Weekend in Review: Young Players Usage, Foul Balls and Two Games in One Day

The weekend to review was really only a day, but this train rolls on.

It is incredibly rare for a team to have three consecutive days off during a season without those days off including an All-Star Game, but due to a scheduled day off on Thursday and two straight rainouts, the Royals were off from Thursday through Saturday. One could maybe argue that they were actually off on Wednesday too, given the performance. But when they took the field yesterday at 12:35 CDT, they hadn’t been on a field in about 93 hours. For a team playing as poorly as the Royals with so few players actually playing well, the time off couldn’t do anything but help. I don’t think anyone expected a brand new identity or anything, but taking some time to regroup had the chance to at least be a positive.

I think it remains to be seen if there’s anything to that, but they did score six runs in their first game, including a late-inning comeback that was something we hadn’t exactly seen from them before this season. And Salvador Perez, who I believe had his last hit sometime during last season had two hits in each of the two games. I’ll get to that in a bit, but if he can get going, that changes the equation at least somewhat for a Royals team that has been needing its run producer to actually, you know, produce runs. Now, Whit Merrifield, though? That’s another story.

Kurtis Seaboldt 🇺🇦 @KSeaboldt

Whit Merrifield reached 100 AB today. He currently has the lowest BA (.140), OBP (.183), SLG (.170), and OPS (.353) in MLB for a player with at least 100 AB. His SLG is 73 points lower than the next-lowest in MLB, his OPS is 142 points lower than the next-lowest.

So, uh, yeah, that’s bad. I’d say the guy could use a day off, but he already had three in a row and then went 0 for 7, though he did have a sacrifice fly. I wrote about this a couple weeks ago when I looked at the struggling Royals bats, but I don’t believe Merrifield is just done done. He’s struggling badly with the fastball with his bat looking extra slow. The one thing to keep in mind with that is that when a hitter’s timing is a mess, like Merrifield’s appears to be, their bat looks slow against fastballs. I don’t know what will get him back on track, but whether he’s hitting first, second, fifth or sixth in this lineup, he’s important to this team. Which leads me to my first point.

Playing the Young Guys

The Royals are such a frustrating organization for so many reasons, but their handling of young players, at times, is probably the most frustrating. We’ve seen it with Edward Olivares and Kyle Isbel this season, and those are some of the more glaring examples. But when the Royals called up Emmanuel Rivera following Carlos Santana’s injury, they had an opportunity to back off Merrifield a bit and get Rivera some playing time. That would mostly require moving Nicky Lopez back to second again and Bobby Witt Jr. to shortstop, his natural position, but they could play Rivera at third most days in that alignment. Do I believe Rivera is a part of the future? I don’t, if I’m being honest, but we’ll never know if they don’t give it a shot. He did, after all, hit .288/.382/.530 this year in 76 AAA plate appearances and .286/.348/.592 in 282 last year.

The Royals had been so hesitant to give Olivares a chance and all he’s done since he started getting a real chance was hit .462/.500/.577 in 28 plate appearances. The quad injury he sustained yesterday is unfortunate because he was finally getting that opportunity to show what he could do. It was about time. Hopefully he isn’t out long, but Mike Matheny didn’t sound especially hopeful between games yesterday. By the time you read this, we might even know the answer to how long he'll be out, but it’s rough. And all the more reason for the Royals to see what they can with Rivera while they can. I hope he continues to get more chances after working a big walk in the first game yesterday and going 2 for 4 in the second.

Late edit: About a minute after I sent this edition, the lineup for today’s game came out with Ryan O’Hearn in there over Kyle Isbel/Emmanuel Rivera. Point proven. Thanks, Royals!

