Hopeless

Are you to the point where if the Royals are facing a lefty starter, that you don't even want to watch the game? Hard to blame anyone for tuning out. Individually, the Royals aren't horrible against lefties this year. They're just generally bad. Yet against left-handed starters this season, the Royals have recorded just two wins in 14 games. That is horrible.

Loss number 12, a 4-3 defeat, came against the Boston Red Sox and one of their lefties, Connelly Early. He held the Royals down for 6.1 innings, allowing just three runs—all three coming via the long ball. The Royals put eight men on against Early, but could rarely advance them. They had just two at bats against him with runners in scoring position all night. You will not be surprised to hear the Royals did not get a hit either time.

They are now 10 games below .500.

Matt Quatraro penciled in a unique lineup on Wednesday, trying to break that southpaw hex. Vinnie Pasquantino was on the bench. That was a necessary omission in the batting order. Pasquantino has hit just .115/.175/.115 against left-handed pitching this year. That's a -6 OPS+. Yes, minus six. He's recorded just three hits in 53 at bats—all singles—versus lefties. He needs to sit against all left-handed pitching until further notice.

The extraction of Pasquantino from the lineup meant that Isaac Collins was the cleanup hitter. That's...a choice. For one thing, Collins, a switch hitter, performs much better against right-handed pitching. For another, he's not what anyone would describe as a cleanup-type of hitter. No matter who he's facing.

I dunno...There's been plenty of consternation around Quatraro and his lineups, but I'm not sure I can defend Collins in the cleanup spot. It's the second time Quatraro has hit him in that position this year.

Boston lefty Early handled Collins and the rest of the Royals lineup with general ease. As noted, the Royals did their damage against the southpaw with a pair of home runs. Salvador Perez clobbered one in the first. Elias Díaz blasted a two-run shot in the fifth. Both home runs gave the Royals a lead. A lead they would promptly surrender.

The Perez home run was impressive. He turned on a 94 mph fastball that was up and in.

That's not an easy pitch for Perez to barrel, but he kept his hands in and behind the ball. Perez has lost almost 2 mph off his average bat speed this season from last. He's down to 71.3 mph on average, an alarming development for an aging player. On this pitch, his bat swing was clocked at 75 mph.

Perez rarely swings at a pitch in that spot. By my count going back to 2021, that's the just second home run Perez has hit on a pitch up and in.

Perez shouldn't be hitting in the third spot, but he still has the ability to do something special. It's just that those moments are becoming more and more rare.

For both Perez and the Royals.

The Royals had a stretch a few weeks ago where they went 9-2, pulling them to two games under .500. In the 14 games since, the Royals have won just three times. They have authored an eight-game losing streak and a six-game losing streak. They are now 10 games under .500. I'd write something about this being the nadir of the season, but I'm going to have to invoke the Bell Axiom here and remind everyone that things can always get worse.

What a topsy-turvy division this AL Central is. The preseason favorite Detroit Tigers have been even worse than the Royals this month, winning just four times. The Twins are somehow hanging around. The White Sox, as we all know, are much better than they've been in the last several seasons. Look at the damn Cleveland Guardians...the cockroaches of the AL Central.

Viewing the Royals in isolation, it's easy to spot the cold streaks.

FanGraphs gave the Royals a 44.7 percent chance of the postseason at the beginning of the year. Odds at the current 15.8 percent feel massively optimistic.

The game threatened to get away from Michael Wacha and the Royals in the second inning. When things aren't going particularly great, innings like the second tend to creep up and just snatch any vestage of hope away from the struggling team. For instance, each of the first four hitters in the inning reached. Willson Contreras flicked a 3-2 cutter that was well off the plate to right field for a triple. Contreras had no business hitting that ball. He also had no business going to third. The man had 11 career triples in over 3,800 at bats prior to Wednesday. Yet there he was, lining the ball to right and motoring to third. I'm not sure Jac Caglianone ran the best route, either.

The next batter, Cedanne Rafaela, chased a 1-2 curve that was almost as far off the plate that second baseman Nick Loftin couldn't field cleanly. He was playing back with Contreras at third and nobody out. Contreras, perhaps still gassed from taking three bases, held his position. Loftin seemed a bit concerned that Contreras would be going and pulled up too soon and left the ball behind.

The third batter of the inning, Nick Sogard, yanked a 1-2 changeup to right to tie the game for the Sox.

Charts like this are how you know things are absolutely in the dumpster for this ball club.

Those are the pitches the first three Red Sox put in play against Wacha in the second. All three reached. The first two were well off the plate to right-handed hitters. The changeup probably was supposed to be out of the zone and hung up just enough.

Thank goodness for Maikel Garcia. One of the few Royals to show up this season, Garcia made a fantastic backhand play on a chopper, stepped on third for a force and then fired across the diamond to complete a double play and save a potential disaster inning. As it was, the Sox plated just two. Enough to grab the lead, but it could've been so much worse.

Wacha regrouped after walking that tightrope, finishing six innings with a season-high eight strikeouts. I'm not a big quality start guy, but I do think it's worth noting that Wednesday's start was Wacha's eight QS in 10 starts. Overall, Royals starters have posted 25 quality starts this season, the most in the American League. That's an indictment of this offense.

Wacha left the game with his team holding a 3-2 lead. It took reliever Steven Cruz only three batters to turn that one-run lead into a one-run deficit.

Not to pick on Cruz, but this is just the way of the Royals bullpen this season. Collectively, they're not good. Individually, they're untrustworthy. Cruz is a reliever I had high hopes for coming into this season, and he's showed something this month since returning from Omaha, but he's had a rough time of late. It was a tasty 3-1 fastball to Jarren Duran who launched it just over the wall in left to give the Sox a lead they would not relinquish. An unfortunate result of the closer fences.

Between the big hits and the insane defense, aren't we all just kind of tired of Duran at this point?

The Royals hit leadoff singles in the seventh, eighth and ninth innings. In the seventh and eighth, they didn't advance the runner to second. In the ninth, it took a passed ball to move up 90 feet. At this point, there's no way to write about this team without highlighting how terrible this offense has been.

The Royals are now scoring just 3.88 runs per game, ranking them 28th out of the 30 major league teams. The club just behind them? That would be the Boston Red Sox, who score just 3.69 runs per game. They just swept the Royals, outscoring them 14-5 across the three games. In Tuesday's game, a 7-1 loss where the Red Sox went off in the ninth inning, scoring four runs against Eli Morgan, it was just the the second time they scored more than five runs since April 25.

It's not going well for these Royals.