Whiffs, Weak Contact, Homers and Six-Game Winning Streaks

Another strong pitching performance paired with some home runs and the Royals just keep on winning.

The White Sox came into play Monday 19-8 when their opponent starts a lefty, so with Mike Minor on the mound, it didn’t seem like a great matchup for the Royals. Of course, two of the eight losses this year were to the Royals when Minor started, so at least there was that going for them. Still, the righty-heavy White Sox lineup with the added reinforcement of Eloy Jimenez was going to be a tough task for Minor. The winning streak seemed like it would be awfully tough to extend.

From the first batter of the game, though, Minor showed that he was on his game and the White Sox might have been a bit off theirs. In the first, he got two swinging strikes from Tim Anderson. Then Andrew Vaughn whiffed once. Then Jose Abreu decided to change things up and he watched three straight pitches, all called strikes. It was masterful. When it was all said and done, Minor threw 92 pitches and got swings on 50 of them. Of those 50 swings, he got 20 swings and misses. It was the most whiffs he’d gotten in a game since facing the Royals in May of 2019 and getting 21.

What I love about his outing is that he was getting the whiffs on all his pitches.

That’s some balance right there. His fastball had hitters largely off balance and his changeup was among the best I’ve seen from him this season. He took advantage of a White Sox lineup that really seemed to be guessing a lot. But what adds to the impressive performance is the amount of weak contact he got throughout this game.

The White Sox put 14 balls in play and only three of them were hard hit. None of those hard hit balls came in the first four innings with two coming in the fifth and one in the sixth. They hit three balls the entire game with an xBA of .500 or higher, so it wasn’t just Minor but he really set the tone with his first six innings of the game for the Royals fifth quality start in their last six games. Now he has a 3.68 ERA in four starts against the White Sox this year and has 24 strikeouts with nine walks in 22 innings. That’s pretty impressive against a team that really does hit lefty starters hard.

I think he benefited greatly from the White Sox timing just seeming off all game, especially Jimenez, but I also think he contributed to that. This swinging strike chart is just so impressive. Look at how he stayed out of the middle of the plate on these pitches:

Even on the pitches where the White Sox made contact, he was generally not in the middle.

That’s just a really impressive way to pitch and the only way to take on a lineup that can do what this lineup can do to lefties.

Of course, none of it would have mattered if not for the Royals getting the long ball going again. And for the second straight day, Jorge Soler was the star of the show, which is something that is both totally believable and also seemed impossible even two weeks ago. He ambushed Dallas Keuchel on the first pitch of the second inning.

Look at that swing. It’s absolutely perfect. This is 2019 Soler. This is the guy that if he was hitting like this all year, we might be talking about at least a somewhat different story this season. It’s both maddening and amazing to see him doing this over the last few games.

Through three, that massive home run was the only hit the Royals had. Hanser Alberto did reach when Keuchel hit him, but he was in total control. With one out in the fourth inning, I was pretty sure Soler wasn’t going to see the same sinker he saw in the second. I was shocked when the first pitch was a slider that caught too much of the plate. I think Soler was too because he watched it go by. Then he saw a four-seamer on the inside corner that was just a really good pitch. And then Keuchel threw a cutter that didn’t quite cut enough.

This guy is on a freaking heater. It was his ninth career two-homer game. He now has seven home runs in his last 11 games and six in his last six. He only has 13 all season, so, yeah, this is pretty crazy. In fact, those seven home runs in 11 games are the most by any Royals player this season in an 11-game span, beating out Salvador Perez’s heater when he also had back-to-back multi-homer games. Only Kyle Schwarber, Shohei Ohtani, Joey Gallo, Jose Altuve and Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. have more homers in an 11-game stretch than Soler’s seven. It’s pretty impressive.

It also didn’t hurt that Andrew Benintendi, who had been struggling pretty mightily since coming off the IL took one the other way on a pitch right down the middle to give the Royals their fourth run.

That run, of course, was very important as Scott Barlow struggled a bit in the ninth in his second inning of work, but he ultimately got the save on, of course, a softly hit ball that found Whit Merrifield’s glove and found Adam Engel wandering to get doubled off.

That’s how you get to six wins in a row.

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Crown Jewel

Success on the Hard Stuff

Would you believe that the Royals have been one of the best offenses in baseball against pitches 96+ MPH? I was shocked by it. When I was writing the series preview for Royals Review, I wanted to see how the White Sox fared against hard fastballs, so I plugged in fastballs at 96 MPH or harder and saw that they were sort of middle of the pack and when I zoomed out a bit, I saw the Royals had the best average in baseball against elite velocity and the third best slugging percentage. They also have the eight best average exit velocity. I don’t know what was so surprising to me, but I guess it’s because we’ve seen them struggle a lot, but it’s pretty impressive that they’ve been able to be successful against that with velocity so high on pretty much every pitching staff.

As a reason teams might be higher on Whit Merrifield than I thought they would be, he’s .375 hitter with a .475 SLG on pitches that hard. We remember well how big of a deal it was in 2015 that the Royals hit those fastballs well and there’s even more of it today than there was then, so that’s worth noting. Other excellent Royals hitters against those velocities are Salvador Perez (.366 average, .512 SLG), Jorge Soler (.292 average, .667 SLG) and Carlos Santana (.294 average, .794 SLG). So maybe Soler’s value goes up a bit to a contender knowing they’ll see a lot of that velocity in the postseason.