power, Royals Getting Out the Brooms and What’s Ahead

This weekend was a bit better than last.

Before the first game of the weekend on Friday night, the Royals announced that Daniel Lynch would get the start on Sunday, which meant that the rotation for the weekend was going to be Kris Bubic, Carlos Hernandez and Lynch. The fact that Lynch is the oldest of the bunch is pretty fun there. And as I noted on twitter, if not for the way the season had gone to this point, I think it would have been a much bigger deal and something we got way more excited about than most people seemed to. Still, though, it was a nice glimpse into the potential future. We’ll get into the actual games a little bit soon, but any time you can have three guys 24 or younger starting a series and all three have a chance to be a part of the future, that can be really fun.

Soler Power

To say it’s been a disappointing season for Jorge Soler would be a huge understatement. After hitting a team-record 48 home runs in 2019 and played every day, he had some injury issues in the short 2020 season. While he wasn’t terrible, he wasn’t the same guy. We all hoped for a big bounceback season for him in 2021 and he started great in the first couple games with a couple of hits, a homer and four walks, but then things went south. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, but just reminding you that things were good for a minute with him before he struck out 16 times in his next 24 plate appearances and hit an embarrassing .173/.265/.302 over his next 262 plate appearances.

It was after that day that the Royals got desperate and Mike Matheny moved him to the number two spot in the order. And while things out better, it’s only because it would have been kind of tough to get worse. But while he hasn’t really gotten on track with actually getting hits, he is starting to drive the ball out of the park. He homered on July 9 against Emmanuel Clase to tie a game late. Then he homered in back-to-back games in Milwaukee during the week. It was the first time he’d done that since the last two games of his fabled 2019 season. And over the weekend, he worked three walks in the first two games of the series without a hit, but then took full advantage of Tarik Skubal, homering in each of his first two at bats of the game, both rockets. Is this just regression to the mean or has he started to find his stroke? The first three and a half months of the season pretty much tanked Soler’s trade value, but it wouldn’t surprise me if a contender thought they could trade for 15 homers in two months without giving up much. There might actually be some value now.

The Games

As I said above, it was about the young pitching this weekend for the Royals, and while it wasn’t perfect, glimpses into the future are always fun for a team going nowhere, especially when they end in a series sweep.

Friday - Royals 5, Tigers 3

Kris Bubic got this opportunity for another start with the way he pitched last weekend after Brady Singer failed to get through three innings. He ended up throwing six innings in relief and was outstanding and the hope was that he could follow that up the way he followed up previous long relief outings before he entered the rotation at the end of May. And boy was he good. He ended up going six innings and giving up a run on six hits. The run was a mistake to Willi Castro, but he was generally really good. What did he do well?

For one, his changeup was back to being outstanding. He threw 32, got 18 swings and eight of them were swings and misses. With one more called strike and five foul balls, the changeup was his best pitch once again. He needs that. The locations weren’t perfect, as you can see below, but he moved the ball around enough that he could be successful.

I say this a lot, but pitching is very simple and also incredibly hard. If you can change eye levels and change timing, you can succeed. And Bubic did a very nice job of that.

Of course, he also had some help because the Royals turned three double plays behind him and two of them were absolute gems. The first was in the third inning. Bubic had allowed the home run to Castro and then a single to Derek Hill when Robbie Grossman came to the plate and hit a ball hard enough that Dozier had to make a really nice play on to get to second and back to first for the double play.

Then in the fourth, there were runners on first and third in a tie game with one out. Zack Short hit a ground ball to third and it was much more routine, but that double play ended the inning. Then in the top of the sixth, the bases were loaded after a single, walk and an error. Short came up again and hit a ground ball to Nicky Lopez that had no business being a double play, but well, it was. The play wasn’t flashy, but they turned it so fast and Short isn’t an especially slow runner.

Kyle Zimmer struggled in relief and got the Tigers within two with some terrible command, but Scott Barlow cleaned up the mess and then Greg Holland closed it out.

Of course, there wouldn’t have been anything to close out if Ryan O’Hearn hadn’t hit just the eighth three-run homer of the year for the Royals. Facing former Royal gas can Wily Peralta, who came into the game with an ERA of well under 2.00, the Royals had two one with one out when O’Hearn came to the plate.

That’s an impressive swing and while it’s exactly what he should be doing on a pitch in that location, it’s something he hasn’t done a lot, so it was really nice to see.

