Whiffs and Rockets: The Daniel Lynch Story

The angel on one shoulder fought with the devil on the other all night, but no matter your thoughts on Lynch, he validated them last night.

Earlier this week, JJ Picollo did his regular appearance on 610 Sports with Cody Tapp and Alex Gold and had an interesting comment regarding last night’s starter Daniel Lynch and Tuesday night’s starter Kris Bubic. He said, “(They) are getting to the points in their careers where it’s in their hands. We’re being patient but they’re going to have to take control of their careers.” I thought it was a little harsh and a little weird. For Bubic, it’s a little different because he pitched a “full” season in 2020, but for Lynch, he came into last night’s start with 180 career innings. From the organization that was adamant young hitters need 1500 plate appearances before you know what they are, to say that about a young pitcher after 180 innings struck me as very weird.

And in his first start since those comments, Lynch basically showed a little bit of everything, both good and bad. If you believe Lynch is a future rotation stalwart and can be a key starter in a playoff series, you saw what you wanted to see last night. If you believe Lynch is a bust who will be lucky to be a middle reliever sometime soon, you saw something that corroborated your previous opinion. As I said with Bubic, I’ll reserve judgment on Lynch until I see who is leading the coaching staff on the pitching side moving forward, but it’s just so easy to see why he’s so tantalizing.

The good of it is the pitch mix - four-seam fastball, slider, knuckle curve and changeup - and the fact that he was willing to use all four pitches. I thought his changeup was fantastic against the Tigers last weekend in a bad start and I was hoping to see it again in this one. He threw 14 of them, which was a far cry from the 28 in his last start, but I thought it was good again, though not quite as good. He got a weak groundout with it to the first batter of the game and then gave up an infield single a couple batters later, but that was about it for the changeup.

Where you get excited for Lynch is what he was able to do with this fastball/slider combination. The numbers are impressive. He had seven whiffs on his fastball on 19 swings and six whiffs on his slider on 16 swings. That kind of swing and miss is something the Royals staff doesn’t typically do well, so to see it was encouraging. Those 16 whiffs are tied for the fifth most in a start in his career. Ultimately, it seemed like he did what he wanted with his fastball, which was keep it up in the zone.

He may have wanted it a bit higher than that generally, but it was probably what he was looking for. And you can see it was hopping.

The slider was pretty good too. I think he had a game plan to put it up and in to righties and got it there, but also did a generally nice job of keeping it off the plate and in.

Though there were obvious mistakes, he got a couple of bad swings on that slider.

And as happened with his last start in Minnesota, his best work seemed to be done in his last couple of innings. He threw 24 pitches in the first, a good 13 in the second and then 26 in a scoreless third, but in the fourth and fifth, he threw 33 pitches and even threw his hardest fastball of the season on his 96th and final pitch of the game to strike out Gio Urshela.

In all, he struck out eight and walked just two. You’ll take those numbers all day.

But man, when he’s not showing why he could potentially dominate a team in October, he’s showing why you may not be able to count on him. It’s all those flames under the “Hard Hit” column. Take the second at bat of the game, facing Carlos Correa. This is a great hitter who is on fire right now, so it’s not an easy at bat to navigate. but Lynch got to 2-2 working mostly at the top of the zone. He tried to get a chase on a slider that just wasn’t close enough. On 3-2, he put a fastball arm side and up and I thought the spot was good, but Correa spoiled it. He tried a slider, but I can’t imagine he wanted it up and Correa absolutely mauled it.

Okay, no harm, no foul (well, it was foul, but you get it). It’s just a long non-pitch essentially, but Correa hit it 112.4 MPH and 453 feet. You know I always say that pitching is about changing timing and changing eye levels. Lynch did throw a fastball coming off the slider, but he threw it in basically the exact same spot. Think about it, though. If Correa was a bit ahead of 86.4 MPH, what’s going to happen if his bat gears up for the 94.9 MPH fastball?

