Game 5: Hot

The Royals hit the midway point in their 10-game homestand on a broiling Saturday night at The K. They turned up the heat on the Chicago White Sox early and often, scoring a single run in each of the first three innings behind the return of starter Michael Lorenzen, ultimately cruising to a 6-2 victory.

On a homestand where they need to bank some victories against two weaker clubs, the Royals are now 4-1 and are poised to sweep the White Sox out of Kansas City on Sunday.

The Royals have scored at least five runs in 15 of 26 games since the All-Star break. That’s the second most such games in the Majors over that stretch behind only the Milwaukee Brewers—who are currently riding a 14-game winning streak—with 18. Percentage-wise, the Royals have scored five or more runs in 58 percent of their games since the break. They did that in just 21 of 97 games—or 22 percent of the time—in the season’s first half.

The last time we saw Lorenzen on the mound for the Royals, he was throwing seven outstanding innings in the desert against the Arizona Diamondbacks. That was back on July 6, and it was his best outing of the season. He got off to a bit of a shaky start on Saturday, walking the leadoff man for the White Sox and following that up by allowing a single. Yet he escaped damage by striking out Colson Montgomery on a nifty change.

Don’t know about you, but I greatly enjoy a well-placed cambio that produces a swing and a miss. Lorenzen followed that up by getting Luis Robert Jr. to hit a ground ball that the Royals infield rolled into a tidy 6-4-3 double play.

It took Lorenzen 21 pitches to get out of the first inning. It took the Royals two pitches against White Sox starter Sean Burke to get on the board. This came courtesy of Mike Yastrzemski, who crushed an upper-middle four-seamer into the party porch in right-center field. A 408-foot home run and the Royals had jumped to an early lead, one they would not relinquish.

A couple of weeks beyond the deadline, and I still really like this pickup. The numbers aren’t there overall for Yastrzemski—he’s hitting just .179 with a .292 on base percentage—but when the hits have been falling for him, they’ve been going for extra bases. That was his third home run since joining the Royals. He’s also hit three doubles. Overall, his slugging percentage since switching uniforms is .487.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but Yaz is experiencing a little bad luck in his early days in Kansas City. His BABIP is just .138, an insanely low rate. He’s also collected seven walks while striking out just nine times.

Let’s say that Chicago’s Burke has an uncomfortable relationship with the strike zone. The right-hander has walked 10.5 percent of all hitters he’s faced this season. If he had thrown enough innings to qualify, that would be the second-highest rate in the majors. He was spraying pitches all over the yard in his 3.2 innings. Somehow, he walked only a single batter on the night, but the pitches the Royals put in play for hits were generally in very favorable locations.

It would appear that Burke also has a difficult relationship with throwing a strike to a base. The bottom four-seamer in the chart above was a 3-2 pitch to Kyle Isbel that he chopped back to the mound in the second inning with runners on first and second and one out. A tailor-made double play ball if there ever was. Except Burke airmailed his throw to center. That error allowed the second run of the game to come across for the Royals.

The Royals made Burke work, seeing 53 pitches in just the first two innings. On a steamy night at Kauffman, no pitcher needs that. The Royals, being the Royals, offered some charity as Isbel took a stroll off first base on a line drive off the bat of Yastrzemski in the bottom of the second and was doubled off. This team is trying to make us become inured to the TOOTBLAN.

I’ll offer up this pitch chart of the Yastrezemski at bat.

That’s a fairly epic battle. Note the locations of pitch three (called a ball) and pitch four (called a strike). The home plate umpire was definitely leaning toward the third base side the entire game. Then note how Yaz hung in there and, after the count went full, battled and fouled off five consecutive pitches until he got one centered in the zone. His batted ball had an expected batting average of .410. Maybe Isbel made that calculation in his head when he broke for second base. (Isbel did not make that calculation.)

Vinnie Pasquantino did not look comfortable at the plate against Burke in the first inning. It looked like, the way he was moving his torso, he was struggling with an oblique. At one point, the trainer came out to check on him. After Pasquantino struck out, he did not come back out for defense in the top of the second, replaced in the lineup by John Rave, who took the field in left while Nick Loftin shifted from left to first.

The good news: The Royals announced within an inning that Pasquantion was out of the game due to a “heat-related illness.” That completely checks out. He appeared to be fine after the game.

Since Pasquantino has gone off with seven home runs in 24 games since the All-Star Break, Rave was obligated to provide some thunder hitting in the number three spot in the lineup.

He did not disappoint.

When Rave connects with power like that, it’s the product of an aesthetically pleasing swing. The follow-through is fun, too. If I didn’t know any better, I’d look at a swing like that and think that Rave was a pure power hitter.

That blast gave the Royals a 3-0 lead through three.

A Yaz walk to leadoff the fifth and a Rave bunt single set the stage for more runs as Maikel Garcia laced a double to the base of the wall in left. Both runners came around to score to make it 5-0. And then, with Salvador Perez up, Garcia was picked off second. Granted, it was a perfect pickoff throw, but still…

Stop with the TOOTBLANS!

While it was clearly a struggle for Burke, it likewise was not easy for Lorenzen, either. In three of his four innings, Lorenzen put two runners on base. He needed 82 pitches to grind through those four frames, allowing three hits and two walks. Daniel Lynch IV looked strong in his two innings, allowing just one hit. Taylor Clarke worked around a two-out single in the ninth to nail down the victory. The White Sox collected their runs against Bailey Falter in the eighth inning. But with a six-run pad at that point, it’s not an issue. For now.

It’s not like Falter has never pitched out of the bullpen. In his rookie campaign in Philadelphia in 2021, 21 of his 22 appearances were in relief. Granted, Saturday was his first relief appearance in over two seasons. Still…Falter is going to need to show something soon.

There’s been a subtle shift in the Wild Card standings over the last couple of days. The Rangers dropped their fourth consecutive game on Saturday (a 14-2 loss to the Blue Jays) and are now two games under .500, tied with the Rays. You’ll notice both teams missing from the standings below, as I generally use the break-even point as the standard to include teams in the Wild Card hunt.

The Yankees have won their first two games of a series against the Cardinals and have solidified their position as the third Wild Card team. A Yankees/Cardinals matchup is among the most distasteful games that I can imagine.

The big news, though, can be found in Cleveland, where the Guardians have dropped their first two games this weekend against Atlanta. The two losses by the Guardians, coupled with the wins by the Royals, mean that Kansas City has closed the gap.

With the Rangers out of the way (for the moment), the Royals only need to get past two teams to get into that Wild Card Spot. That’s just as large as being four games out.

The rest of this homestand remains incredibly important. The series finale is Sunday afternoon with Ryan Bergert taking the mound for the Royals.