They tacked on with a Carlos Santana homer and then, as I mentioned above, Barlow and Holland finished things out. I mentioned before the break that we might see a team more resembling the April Royals out of the gate. I figured the bullpen would be a bit more rested so they could start fast. This game felt like an April win.

Saturday - Royals 9, Tigers 8

The first game was a pretty clean one. Good starting pitching, great defense and timely hitting got it done for the Royals. This one, uh, not so much. And it sort of came out of nowhere. Hernandez took the ball and had a seven-pitch first inning. He was pumping upper-90s and even got to triple digits. It looked like another young Royals pitcher was going to carve through a few innings.

But then in the second, he found trouble. He gave up a single and a walk. Then on a fielder’s choice, he missed the return throw from Lopez and it allowed Miguel Cabrera to score. I initially thought Hernandez made a second mistake by not getting to the ball that got away fast enough, but I do think I was wrong about that. But he worked out of trouble and only allowed the one run. That seemed like a win to me. Sometimes, a young pitcher working out of trouble is more impressive than a 1-2-3 inning and I felt pretty good about how he handled that.

It didn’t carry over. He lost his command in the third. He walked the first two batters, got a groundout and then walked another one to load the bases. You could see his pace slow down. He was stepping off, throwing to bases and just generally taking a long time. This is not a pitch chart you ever want to see. Nothing really on the edge. It’s only middle and not even chase-worthy.

When he got Cabrera to hit a sac fly for the second out, I thought this was another opportunity for him to escape a jam. And he was one strike away. But on a 2-2 pitch, he put a changeup in Jeimer Candelario’s happy zone and 434 feet later, it was 5-0 Tigers and Hernandez was done in favor of Richard Lovelady.

Lovelady gave up a run in the top of the fifth which was in his third different inning of work. I think Matheny probably tried to get a little more out of Lovelady than he should have, but I also understand it because I thought Lovelady looked very good. But he gave up two singles to start the inning and Tyler Zuber had a chance to make an impression, which I thought he did (and then he got sent down anyway, so what do I know?). He got a strikeout, then gave up another Cabrera sac fly and then a groundout from Candelario. I thought he looked good.

The offense had to go to work, though. The offense finally got to Mize with three straight singles to start the fifth, including the second hit from Lopez that drove in the Royals first run.With two on and nobody out, the Royals had a real chance to get into the game, but Whit Merrifield struck out and Carlos Santana hit a fly ball to left. With the opportunity about to slip away, Salvador Perez stepped to the plate and absolutely crushed a ball.

That made it 6-4 and now it was up to the bullpen to keep the Tigers down to give the Royals a shot. Domingo Tapia, who I thought would be the one to go down for Lynch worked a scoreless sixth. Jake Brentz came on and worked a fantastic seventh that ended with him striking out Grossman looking. I’m still looking for video of this, but Grossman didn’t think it was a strike and as Brentz was leaving the mound, it sure looked like he nodded in Grossman’s direction as if to say, “it absolutely was a strike, sit down.”

So the seventh came and a brutal at bat from Michael A. Taylor led to another rally starting. Lopez got his third hit. Merrifield got his first and then Santana came to the plate.

Oh my. That’s pretty intense. The Royals had their first lead of the night after trailing 6-0 in the fifth. But they weren’t done. Perez singled, Andrew Benintendi walked and after a Soler lineout, Hanser Alberto pinch hit for O’Hearn against a lefty.

A five-run inning gave the Royals a lead they would try to give up in the ninth, but ultimately didn’t. Holland gave up a two-run homer that probably should have been a solo homer if not for a ball Jarrod Dyson probably should have caught, but he was getting hit hard, so Matheny went to Wade Davis to bail him out. I would be lying if I said I was confident, but he struck out Candelario to end the game. It was a really nice comeback for the Royals.

Sunday - Royals 6, Tigers 1

So maybe this should be a whole article because of the way Daniel Lynch pitched in his return to the big leagues. But I’m a slave to routine, so it’s just here at the bottom of this Weekend in Review. As I mentioned Friday on the radio, it does happen that players have rough debuts and have to be sent down, but when they come back, there’s a little added pressure to have figured things out. Lynch gave up 14 runs in eight innings in his first time in the big leagues and looked overmatched far too often. He had to be better.

