Weekend in Review: Eight is Great for the Royals

What if the Royals never lose again? I don’t just mean this year, but for all of eternity. That would be pretty cool. Okay, fine, it won’t go that way, but what a homestand and what a weekend. They’ve only swept five series all year, and two of them were this past week on this past homestand. Can’t complain about that. They’ve now won 17 of their past 21 at home and are 36-30 at Kauffman Stadium. If you do some quick math, you know they were 19-26 at home before they beat the Phillies on a Sunday afternoon (and then bludgeoned them the next day), but 36-30 at home will work. It’s the 22-44 on the road that has me concerned, particularly for the next week.

But it’s just nice to see them play winning baseball, and specifically to do it against a team fighting for something. It’s one thing to beat the A’s and basically just wait until they put some relievers in the game to be able to come back. But the Tigers, while not what I’d call a good team, are (or were) in the playoff race. Yes, they traded Tarik Skubal and Casey Mize, and yes, Riley Greene is on the IL, but they have (had?) fought back amazingly, coming from 18 games under .500 to be right back in it. They’ve now lost eight of nine, so maybe they’re playing so poorly that they should be thought of in the same regard as the A’s at this moment, but wins are wins.

Are the Royals in the race? Well no. They’re 7.5 back with 30 to play. That alone is daunting. They also have to pass the Tigers, Mariners, Orioles, Twins, Blue Jays, Rangers and Guardians. Generally, being behind half the league is a bad thing. We talked about it on the podcast last night that you can check out below, but they’re going to need to gain like three or four games in the next 10 and pass at least three teams before I’ll think they’re really in it. It’s a shame too because they hold the tiebreaker over three of the teams ahead of them (Detroit, Seattle, Minnesota) and could hold the tiebreaker over Cleveland and Toronto when it’s all said and done. So for now it’s just a fun story that their playoff odds have jumped to 0.1 percent.

Sometimes people say that stranger things have happened. I honestly don’t think they have. I’m not sure a team has been 24 games below .500 with less than a quarter of the season to go and made the playoffs. I’m not dumb enough to guarantee that it won’t happen this year, though I feel pretty confident in saying it won’t. But that doesn’t mean I’m not curious of what the standings look like. And I’ll tell you something I’ll probably say a lot over the next few weeks. That’s more fun than not caring at all.

This week, Soren and I looked at the long winning streak and what it means, along with Daniel Lynch IV getting a shot, the bullpen and how it’s improved, the Royals’ best starter, the new stadium, and more. Make sure to give us a listen. You can either watch the podcast here or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

The long winning streak has brought back an old trope that the Royals “always do this.” They have a great finish, give false hope, and then everyone’s upset. I wrote about this three years ago after their last perfect homestand. It wasn’t true then. It’s not true now.

Since 1995, the Royals have played in 31 seasons that featured two halves (2020 obviously doesn’t count here). They’ve been better in the second half in 18 of 31 seasons. You’d probably expect about half, but they have such terrible first halves that I’ll bet 18/31 makes sense. But in only 10 of those seasons, their second-half winning percentage was at least .050 higher than the first half. It’s important to keep in mind that better isn’t always good. An ugly second-half winning percentage may be “better” than the first half, but who cares when it’s .413, like in 2006?

Three years ago, I listed .450 as the minimum winning percentage for a second half to be relevant. That’s a 73-win season over 162 games, which is at least not 90 losses. I looked at years that combined that with at least a .040 improvement in winning percentage. I bumped the threshold to .050 because I think it makes a little more sense as far as a demonstrable difference. About half the seasons cleared .450 in the second half (only 10 in the first half did), but only seven also improved by .050: 1996, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2018, 2021 and 2025.

Of those seven, 1996, 2018 and 2021 clearly meant nothing. I think 2011 mattered because the young core was finally in place, even if the playoff run came later. 2013 led directly into 2014’s World Series run. We know why 2014 was relevant. I think you could argue about last year’s run, but I also think that calling it meaningless is revisionist. It did nothing for this year, obviously, but they were coming off a playoff year and contending again. The other three +.050 second halves that didn’t clear .450 were 2016, 2019 and 2023. The first two were meaningless. The latest set up a playoff season.

Look, here’s the bottom line. The Royals are often better in the second half, but it’s not nearly to the level that many would lead you to believe. And when they are, it has meant something roughly half the time. I’d guess the split isn’t all that different for most teams. The Royals just have more bad first halves to climb out of. My advice is the same I gave three years ago. You can take it or leave it. But enjoy this. Watching winning baseball is more fun than watching losing baseball.

