Whimper By the Bay

Another night, another bad loss to a bad team for a Royals team that suddenly has lost their cushion.

I can remind you how long the season is. I can tell you that it’s a season of ebbs and flows. I can tell you how every team finds a tough stretch in the season, no matter how great of a season they’re having. I can tell you that, in today’s game, there are a lot of teams in the middle, in that range of 70 to 90 wins. Last season, 20 teams won between 70 and 90 games, which means that great starts will tend to regress to that mean. But none of it makes the results of the last two days any easier to take after we all thought the schedule getting a bit easier would help the Royals get back to winning.

I saw people mention they looked flat and lifeless. They absolutely did look both of those ways. I’ve said this before (far more than I’d like to have), but it has stuck with me for years that when a team isn’t scoring runs, they almost always look flat and lifeless. A casual (and even the not-so-casual) fan would likely look at a 2-1 loss very differently than a 9-8 loss even though the run differential and result is the same. Scoring runs means you look alive and awake. Not scoring runs means you look dead and asleep. The truth is that both are losses and both have their plusses and minuses.