For most of the year I’ve harped on the Royals’ inability to hit for any kind of power. In case you’ve missed it, they’re actually doing quite well in terms of batting average. They could do better in OBP, but the real problem is that almost all of their hits are singles. Today both teams combined for six hits; the Royals were the only team to gather an extra-base hit, and the only team to score a run. It’s not a coincidence!
Winners
Michael Wacha gets top billing today. When you shut out the opponent, the pitching has to get a lot of love. And he was electric. He threw seven scoreless innings and walked only one. He didn’t give up a hit until the seventh inning. No runner ever made it past first against him. Or against the other two pitchers, but we’ll get to them in a minute.
Wacha has really struggled this year when facing the batting order the third time through, but today he buckled down and got four outs of the five he faced in the sixth and seventh innings once the lineup turned over again. The Royals needed that with Hunter Harvey still entirely MIA and Lucas Erceg recently added to the rolls of the injured.
John Schreiber got the eighth inning and earned the win by shutting down the Tigers with two strikeouts. He did give up a walk, but we can’t really blame him for that one. Schreiber hasn’t gotten as much love as some of the other relievers, but he’s been fantastic for most of the season. He was on point again today.
Carlos Estévez took a lot of flak early this year, including from me, for not being as deadly to the opposition as last year’s closer, the aforementioned Erceg. He has quietly begun pitching much more effectively. There are fewer long at-bats and fewer baserunners when he’s on the mound than earlier this year. He was always good, but of late he’s been great, and today was no exception.
Nick Loftin would probably have made this list even if the eighth inning hadn’t gone the way it did. He had one of the Royals’ first two hits and then made a sensational diving catch in left-center field to keep the Tigers from putting two runners on in the seventh.
Then, in the eighth inning, he hit a one-out double before scoring the only run of the game, and so got most of the accolades after the game. As noted in the lead paragraph, it was the only extra-base hit in the entire game.
Loftin didn’t have a perfect game; after his earlier single, he was thrown out by a mile attempting to steal second. The broadcast crew tried to make excuses for him, but the Royals have got to be smarter about trying to get extra bases, and that includes trying to steal second in a close game from a tough pitcher. Sure, you need baserunners in scoring position, but when you get thrown out by as much as he did, you’re just giving away outs instead.
Vinnie Pasquantino made a niche for himself last season by consistently finding ways to drive runners in, whatever it took. This year, he’s been a bit lacking in that area – alongside all of his other hitting stats. However, he’s been heating up, and with one out in a tie game in the bottom of the eighth, he came through by driving a single to left to give the Royals the lead.
That’s just vintage Vinnie, taking a pitch well outside the strike zone and making sure he did enough with it to get the run across. Earlier in the season, he’d have swung too soon and either missed entirely or hit a weak groundball that did nothing useful. I like this version better.
Third base coach Vance Wilson and the Royals’ advance scouts deserve the maximum allowed credit for their positions after today’s win. For the second straight day, Wilson sent a runner home on a ball hit to left on what might have seemed a sketchy proposition, only for the ball to end up nowhere near where it needed to be to make the play close at home. The team did their homework on Riley Greene’s arm and came to the correct conclusion that they should test it. Had the pitching been a little better yesterday, it might have mattered. It did matter today.
Loser
Home plate umpire Nate Tomlinson was atrocious in this one. I noted earlier that Schreiber couldn’t be blamed for his walk. That’s because he threw four strikes to Dillon Dingler, only to have two of them called balls before Dingler eventually walked. Later in the inning, he saw another strike called a ball against Javy Báez before striking him out anyway. Tomlinson also allowed Mark Canha to pop out to the catcher after calling one of the four balls he watched as a strike. Complaining about balls and strikes is supposed to be the thing losers do, but really the ABS can’t come soon enough.
On a day when the team celebrated the retirement of Mike Moustakas, you might have expected third baseman Maikel Garcia to make a huge splash. Instead, it was Nick Loftin, who has made significant changes to his game after being demoted to the minors, and Vinnie Pasquantino, a left-handed hitting corner infielder some have demanded be demoted because of struggles during a competitive season after early-career success.
The Royals finish the month of May with a 15-13 record, following a 14-13 April. It’s good to put into perspective that, as bad as the losing stretches have been, the team is two-for-two in achieving winning months so far and remains in the thick of the playoff hunt.
The Royals have a chance to take the series from Detroit tomorrow. On paper, they should have the advantage in the pitching matchup. Staff ace Kris Bubic will go for Kansas City. The Tigers will counter with Keider Montero. Montero hasn’t been great this year and is only starting on the big league staff because of multiple injuries to their starting rotation. (What a blessing Noah Cameron has been, eh?) The game will start at 1:10 Central and be simulcast on KSMO for those of you without access to FanDuel or MLB TV.