I was extremely curious to see Noah Cameron face this Tigers offense for a second time since he started calling his own pitches. They were the first team he faced in this run, and he was dominant over seven innings. But you might recall that his day started in the second inning as Beck Way opened for him. He got the start in this one, and the final results were very good from a run-prevention standpoint, but there were some reasons to pause.

Look, nobody is going to say no to five innings and no runs, so I’m not going to complain too much here, but he just struggled to put guys away, particularly with two outs. He needed 85 pitches to get through five innings, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. Here are his pitches by inning to get the first two outs:

1st - 7
2nd - 10
3rd - 8
4th - 6
5th - 9

That’s 40 total pitches. He walked the second man of the second inning, so he faced 11 batters to get these 10 outs. Now here are his pitches by inning after he recorded two outs:

1st - 4
2nd - 2
3rd - 12
4th - 18
5th - 9

By simple math, you know that’s 45 pitches to get five outs from nine batters. It was frustrating to watch, especially when you see how efficient the first two innings were. Hell, through 2.2 innings, he’d thrown 31 pitches to get eight outs on nine batters. But when the lineup turned over, the Tigers really went to work against him. We’ve seen the Royals give up some back-breaking two-out runs, so it’s not that two-out rallies can’t hurt, but they do make it harder for the opponent. Even in a lot of trouble, he was just one out away from getting out of it most of the time. He finally actually had his first 1-2-3 inning in his final frame. But I don’t have a problem with him getting lifted after 85 pitches, particularly after throwing 115 the last time out.

It just felt like his command wasn’t quite there. He only started 10 of 20 batters with a strike. He wasn’t hit hard at all, but he was just sort of spraying around the zone. He got a decent amount of chase, but not many whiffs. It was just one of those games where the stuff wasn’t as crisp as it had been. But to Cameron’s credit, he worked through it and gutted it out. You’d like to not rely on the Royals bullpen to get 12 outs, especially against this Tigers team that seems to always get the big hit against them, but I can’t complain about five shutout innings without really having it.

Just to update the numbers since he started calling his own games:

6 G
42.2 IP
15 H (this is absurd)
36 K
12 BB
1.05 ERA

It was primed to be a good pitching matchup with Troy Melton on the other side. Melton entered the game with a career ERA in 130 innings of under 2.00. He entered the game yesterday with a season ERA of 1.49 in 84.1 innings. I don’t buy that he’s one of the elite pitchers in our game, but I think the numbers show he’s very good. Matt Quatraro has mentioned this when facing him before that he has a unique arm angle, and the fastball just really gets on you quickly. Royals hitters struggled a bit the first time through. Bobby Witt Jr. had a hit, but there were a ton of popups. They had one real scoring chance in the second when Nick Loftin walked and Isaac Collins singled to right to put men on first and third with two outs, but Kyle Isbel hit a 104.6 MPH line drive right to Max Clark in center to end the inning. Put a pin in Isbel hitting that ball hard, though.

In the fourth, Vinnie Pasquantino continued his hot return to the active roster with a double to right, off the glove of Spencer Torkelson. With two outs, he came around to score on a Kevin McGonigle error on a hard-hit Michael Massey ground ball. This started a trend of the Royals scoring one run per inning for the rest of the game.

In the fifth, it was Isbel leading off. Remember how well he saw that pitch earlier?

In the sixth, it was Pasquantino leading off.

Melton has now allowed 10 home runs this year, but he allowed seven of them in a four-start stretch in June that included a game he allowed four. Since then, he’s allowed just three in nine starts, spanning 52.1 innings. All three have been hit by the Royals. The two today that you just saw are joined by Collins back in Detroit last month. Since the start of July, he has a 1.03 ERA with 51 strikeouts and 19 walks. Against the Royals in that time, he hasn’t been bad, but has a 3.38 ERA with eight strikeouts and seven walks. Can’t be upset with that.

In the seventh, the Tigers had just cut the lead from 3-0 to 3-2, so this time Carter Jensen led off with a mammoth home run against a lefty reliever.

This was a continuation for Jensen after a long hitless streak of him seeming to be coming alive. It was his first home run since August 7 and just his second of the month and fourth since the break.

The Royals would get one more in the eighth. Massey started the inning with a double, and Isbel drove him in with a ball hit down the left field line to score Massey.

Nate Pearson got the save after Steven Cruz was used as the fireman in the seventh and eighth, and the Royals grabbed the first game.

When I was younger and someone would talk about an older player and they’d be like 33, I never really understood why adults were at least slightly annoyed. Now, I sit here and call a Saturday night win over the Tigers “Old Timer’s Day” and I’m annoyed with myself. But that’s what happens when a 35-year-old pitcher gets the win and is backed by a home run from a 36-year-old with a 38-year-old getting the save.

