Weekend in Review: Two Out of Three Ain't Bad

The Pirates are a mediocre team and the Royals did what good teams do to mediocre teams.

Expectations are a funny thing. The Royals have handled the teams they’re supposed to handle so well that you almost come into these series expecting a sweep. Then, they go and win the first two, and it feels like a huge disappointment if they don’t finish the sweep. And when they don’t, sure enough, it’s disappointing. But the truth is that the goal is to win two of three from the teams you’re supposed to beat and to tread water against the good teams. And while the Royals record against current AL playoff teams isn’t excellent, they’ve played them mostly very tough.

They’re 21-25 against the current playoff field, but they have a run differential of -1 against those five other teams. The Yankees are their biggest problem, but I also think it’s interesting that they got beaten around the yard during one of their worst stretches of the year, and the most recent series was incredibly competitive. That’s not to say that the Royals will beat anybody, but they can, and they’ve gotten into a playoff spot by largely doing what they’re supposed to do in these series throughout a season. And that’s exactly what happened in this series against the Pirates.

A Look at Playoff Seeds and How They Fared

While I think the most likely playoff scenario is that the Royals are the fifth seed in the AL playoffs and heading to Baltimore for a best-of-three series on the road, there are other possibilities for them. The math doesn’t support them getting the top seed in the AL, but there is a very outside shot that they can catch the Guardians for first place, which would likely earn them the second seed and a bye through the Wild Card round.

Before I get into some of my thoughts, let me give you the results we’ve seen since the new playoff format was unveiled two years ago. And before I get to that, I want to point out that two years is an impossibly small sample. So with that in mind, let’s look at the results.

Wild Card

2022

5 Seattle over 4 Toronto
3 Cleveland over 6 Tampa Bay
5 San Diego over 4 New York Mets
6 Philadelphia over 3 St. Louis

2023

5 Texas over 4 Tampa Bay
3 Minnesota over 6 Toronto
4 Philadelphia over 5 Miami
6 Arizona over 3 Milwaukee

The road team won five times in eight series. More impressive is that only one of the eight series went beyond the first two games. That’s a little surprising to me.

LDS

2022

1 Houston over 5 Seattle
2 New York Yankees over 3 Cleveland
5 San Diego over 1 Los Angeles Dodgers
6 Philadelphia over 2 Atlanta

2023

5 Texas over 1 Baltimore
2 Houston over 3 Minnesota
4 Philadelphia over 1 Atlanta
6 Arizona over 2 Los Angeles

Five of the eight teams to get a bye lost in their first series. The five losing teams combined to win three games in their series.

LCS

2022

1 Houston over 2 New York Yankees
6 Philadelphia over 5 San Diego

2023

5 Texas over 2 Houston
6 Arizona over 4 Philadelphia

The lower seed winning three of four is vaguely interesting.

World Series

2022

1 Houston over 6 Philadelphia

2023

5 Texas over 6 Arizona

Okay, so let’s talk about the elephant in the room. So many people have argued that the bye hurts the team that had to sit for a few days. I get the thought process, and the results, especially last season, did support that. But the sample is way too small to draw any conclusions, and an interesting number here is the likelihood of reaching the ALDS. If you’re a Wild Card team, half of all teams have not advanced to the next round. By contrast, 100 percent of all teams with a bye have made it to the ALDS.

I get the idea that a bye and a few days off can break the rhythm of some bats, and it can get magnified when facing a team that has not had to break that rhythm. That said, the randomness of a three-game series is why I would never turn down the Royals an opportunity to get to the next round without having to lift a finger. Remove the White Sox from this conversation and realize that even a truly bad team can win a three-game series on the road against a good team. Now imagine the odds of two teams that are relatively evenly matched. Having to win two of three in a game that can be as random as baseball is terrifying enough to assume that a bye is a bad thing.

So yes, the Royals getting the bye is my number one preference. I would imagine most will agree with that, but some people wouldn’t, which is crazy to me.

The Games

Friday - Royals 8, Pirates 3: A Crooked Number

This was a fun game for two reasons. The first is that the offense looked like the offense that was pacing the American League for so long after the break. The second is that Alec Marsh looked dominant at times and showed why and how he could be an incredible weapon out of the bullpen during the postseason. Let’s start with the offense.