Well, uh, that. Why throw a pitch there? Some of that is on Salvador Perez calling the pitch because Lynch hit his spot perfectly. But this is an area where I’d like to see Lynch take Picollo’s advice and take charge there. I know it’s sacrilegious to shake off Perez, but I’d like to see him either have confidence in throwing a better slider than the 2-2 pitch or in using that changeup that was just so successful for him in his last start.

The Royals actually tied the game in the top of the second, which should be worth a win for them the way the offense has been going, particularly on the road, but Lynch came out and threw one of his softer fastballs to Gilberto Celestino, who is not a good hitter, and Celestino hit it to center about 10 MPH harder than it came in for a double. Nick Gordon came up next. Now, he’s become a much better hitter, but against lefties, he handles one pitch decently and that’s a slider. So Lynch started him off with one off the plate that he took and then he gave him a gift that Gordon simply didn’t miss.

Unlike the Correa homer, he obviously missed his spot badly and ultimately that cost the team the game. You’d like your offense to be able to overcome three runs because the bullpen did a great job keeping the Twins at three, but you also would like to see Lynch be able to get deeper. But he couldn’t because he threw so many pitches. We’ve talked about this before with him. In that first at bat against Correa, it took four pitches to decide the at bat after it got to two strikes. He threw 35 pitches after he got to two strikes on a hitter. Some of those ended the at bat, and thank goodness for Jose Miranda and his two double plays after Lynch just decided to walk Correa twice following that first at bat, but he just has to put hitters away faster.

He had an at bat where he struck out Gordon later in the game, but he had him 0-2 and it still took 10 pitches to end things. He gave up 12 balls in play in the game. 10 of them were hard hit and eight were hit at 100 MPH or harder. His whiffs allowed him to be successful, but the hard-hit balls and the high pitch counts have to be figured out. There was a fantastic, and tough to read, article on The Athletic yesterday from former Royals beat writers Rustin Dodd and Alec Lewis about the pitching issues. One quote really stood out to me.

“If these stud pitchers — Kowar, Lynch, Singer, all these guys — had they been Dodgers or Rays or Guardians, they would be very, very good,” said one rival pro scout, referencing three clubs seen as at the forefront of pitching development. “But unfortunately … they haven’t been taught how to move well. They haven’t been introduced to the metrics that gives them an idea of how they can pitch most effectively.”

Lynch’s game yesterday is exactly why you can see what scouts see in him. I had one scout of another team tell me “I hope your guys give up on Lynch so we can fix him.” What’s done is done. The Royals can’t change the past, but if they don’t do something to fix it moving forward, they’re in deep trouble because someone is going to get their hands on Lynch and it’ll be all the whiffs without all the rockets.

I do want to touch on a couple of positives. The Royals bullpen, as I said, was nails again. Collin Snider and Dylan Coleman combined for three scoreless innings with just one hit allowed. In September, the bullpen has actually been really, really good with a 2.56 ERA, 3.05 FIP and a 26.7 percent walk rate, which is good for eighth in all of baseball. But maybe more important is their 7.9 percent walk rate, which is 10th in baseball.

Coleman, Snider, Jose Cuas, Scott Barlow and Amir Garrett have been quite good. Anthony Misiewicz is interesting because he’s striking out 42.3 percent of hitters, but has given up a couple of runs. Brad Keller has been bad. Carlos Hernandez has shown why they want to try it, but the results haven’t been good. Still, nice to see some actual quality work out there. When you think about next year’s bullpen and you think about putting Barlow and Coleman with a hopefully healthy Josh Staumont and someone who steps up, you can start to see how that unit could be much better in 2023.

And, of course, Salvy hit another homer in Minnesota.

While he was batting, I was just looking up when his last homer was because it seemed like it had been awhile. It had, it was September 6. Unfortunately it just wasn’t enough, but you have to love that he hit his 21st homer on Roberto Clemente Day at least. If only it was in a win. Maybe someday.