Well, he was. And the offense helped him out really quickly. He threw a 1-2-3 first, which I’ll get back to, but the offense started off on first. Merrifield led off the bottom of the first with a double. Santana hit a ball the other way that I think Merrifield read poorly and had to hold up at third. But it didn’t matter because Perez cleans up messes.

That was the fourth three-run home run of the weekend for the Royals, which was the 11th of the season. Yes, they hit four of their 11 three-run homers this weekend. That’s pretty fun. And then Soler followed Salvy’s 454-foot blast with this:

My oh my. That’s four batters and four runs. That’s a good way to support your young starting pitcher. And then in the third, Soler decided one wasn’t enough.

But even with the offense ambushing the Tigers, the story was Lynch. His line was a thing of beauty. He went eight innings, gave up no runs on five hits with four strikeouts and no walks. It was the best start of the year for the Royals and it wasn’t especially close, in my opinion. According to Baseball Savant, Lynch did his work with the slider and the changeup, getting 10 whiffs on 24 swings on those two pitches. I think a couple of those sliders might have been curves, so I’m being a bit cagey on those classifications, but either way, the off speed stuff did the job for him big time.

He just looked calm, cool and collected, which was not guaranteed after his first big league experience a couple months ago. His first inning was quick and easy. His second inning was a nice test with a couple two-out hits, but he got out of it. And then he sort of just went on cruise control. He had a 1-2-3 third, a 1-2-3 fourth and a 1-2-3 fifth.

I probably would have taken him out, if I’m being honest. This is a guy who couldn’t get out of the first in one start and got lit up by this Tigers team is another before being sent back down. Five shutout innings was a fantastic confidence builder. But then he went back out for the sixth and my fear was almost realized. He gave up an infield single on a 58.1 MPH grounder and a bloop single on a 74.4 MPH batted ball. Weak contact or not, it was a test.

He got a swinging strike just over the top of the zone against Jonathan Schoop. Then he just missed low with a 95.5 MPH fastball. Then he threw one just down in the zone enough that Schoop barely missed it and hit a moderately hard grounder to Merrifield at second and the Royals turned the double play. Then on the sixth pitch to Eric Haase, he threw this slider to get out of the jam:

Woo boy. If I’m being honest, I probably would have taken him out. This is a guy who…okay, same story as before. Six shutout innings is even better than five and I absolutely love watching young pitchers escape jams, like I said above. But there he was back out for the seventh. And he threw eight pitches to get three outs. So if I’m being honest, I probably…fine I’ll stop. He gave up a hit in the eighth and got away with a much reduced velocity fastball to Hill, but got a groundout from Akil Baddoo and that was the end.

Ervin Santana tried to make it an interesting game, but the Royals were in control from the jump and got themselves a sweep. Good weekend.

What’s Next

If the Royals could have figured out a way to just go something like 29-35 instead of 20-44 (I know that’s a lot, but it’s also still not good) between their 16-9 start and the break, this week’s series with the White Sox could at least be interesting. But instead of being merely bad, they completely tanked and four games at home against the White Sox doesn’t mean much anymore. But they are still trying to get back to respectability after falling to a season-high 18 games under .500 after that Orioles series. Now, though, they haven’t lost in a week and have a tough series to keep it going against a very good White Sox team that did struggle with the Brewers over the weekend. And then they’ll go to Toronto where they get to be the Blue Jays’ first opponent at their real home since 2019, so, uh, good luck.

But there’s also the trade deadline coming up on Friday afternoon at 3pm. I still don’t think the Royals are going to be terribly aggressive, much to many’s dismay. But I think there’s at least a chance they move Merrifield. What I’ve heard is that they are legitimately listening to offers at least, which is more than I think was true in the past. I still think they won’t get as much as they want, which is another story, but they’re listening. Word is that the Mariners want him badly after missing out on Adam Frazier, but I put the percent chance Merrifield is dealt at somewhere around 30 percent, which is more than it ever has been.

I also wonder if Soler’s power surge could potentially get some team to think they can get a few homers out of him for two months. Maybe the A’s? I don’t know. Otherwise, Taylor back in the lineup from his wrist injury might make him attractive as a fourth outfielder and Dyson too. The other guy to keep an eye on is Scott Barlow. I think he might go, and I think they might get something worth talking about for him, but that’ll be a day to watch this week.

It was a perfect week since the last Weekend in Review. Let’s hope for another one before the next one.