Foul Balls Galore

Boy do Royals pitchers allow a lot of foul balls. I’ll get into that shortly when I talk about the games, but if it seems like the Royals give up a lot of foul balls, it seems like it because it’s accurate. Heading into action yesterday, the Royals had allowed foul balls on 27.1 percent of two-strike pitches. The second-worst team in that stat was the Houston Astros at 24.6 percent. The difference between first and second was the same as the difference between second and 24th. Daniel Lynch didn’t help that any with 16 foul balls on 40 two-strike pitches yesterday in the second game.

Some of it is approach, but being unable to put hitters away is the hallmark of a staff that just isn’t prepared. I don’t think anyone could argue that someone like Lynch couldn’t get the same swings and misses that he does in the first couple pitches. But this happens far too often and teams know exactly where the Royals are going with their pitches with two strikes enough that they’re able to spoil pitches. While being unprepared is something I’ve mentioned a lot with this coaching staff, I think some of it is the way the game is called from behind the plate. I’ve never been enamored with Salvador Perez’s game-calling. Pitchers love throwing to him, at least that’s what they say, and that’s great, but he has struggled at times with pitch calling and becoming too predictable. If they can fix this issue, that’s when the young staff can start to take the next step.

The Games

Sunday, Game One - Royals 6, Orioles 4

I’m not going to go crazy in depth here for two reasons. One, it was just yesterday for both of these games. But two, I’m lucky enough to have a bunch of wonderful mothers in my life and my wife and I had all of those mothers in our families over to our house and I didn’t get to focus as much on baseball as normal. It was a great reason, and I didn’t regret a second of it. I did watch the games, even if they weren’t as closely as normal and what I saw from Greinke was maybe his worst start of the year.

And he still got through it with two earned runs allowed and no walks over 5.2 innings. I continue to have no idea how Greinke keeps this up. Before yesterday, there was at least a path to understanding. With hardly any walks and fewer hits than innings pitched, he had a sub-1.00 WHIP. When you’re allowing that few runners, you can work around a lack of strikeouts. But yesterday, he gave up a ridiculous 10 hits in 5.2 innings. The Orioles went outside the strike zone to get a couple of those hits on pitches that I would never want Greinke to stop throwing.

He gave up five hits on balls with an exit velocity of 81.1 MPH or slower. Two more were balls that wouldn’t have even been classified as hard-hit. And then three more were hit hard, over 100 MPH. This goes to show just how difficult it is to live as a pitch-to-contact guy. Sometimes those balls find a hole, no matter how good your defense is behind you. But Greinke just continued to do this thing, against all odds and kept the Royals in the game.

The offense, though, didn’t benefit much from the time off. I didn’t find myself especially impressed with Jordan Lyles, but he was incredibly efficient. I’ve talked about this before, but I think the Royals can be pretty passive at times on first pitches and Lyles filled the zone to start counts.

They took seven called first strikes, which is not terrible honestly. But part of the reason why pitchers aren’t afraid to challenge them is because they simply don’t have the bats to stop the challenges. And in this one, it was no different. They made six outs on the first pitch and picked up three singles and a double. But you see how many pitches were actually in the zone with many in a spot that a hitter should be able to pounce. I know we talk quite a bit about plate discipline, but sometimes swinging early can be huge. This team is hitting so poorly right now that I’m not sure what the answer is.

But with the score 4-3 Orioles in the eighth, they brought in a familiar face, Jorge Lopez. Lopez has been outstanding this year and has looked like the pitcher I thought he’d become out of the bullpen. And then he suddenly looked a lot like the guy we saw in Kansas City. He gave up a single to Perez, his first in 27 at bats and then Ryan O’Hearn actually did something, hitting a sacrifice fly to tie the game.

And then in the ninth, with two outs, Nicky Lopez hit a pretty weak grounder to Rougned Odor that should have ended it, but Odor made an error. Then Lopez threw a pickoff away and Lopez got to third. That’s when Michael A. Taylor, who came into the game to run for Olivares, hit a rocket single to left to give the Royals the lead. An Andrew Benintendi single was followed by another hit by Perez with runners on to give the Royals an insurance run they wouldn’t need but it was nice to have.