In the first inning, Luis L. Ortiz was showing why he’d put up some impressive numbers this season, but particularly since moving to the rotation. He kind of mowed through the lineup even though he seemed to pitch around Salvador Perez with two outs. And the second started the same with a soft lineout by Hunter Renfroe, but the floodgates just opened after that. He walked Robbie Grossman on four pitches and then made an error on a weak tap to the mound, allowing Adam Frazier to go to second and Grossman to third. How many times have we seen this as Royals fans? The pitcher makes an error and the inning unravels.

From there, Yuli Gurriel singled, Kyle Isbel doubled on the 10th pitch of his at bat and Tommy Pham singled. He did get Bobby Witt Jr. to line out right back to the mound, but Witt made solid contact. At this point, it was 4-0 after Grossman, Frazier, Gurriel and Isbel had scored and that brought Salvador Perez to the plate.

That, friends, is an exclamation point. I’m going to get to Perez in a bit in this newsletter (spoiler alert for the Player of the Week, I guess), but if you were waiting for him to get hot again, you don’t have to wait anymore. He had a monster series in New York and it feels like he’s hitting the ball really well again.

I know a six-run inning with some bad defense mixed in doesn’t say an offense is fixed. It’s absolutely not. There are still some sequencing issues that are likely going to turn back to their favor at some point. But it was nice to see them capitalize and pour it on because that’s something we saw from them so much in the first four and a half months of the season.

And they continued to add on. Isbel hit a bomb in the fourth.

Here’s another Player of the Week spoiler, but you’ll read more about Isbel below. In a bigger stretch, he’s hitting .250/.307/.409 since the start of June. Those numbers aren’t great, but with his defense and where he hits in the lineup, they’re more than good enough. I’ve said before that I don’t think Isbel is a guy you ignore when trying to improve the team, but without an offensive force capable of replacing him, you live with the defense. Personally, I’d also live with the drop in numbers against lefties in the playoffs for his defense.

Up 7-1 heading into the eighth, the former Pirate, who had a kind of odd video tribute given the impact he made, Adam Frazier stepped to the plate.

Hey, good for him. Frazier got three starts in his old city after accumulating three plate appearances in nearly two weeks after the Royals hit the waiver wire looking for reinforcements during that Houston series. I wouldn’t say he did enough to earn too many more at bats, but he did hit this homer and tripled on Saturday.

Okay, to Marsh.

He ran out of gas a bit in the sixth, which isn’t that surprising. He’d thrown between 73 and 87 pitches in each of his four starts since his time in the minors. It’s not that he couldn’t go more, but there’s a reason the Royals decided to back off him. Either way, the first five innings were fantastic for him. His overall line was excellent too:

5.1 IP, 5 H, 1 R, 11 K, 2 BB

The 11 strikeouts were a career high, and he’s now made two solid starts in a row and the one in Houston wasn’t really that bad either. In total, he’s thrown 20 innings since he’s been back with a 3.60 ERA that includes 23 strikeouts and four walks in 20 innings. That will work.

In this one, his curve was just a monster curve. He threw 19 of them and the Pirates swung at 12. They came up empty seven times.

Rowdy Tellez will tell you that the curve ate him up. His slider may have been a little better even. He only got five whiffs, but he had the Pirates chasing it all night long with a 54 percent chase rate. He was also getting called strikes with 18 of those, so between the 18 total whiffs and the 18 called strikes, his CSW% of 38 percent was one of the very best of his entire career.

I know the Pirates lineup isn’t great, but seeing him averaging 94.3 MPH on his sinker and 94.8 MPH on his fastball and getting up over 96 MPH with both of them while he was getting so many whiffs on his breaking balls made me really think about what he can do in the postseason. He’s throwing strikes. If he does that with that stuff, he adds a new wrinkle to the Royals bullpen. I imagine we’ll see it soon with Michael Lorenzen about ready to come off the IL.