Leave a comment

It all starts with Michael Wacha, who bounced back from a rough one against the A’s to throw a gem against the Tigers. He went seven innings and gave up just a run on three hits with six strikeouts and one walk. I’d call it a bit of a no frills outing because, as is so often the case, it wasn’t jaw dropping, but he just got the job done. He only had nine swings and misses, but the Tigers only hit six balls hard. He threw first-pitch strikes. He kept the ball in the zone. They just didn’t do much with it.

Unlike Cameron, Wacha got the third out. I thought it might be another one of those nights when he got the first two in the first before he walked Colt Keith and gave up a single to Dillon Dingler, but they went 1-2-3 in the second, third and sixth, and he only gave up one two-out after that. It was a home run, so it was a big one, but he generally just didn’t seem to have any problem putting innings away. I was actually fascinated by how many changeups he threw in the zone.

You just don’t usually see that many that seem awfully hittable. But the Tigers just couldn’t do much with it. They didn’t whiff on it that much, coming up empty on just four of 18 swings. But they only hit one of them hard and only went 1 for 6 on the pitch. Wacha really leaned heavily on it when he got to the third time through, throwing it 42 percent of the time compared to 26 percent the first two times.

The offense came from two swings and a wild pitch. The first swing was from Isbel, who had a great weekend.

Quatraro mentioned after Sunday’s game that Isbel had done some work with the hitting coaches because he had really been struggling since coming off the IL. Well, it worked. That was a big-boy home run right there.

One inning later, the big boy hit his own.

I’m convinced we’ll be talking about a Royals game in 2037 at the new stadium, and the story will be about how Salvador Perez hasn’t done much offensively, but he was able to drive one 431 feet to dead center for his 15th home run and 19th hit of the year. Sometimes hitting looks so hard with him, but when he gets into a ball to center, it just looks so easy.

With the score 2-1, Jac Caglianone led off the sixth with a line drive down the right field line for a double. Perez grounded out to second, and he seemed to look back to Pasquantino as if to say, ‘I got him over, you get him in.’ The only problem here is that Pasquantino didn’t. He made decent contact, but it was a grounder right to the first baseman. The Royals surprisingly didn’t have the contact play on and Caglianone stayed at third. Sometimes the baseball gods don’t care, and Tanner Rainey bounced a pitch that got away and allowed Caglianone to score without an out.

If you say you weren’t worried about the bullpen, I will not be shy about calling you a dirty liar. Alex Lange came in and looked…great. He only needed 11 pitches. He didn’t get a strikeout, but the Tigers went down 1-2-3. Then with the ninth looming, I wondered who would be in there with Pearson and John Schreiber having gone two days in a row and Cruz having thrown 20 pitches and in parts of two innings the day before. It was Craig Kimbrel, who has more saves than anyone who has ever pitched for the Royals.

He got a groundout and then a three-pitch strikeout. But he walked Zach McKinstry to bring the tying run to the plate. Then he balked, but I guess who cares? He went to 0-2 on Brett Callahan, who fouled two off before a foul tip into Carter Jensen’s mitt gave the Royals the series win and gave Kimbrel his first save with the Royals and 441st of his career.

Nothing matters in this game except that Perez stole second base, and it wasn’t the back end of a double steal or anything like that. He got a read on the pitcher, and he went for it. And he was safe. Salvy loved it. The dugout loved it. The fans loved it. It was electric. And it started a massive inning for the Royals where they scored five runs to take a lead after falling behind in the top of the first for the first time in this series. No, they didn’t hold the lead because Mason Black is showing why he was so readily available, but they also never trailed again.

It started with a bloop by Salvy, and then he got a great read on Jacob Waguespack.

I have no words.

John Rave, in there because Caglianone got scratched with a sore ankle, walked after the stolen base, which sort of made it feel cheap, but not enough to stop loving it. Then Tyler Tolbert was hit by a pitch. After Luke Maile struck out, there was a real fear the Royals were going to leave the bases loaded. But Isbel couldn’t be thrown a better ball to drop in front of Javy Baez to drive in two.

Two was good. Putting an exclamation point on the inning was better, and that’s exactly what Nick Loftin did.

Now, I don’t exactly love that he watched that home run as it landed barely in the first row of seats, but it got out, so what are you going to do?

The Royals held that 5-1 lead until the fifth when Lynch hit a pitch count and the Royals turned to Mason Black, who lit the lead on fire. He’s been fine, so I’m not going to eviscerate him or anything, but he certainly didn’t have it. And before you knew it, a 5-1 lead was a 5-5 tie.