Sunday, Game Two - Orioles 4, Royals 2

Lynch looked…okay at times. And not so okay at other times. The good is that Lynch had 17 whiffs in the game. That’s the most of any Royals pitcher this season. The second most is Lynch with 15. The third most is Lynch with 12. And the fourth most is Lynch with 10. Yes, he’s the only Royals pitcher to get double-digit whiffs in a game and he’s now done it in four of his five starts.

I thought his fastball up in the zone was great yesterday.

Those are the swings and misses on his fastball, which is exactly where the game is headed (has gone?). But I thought he got himself in some trouble when he tried to climb the ladder with his fastball a little too often. I thought his slider looked sharp and he got six whiffs on 17 swings. I actually thought his changeup looked quite good too. He was getting weak contact and a few whiffs on it. I would have liked to see a few more changeups down after the fastball up didn’t work when it didn’t work.

And even with all the swings and misses, he threw 95 pitches and couldn’t even get out of the fourth inning. A lot of that is because of a whopping 30 foul balls allowed, which is the second most allowed by a Royals pitcher in a game this year. First is Lynch with 31. Third is Lynch with 26.

We can talk about walking Chris Owings twice, which immediately disqualifies you from having a good start. Or we can talk about giving up three runs in the first inning for the second time this season. But there is a definite ceiling on a guy like Lynch as long as he isn’t able to put guys away. Like I said above, 14 of those 30 foul balls were with two strikes. That wouldn’t have changed much yesterday as he was only hurt by one two-strike foul ball prior to a hit in the first. But on the whole, that’s the next step for Lynch.

He’s clearly getting the whiffs he wasn’t consistently getting last year. Now he needs to figure out how to put hitters away more consistently. And if he can do that, I have faith that he can actually be a legitimate number two starter or maybe even better. It’s easy to look past Lynch because he he hasn’t been dominant from the word “go” but he’s also yet to reach 100 big league innings, so I think we need to see these swings and misses as the next step and be hopeful that he can continue to learn and get to that next step.

If you’re not entirely convinced, just take a look at how nasty some of these pitches are.

Slider:

Fastball:

Changeup:

And while the offense was once again held down, I will say that I thought Bruce Zimmermann looked great. He was locating everything and mixing pitches extremely well. A scuffling offense like the Royals helps a pitcher, of course, but he was very much on his game yesterday. On the plus side, like I mentioned, Perez had two more hits for four total on the day. Hunter Dozier also had two hits and MJ Melendez ripped a double against a lefty and showed off some very good speed. No, not everything is fixed and losing Olivares hurts this team with the way he was playing, but I felt a little better about them after yesterday than I have in awhile. Not a lot, but a little.

What’s Next

The Royals get the ol’ 11am local time start for the makeup from one of the rainouts over the weekend. It’ll be Carlos Hernandez against Tyler Wells. If you’re reading this late enough, you’ll know how that game went. Then they hop on a plane to go to Texas to take on a Rangers club that spent an awful lot of money but they’re still not quite there just yet. They’ll face two lefties in that series, which isn’t great for a team that has struggled against lefty starters this year. So that’s concerning, especially when you remember that the Rangers swept the Royals in their park last season. After that, they head to Colorado to face a team that reminds me of last year’s Royals. They have a good record, but it doesn’t quite make sense how they’ve gotten there. As it stands right now, they’ll get two more lefties in that series.

I mentioned this on Royals Review on Friday, but this road trip is huge. They currently sit at 9-16. If they can win five games on this trip, meaning they need to finish 4-3), they can come home at 13-19. That’s not great, but it provides some hope with eight games in the division on the next homestand. If you want to look ahead even more and they can go 5-3 in those eight games and be sitting at 18-22, you feel like they have a shot given that they haven’t exactly played well. I’m not predicting it, but that’s where they need to be to make baseball beyond the 40-game mark relevant.