We know he won’t be replacing Chris Stratton who struggled again, but then was placed on the IL before Saturday’s game. That effectively ends Stratton’s season, which is not something anyone should be concerned about outside of being a human being and caring about injured players.

Saturday - Royals 5, Pirates 1: A Business Win

Saturday’s game was a lot less interesting. Michael Wacha was solid once again, though his pitch count got elevated, due in large part to some horrible home plate umpiring. Friday’s was actually worse, but Saturday’s was one of the worst we’ve seen too. Still, he struck out eight and generally looked like he was flashing playoff stuff.

His changeup was, as usual, just so good. He got seven whiffs on it in 17 swings and the contact he gave up was soft. The first whiff he got on the changeup really set the tone.

I don’t know what a hitter is supposed to do there. That ball just dropped. And it was doing it all night long. But he also was getting it done with his four-seamer with five whiffs, his sinker with two and his cutter with four. I don’t remember his cutter looking so sharp all season long. He matched Marsh with 18 whiffs, but he didn’t get nearly as many called strikes. Again, it was a wild zone.

Even so, it was another very encouraging start for Wacha. You might recall he got lit up against Texas in May for seven runs on nine hits in 3.2 innings. Since then, he’s 12-3 with a 2.59 ERA in 20 starts spanning 118.1 innings. He’s struck out 107, walked 33 and given up 98 hits. It’s a totally arbitrary date, but he’s been the Royals best starter for four full months now. And that’s on a team that has two other starters who will get Cy Young votes.

There wasn’t a blowup inning for the offense. They just sort of plugged away. They got one in the top of the first.

Witt needed that. He’s never truly fallen into a deep slumber, but he just hasn’t been nearly as good for a couple weeks now. Some of it is the Pasquantino injury and losing that protector behind him, but some of it is that it was bound to happen. He’s been hitting the ball harder and I think is just about to emerge, and this home run was a pretty good sign of that. It was a rocket and a classic Witt swing.

They got two more in the fifth that started with a Frazier triple, followed by a Maikel Garcia double. Witt eventually got Garcia home with a sacrifice fly. In the sixth, Michael Massey led off with a double and scored on an error. And in the seventh, Isbel doubled and scored on a Witt double that was initially called an error. The Pirates might want to invest in their defense this winter.

James McArthur struggled again when he was given the eighth, which isn’t great for a guy who was starting to look like the dominant reliever from last September, but Kris Bubic bailed him out with a dominant two batters to get two strikeouts. Then Lucas Erceg shut the door in a non-save situation to get the win and clinch the series.

Sunday - Pirates 4, Royals 3: Missed Opportunities

If you weren’t sold on Wacha over Brady Singer for the playoffs before this weekend, I think you might be now. Singer struggled again, giving up four runs on six hits over five innings. He did strike out six, but he walked four. He now has a 5.40 ERA in 43.1 innings since the start of August. That’s come with a very solid 22.6 percent strikeout rate and 7.2 percent walk rate that was really hurt by his last two starts, but he just hasn’t looked terribly effective.

Still, like Marsh, you can see how Singer can be a real weapon in the bullpen against the right hitter. His slider is still very good. His sweeper can still get plenty of whiffs. And even his four-seamer got whiffs yesterday. And his sinker wasn’t good. He got a lot of weak contact on it and got a lot of called strikes on it.

If the velocity on that pitch plays up and he has one of his breaking balls working, Singer is the type of pitcher who could take over a game in a two-inning stint in the playoffs. I know I wrote about him as the fourth starter, but if Lorenzen looks good coming back, I do wonder if the Royals deploy Singer as a true bullpen weapon in October. I think he could be filthy out there.

The issue in the loss was partially that Singer struggled, but the truth is, they were never winning this game. The Royals had the unfortunate task of playing in New York on 9/11 and in Pittsburgh on Roberto Clemente Day. I know that none of that is preordained, but it does feel like you’re fighting with the universe sometimes. More accurately, though, the Royals were fighting with themselves.

