Whit Finally Hits, Royals Finally Win

It's been a terrible start to the season, but Whit Merrifield got it going and led the Royals to a much-needed win

It would be easy to look at the Royals 8-2 win over the Rangers last night and still pick out things that need work. And I’m going to do that because that’s part of the story. But it’s been kind of a depressing few days around these parts and I think we could all use a happy day thinking about the Royals. A big win can help to calm things down at least until the start of the next game and when the second-lowest scoring offense in baseball (coming into the day) scores eight runs, that’s reason to celebrate.

But what’s even more reason to celebrate is that they scored those runs and a lot of it was because of the play of Whit Merrifield. I’ve been very critical of both Merrifield and the way the organization has handled him and while I don’t think everything now is, as he said last year, peaches and roses, it’s nice to see some positive signs for the guy who has been one of, if not the, best players on this team for the past few seasons.

The obvious is that he went 3 for 4 with his first home run of the season and scored four runs. I can analyze him until I’m blue in the face, but that stat line alone is cause for celebration. But you might recall what I wrote about yesterday with regard to pitches in the heart of the plate. Merrifield was one of the worst offenders, having gone a paltry 4 for 48. Here are the final pitches of his four at bats yesterday.

Oh yeah, that’s much better. In the third inning, he stepped to the plate to face Kolby Allard and he simply picked on the first pitch he saw.

That’s a nice swing, a great result and instant offense. That looked a lot more like the Merrifield we’ve been watching since 2016 than the guy we’ve seen over the first month or so of the season. I think I’ve said this before, so I apologize if I’m repeating myself, but I was told something awhile back that when a hitter’s timing is a mess, they’ll look like their bat is slow. It’s because they’re stuck in the middle of breaking pitches and fastballs. They end up unable to hit either, but missing on the fastball is something that sticks out.

And Merrifield came into the night hitting .105 with two doubles against fastballs. His bat looked slow. I will give some credit to him and say that Tuesday night looked much better, albeit without the results. So when he hit that home run on a fastball, it was only vaguely surprising. Since I didn’t write about Tuesday’s game specifically, this probably was overlooked, but here was his last swing of the night.

I’m not sure if Statcast was so surprised that he hit that ball and hit it hard that it didn’t register the exit velocity, but it didn’t. So I don’t know how hard it was. But I do know that it was one of the best swings we’ve seen from Merrifield all season. He was right on a 94.8 MPH sinker from Joe Barlow and it took a phenomenal play from Kole Calhoun to retire him. With all the talk of his bad luck, that was actually bad luck. Previously, he hit a good changeup into center field for an RBI single and had a hard-hit groundout on a 93.4 MPH sinker from Martin Perez. I don’t know if I would have said the tide was turning, but he looked better.

You might remember that I was confident a couple of weeks ago when I wrote the fact or fiction look at struggling hitters that he’d bounce back. That isn’t to pat myself on the back. Basically, the only two options with Merrifield were that he had completely lost any ability to hit or is in decline and the skills aren’t what they used to be, so slumps are a little longer and a little deeper. He’s not out of the slump yet by any stretch, but a 3 for 4 day after a 1 for 4 day with a couple hard-hit outs tells me that he might be about to start the climb out of the hole he’s dug.

They need him badly. He’s now scored at least one run in five games this year. The Royals are 4-1 when he scores. He scored at least one run in 74 games last year. They were 47-27 last year when he scored. They were 18-9 in 2020. They were 41-38 in 2019. That may seem like a so-so record, but that team lost 103 games. The point is that when Merrifield is going good, he scores runs. And when he scores runs, the Royals win games.

Whether this is the start of something big for him (and he needs a massive hot streak to get his numbers to respectable) or just a one-time blip, I think it’s something to both note and to celebrate.

Bullpen Comes Through All Game

Yesterday was also noteworthy because it was the first bullpen game of the year. Well at least the first one where the Royals were expecting to only get a short start and then turn it over to the rest of the bullpen. And Gabe Speier set the tone. He threw two perfect innings with one strikeout. Basically he did what he’s done all season and what he did last season too. He got called back up to the big leagues in mid-September and he gave up just one earned run in 7.2 innings. But the biggest thing to mention is he didn’t walk anyone.

And now he’s pitched in eight games in 2022, spanning 11.1 innings. And he hasn’t walked anyone. No, he isn’t a strikeout artist, but there’s something useful about a guy like Speier who also has given lefties fits being able to come in and not issue a free pass. I didn’t watch him in the minors, but the times I saw him in 2019 and 2020, I didn’t see a big league future at all. Now, in my defense, he did walk 10 in 13 innings between the two seasons, but I just didn’t see it and I’m thinking I was absolutely dead wrong on that.

What’s super interesting about this outing is that he used his sinker and four-seamer for 15 of his 17 pitches. And that’s interesting because as a reliever previously he had used his slider more than anything. And it was good! He had previously thrown the slider 42.9 percent of the time and opponents were just 2 for 15 on it without an extra base hit. But he threw it just twice against the Rangers and got a ton of weak contact.