Good teams, and teams that are going as well as the Royals, generally get that back. It usually doesn’t happen immediately, but it did here. Loftin walked and Pasquantino put another dent into the wall, this time in right-center. They had the lead back. Perez smoked one down the line to get another run home. You feel good about getting two back after giving up four. Rave wanted to get them all back.

Now that’s a home run you can watch. I don’t know quite what to make of Rave. He’s only hitting .215 with a .282 OBP, but his .462 SLG says there’s some thump in there. I’m intrigued. I’ll tell you that.

Jose Cuas had a tough seventh inning, though it could have been far worse. He had the bases loaded with nobody out and gave up just one. With a three-run lead, you’ll certainly take that. And then Pearson and Cruz shut the door for the sweep.

I haven’t mentioned Lynch’s performance yet. He was fine. I’m struggling to know what to make of him as a starter. He got 25 swings and one whiff. That’s terrible. He gave up eight hard-hit balls out of 14. That’s terrible. But he only gave up one run in 4.1 innings (and then gave up another that Black let in). I can’t say he was good, but I also can’t say he was bad. I don’t know. I’m fine with him getting another start and a few more after that. I still just don’t see it.

But hey, a win is a win, and another sweep is always good.

The Royals didn’t lose a single game this week. There are TONS of options. There were four hitters who didn’t have a 100 wRC+ or better this week. One of them hit a big home run yesterday. Another had a huge role in two of the wins. A third was Luke Maile. Sorry, Luke. I could list everyone, but I’ll just give you the two runners-up. First was Perez, who hit .360/.370/.560 with one stolen base. He wasn’t the winner. Then it was Witt, who hit .370/.485/.630. He walked five times and was hit once. He stole three bases. He didn’t win. No, the winner was Pasquantino, who had a monster week in his return, hitting .385/.448/.769 with four doubles and two home runs. He scored six runs. He drove in five. He walked three times without a strikeout. He looked like an absolute monster at the plate.

The Royals are off today, but are leaving the country to take on the Blue Jays. I know that we’re all disappointed in the Royals, but the Blue Jays have not bounced back well from their crushing Game Seven loss in the World Series last season. They’re sitting under .500 and toward the bottom of the AL East. Luckily for them, the whole league is terrible outside of like three or four teams, so they’re right in the thick of the playoff race even though they have not had a good year.

Their offense ranks near the bottom of baseball, fighting it out with the Mariners and a few others for fewest runs scored. They just don’t hit the ball out of the park, but they also don’t walk. Their power has been poor overall, and they also sit at the bottom of the league in ISO. Alejandro Kirk has had a nice year. Jesus Sanchez has been fine. Kazuma Okamoto has been a nice signing. But guys they’ve counted on to be tentpoles in their lineup simply haven’t been, with nobody more disappointing than Vladimir Guerrero Jr. I’m terrified that it’s going to happen this series, but he has not hit a single home run at home this season. It’s wild.

Their pitching has been fine. They’re not at the top of the league, but they’re well above the middle in ERA. Louis Varland has been an outstanding closer for them after they got him from Minnesota last year. Tyler Rogers has been a great signing. Spencer Miles has been an incredible find in the Rule 5 draft. They have a Cy Young candidate in Dylan Cease, and they acquired Jose Soriano from the Angels at the deadline. They should be better than they are. But, like so many other teams, they’re just sort of there.

Here are the probable pitching matchups:

• Tuesday: RHP Seth Lugo vs. RHP Max Scherzer

• Wednesday: RHP Randy Dobnak vs. RHP Shane Bieber

• Thursday: LHP Noah Cameron vs. RHP Spencer Arrighetti (probably)

After leaving Toronto, the Royals head to Cleveland to take on a Guardians team that hasn’t quite started their run like they seem to do late in the year. Steven Kwan has found his form, so that’s good for them, but Jose Ramirez is having his worst year since maybe 2019. They acquired Jo Adell, who I’m not sure is actually good. They acquired Nathaniel Lowe, who I think is fine, but nothing special. Travis Bazzana, the number one overall pick in 2024, has been fine. The starting rotation is good, led by Gavin Williams, Parker Messick and Joey Cantillo. And they did acquire Foster Griffin.

Share Inside the Crown

Like the Blue Jays, I don’t know if they’re good. I don’t think they are. They’re not bad either. They’re just kind of there. As of right now, they’ll throw Tanner Bibee, Griffin and Messick in this series against Wacha, Lynch and Lugo. But, as always, this far out, it’s subject to change.