They went 1 for 12 with runners in scoring position and left 10 on base. They had the bases loaded and nobody out in the second and scored one run. In the third, they had a leadoff triple and two singles, but didn’t score. That seems impossible, but a Witt fly ball followed Pham’s triple to right and Pham somehow took about six minutes to get home and was tagged out on the throw. In the fourth, they got back-to-back doubles with one out that scored a run, but Garcia, the second double, didn’t score. In the sixth, they had the bases loaded with one out and only scored on a Witt walk. That was their third and final run. They had a leadoff double from Massey in the second and he didn’t score. Then they went six up, six down in the eighth and ninth.

They need to get that situational hitting back. That’s the spot they really miss Vinnie Pasquantino. It’s not that he can hit in every spot, but him hitting third allowed Perez to hit fourth and it just really lengthened the lineup. Someone needs to get hot, and it doesn’t matter who. We’ve seen all year that someone will, so I’m not that concerned it won’t happen. Still, though, it needs to happen.

Player of the Week

For the second straight week, Witt wasn’t great. He did drive in five runs and scored three more, but he was pretty pedestrian. Isbel had a really good week, hitting .400/.526/.733 and making a ridiculous diving catch yesterday. He made a pretty good argument for player of the week, but I felt like I couldn’t not give it to Perez the day after Roberto Clemente Day when he hit .409/.462/.682 with two home runs and seven RBIs in the six games. Okay, it’s not just the sentimental total. He did have nine more plate appearances than Isbel and made that great play at first in New York.

One thing I want to point out is that the bullpen other than McArthur and Stratton had a pretty great weekend. They needed to throw 10.2 innings and did it with a 1.69 ERA. They struck out 12 and walked five, but they showed why the bullpen can be a strength for them in the playoffs when the dead weight isn’t throwing really any innings.

The Week Ahead

Every week for more than a month has been the biggest week in nearly a decade for the Royals. It started with the series against the Red Sox in early August. Then it was the Twins. Then it was the Angels that was followed by The Gauntlet™. Then it was eight games in seven days against the Guardians and Astros. Then it was the Guardians and Twins. And finally it was the Yankees in New York. This week is important in that the Royals are still working to clinch that playoff spot, but it feels like they can breathe and find their way to set things up for next month. But the Tigers are hanging around just enough that the Royals can’t get caught up in entirely looking ahead.

Here are the pitching matchups:

• Monday: RHP Reese Olson vs. RHP Seth Lugo

• Tuesday: RHP Casey Mize vs. LHP Cole Ragans

• Wednesday: LHP Tarik Skubal vs. RHP Alec Marsh (I think it’ll be Michael Lorenzen)

It sure seems like Olson is going to come off the IL after missing almost two months with a shoulder injury. When he went on the IL, he had a 3.23 ERA in 103 innings over 19 starts. He did give up seven unearned runs, which are still runs, but he was very good for them before he got hurt. He only threw five innings in two starts on his rehab assignment, so it’s fair to wonder how long he’ll go in this one, but he’s a good pitcher who leads with a slider that gets tons of whiffs. He’s made two starts against the Royals this year. One was excellent in a loss and the other was not so excellent and was done before he got through the third. He’s a tough draw.

Mize is making his fourth start since he spent exactly two months on the IL and he’s been…fine? Maybe that’s a bit too much given that he’s giving up 11 runs on 17 hits in 16 innings, but he’s only walked two batters in the three starts at least. And then they finish things up with Skubal, who has a 2.23 ERA in 161.2 innings over 26 starts against everyone who isn’t the Royals. He has a 4.91 ERA in 18.1 innings against the Royals in three starts. Does that mean the Royals are guaranteed to get to him? Of course not. But it does mean that they’ve done it before and a lot of teams can’t say that.

This is much more important for the Tigers than the Royals. Yes, it would make the clinch date closer if the Royals can dispatch them, but even if they get swept, they’d still hold a two game lead with nine to play, which isn’t a lot, but it’s more than it seems. Just one win out of three and they’re four up with nine to play. On the flip side, if the Royals sweep the Tigers, the playoff hopes are basically dead for Detroit. I’m a bit worried knowing that one team has so much more to gain. And after that, the Royals will welcome in the Giants, who have some young talent, but are basically toast. And that’ll conclude the home schedule, but hopefully only until they get their first home game in the ALDS.