Maybe this is only interesting to me because I’m a nerd, but he turned it over to Joel Payamps, who also has used his slider more than anything and I thought maybe Payamps would go fastball heavy. But nope, he went with his slider. And good lord was he good in this game. He threw 13 sliders and got swings on six of them and whiffs on five of those six swings. Not a single ball was put in play and three more sliders were called strikes. That means nine of the 13 sliders he threw were strikes.

But his fastball was great too. Take a look at this strikeout of Marcus Semien in the third.

That ended the inning after the Rangers put their first runner on base. Payamps running it up there at 96.8 MPH isn’t what I was expecting to see in this game. That was the hardest fastball he’d thrown all year until he threw one harder the next inning. Anyway, he was fantastic as well, giving the Royals three shutout innings with just two hits allowed and five strikeouts.

Collin Snider continued a trend where he got himself in trouble and gave up a home run to Brad Miller, but he was relieved by Taylor Clarke, who like Speier has yet to walk a batter in what is now 12 innings pitched this season. Clarke was good in his first inning, but gave up a couple hits in the second and needed Scott Barlow to bail him out. And boy did he.

That was Barlow’s second pitch. He’d throw one more to get Semien on a groundout and ended up with three outs on three pitches. If not for the offense scoring four runs in the top of the ninth, he’d have stayed out there for the save, but instead it gave Kris Bubic a shot in relief.

And I wonder if that relief outing may have saved his season and maybe even changed the course of his career. Maybe that’s way too dramatic, but I’m also not so sure. He kind of farted around with Andy Ibañez to start the inning and got him to ground out to short on a hard-hit 3-2 pitch. Then he threw a 94.3 MPH fastball to Corey Seager that was hit on a line and got out in a hurry. This is where I’m curious and hopeful that everything may have changed.

Bubic pitched angry. It was in control angry, but it was angry. He started Adolis Garcia off with a good changeup. Then he went to the fastball. It was 96.2 MPH for a strike in the same spot the first pitch changeup was. And then he uncoiled the hardest pitch he’s thrown in the big leagues.

Yep, 97 MPH cheese right past him. He ended his outing with two straight fastballs at 95.9 MPH and 95.8 MPH to get Nick Solak to end the game. Maybe it means nothing, but you know I’ve droned on enough about how he needs to throw harder to make everything work. Sometimes you just have to do it to see it click. I know he probably can’t maintain 95-97 over the course of a start. Actually, I don’t know that, but I assume he can’t. But his fastball was averaging 91.2 as a starter. I know unequivocally there is more in that tank and if he can just average a couple miles per hour more than that, I think he can become a difference maker in a rotation. Hopefully last night was the start of that.

Big Pinch Hit

I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about Emmanuel Rivera’s pinch hit triple in the top of the ninth inning. The bottom of the ninth was about to be at least a little more stressful than it was because after Merrifield and Nicky Lopez started the ninth with singles, Bobby Witt Jr. struck ou and Andrew Benintendi flew out, but not deep enough to get Merrifield home. The Rangers intentionally walked Salvador Perez and the Royals pinch hit for their golden boy Ryan O’Hearn with Rivera.

He was behind the fastball, but hit in the right spot. It rolled a bit and he was able to get to third to score all three runs. I’d say it was pretty noteworthy.

Nick Kappel @NickKappel

Emmanuel Rivera is the first player in @Royals history to record a pinch-hit, bases-clearing triple.

The Royals spent the whole game absolutely pissing away chances and being fairly lucky that they came away with what they did until that ninth inning. Witt had a big double in the fifth to score two and then hit a dribbler in the right spot to score the fourth. But Rivera’s triple broke it open. Maybe that relaxes the offense, maybe it doesn’t. But for one minute, all the trouble with runners on and runners in scoring position felt like a lot less of a big deal.

Heasley’s Debut

And finally, the Royals officially announced that Jonathan Heasley would make his 2022 debut at the big league level tonight. I’m looking forward to seeing him because reports on him out of Omaha are very good. I’ve said before that I haven’t gotten to see the same Heasley in the big leagues that I’ve seen in the minors, so with him throwing the ball well, I’m excited to see what he can do in his second time up, pitching to a struggling lineup.

The roster move may be announced by the time you read this, but I’m very curious what direction they go here. I think the easy bet is to send Bubic down and if you’re wondering why they didn’t do that already if they were going to, the easy answer is that they were trying to conserve options since you can only send someone down five times now in a season. If they had sent Bubic down after his last start and brought in a reliever, they’d have had to option that reliever and waste one of the five. Maybe that comes in handy later and with a rested bullpen, that was something they didn’t need to do. That’s just a theory, mind you, but it does make some sense.

Other options could be Ronald Bolaños who has struggled with control in the majors, but has had okay results. Or you could see a surprise like Dylan Coleman or maybe even Snider, who has been struggling recently. I don’t think it’ll be a bat going down as they’re already only playing with a three-man bench and will have to be in compliance with the 13-pitcher maximum in a couple weeks.

So all in all, last night was a night that’s been few and far between for Royals fans lately and I’m glad we get to celebrate that when we can.