A brutal loss to cap a disastrous series

In my last dispatch, I wrote that, at this point of the season, all losses are bad losses. Losses to the Cleveland Guardians, a team that was jockeying for position with the Royals in the Wild Card standings, would be especially egregious.

Though that prism, I feel comfortable calling Thursday’s 3-2 defeat to those Guardians, the worst loss of the season.

Looking to split the four-game series, the Royals took a one-run lead into the later innings. This could be a salvage job on a series that started poorly. A win would reposition the Royals in fifth place in the Wild Card standings, the same spot they occupied at the start of the week. Now, by losing three of four, the Royals are entrenched in sixth place in the Wild Card standings. They are four and a half games back and now need to jump three teams to get into the postseason. With just 15 games remaining.

It doesn’t look good for the Royals to make it back to October.

The Royals jumped out to an early 2-0 lead, and it took just three batters. And that was the offense for the evening. Doesn’t it seem like this happens a bit too often? Where the Royals seize that early lead in the first inning and then curl up and do absolutely nothing for the rest of the game? I’m sure I could look up the numbers behind an assumption like this, but my fingers are on fire, and I really don’t want to get sidetracked by jumping over to Baseball Reference or FanGraphs.

I will take the top four or five in the Royals lineup all day, every day. I like Mike Yastrzemski at leadoff against right-handers. Bobby Witt Jr. remains amazing—he has low-key accumulated 7.0 fWAR this season and is, by that metric, the third-best player in the AL this season. Vinnie Pasquantino is finally hitting like we all thought Vinnie Pasquantino would hit. Then there’s Maikel Garcia breaking out, and he’s followed by Salvador Perez. Perez is scuffling and has been most of the season, but he’s still a guy who can do something up at the plate. Yeah, I’ll take those five.

So when Yaz starts the game with a walk, you get the feeling that good things are on the horizon. Two batters later, Pasquantino crushes one to right-center and the Royals have their lead. And Vinnie has home run number 30 and RBI numbers 101 and 102.

And that’s it.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this top four or five thing. The lineup flipped over perfectly two innings later. Yastrzemski did his job again, lacing a double, to start the frame. But then Witt, Pasquantino and Garcia all went down and Yaz never advanced. Wasted opportunity.

(Fine. I took a detour and looked up the splits. The Royals have now scored 71 first inning runs. Their OPS+ as a team in the first inning is 101. It is the second-best inning for their offensive production. The best? The fifth. Or the inning when starting pitchers start to get ripe in 2025.)

The Royals had chances. They had baserunners. They just couldn’t sequence anything. Even their chances were tepid at best.

Meanwhile, Steven Kolek was throwing a good ballgame.

The right-hander was mixing his four-seamer with his change while showing a sweeper and slider for a little variety. Honestly, I’m not sure how Kolek did it. He did not miss many bats—he had only four swinging strikes on the night, all on his changeup. Nor did he get the Guardians to chase. They went after pitches outside of the zone just 14 percent of the time. Kolek also gave up plenty of hard contact, allowing Hard-Hit balls on nine of the 19 that Cleveland put into play. Hell, Kolek even fell behind most of the hitters he faced. He struck out four, all of them looking at four-seamers.

None of those pitches were thrown in full counts, leading me to think that the Guardians were looking for something else. That’s good game plan execution in my book.

For the night, Kolek walked just one and allowed three hits. He recorded 11 ground ball outs. The lone run he allowed came when Steven Kwan led off the third with a double. He advanced to third on a ground out and came home on another ground ball out.

Like the other rookies we’ve seen in the last year or two, Kolek has a poise about the mound. He doesn’t get bothered and seems to have a gameplan and is able to stick to it. We’ve come a long way from resting our hopes on Vin Mazzarro and Kyle Davies. Even in the dark spots of this season, we can still find rays of light. That’s important.

When Kolek walked Daniel Schneemann with two outs in the seventh, his night was over. Matt Quatraro opted for John Schreiber to face Brayan Rocchio.

The Cleveland lineup is crazy in that manager Steven Vogt has the ability to stack it exclusively with left-handed hitters. Thursday’s lineup featured seven true lefties and two switch-hitters.

Rocchio is one of those switch-hitters. He’s generally better from the right side of the plate, so I’m thinking that’s why Quatraro opted for Schreiber in that situation, to keep him hitting lefty. Schreiber, with his sidearm motion from the right, seems like he would be at a disadvantage against left-handed hitters. The numbers this season at least, don’t really bear that out.

vs LHB - .227/.292/.375, 82 OPS+
vs RHB - .234/.295/.406, 96 OPS+

Schreiber got Rocchio to hit a soft ground ball to end the inning.

After the Royals did not score (naturally) in their half of the eighth, Quatraro opted to send Schreiber back out to face the bottom of the Cleveland lineup. Had the Royals gone with a lefty from their bullpen like Daniel Lynch IV, the Guardians would have definitely countered with a pair of right-handed bats for Bo Naylor and C.J. Kayfus. They don’t have great options, though. Instead, neither manager made a move.

This is the moment everything went sideways for the Royals.

Naylor hit a leadoff single. Kayfus followed by yanking a 1-0 fastball 425 feet and out of the park. The Royals 2-1 advantage flipped to a 3-2 deficit. In that one moment, that one pitch, was the entire Royals season in summary form. No, they did not give away their season. No, they did not get elimintated in something like game 162. Instead, that four-seamer was just a punctuation on a year where the Royals fell just short. It was letting the last little bit of air out of the tire. They just aren’t good enough.

The game was not over. The Royals still had three outs to go. It’s an opportunity.

Jonathan India led off and was clipped by a pitch that was up and in. It was the 14th time he was hit by a pitch. At least this one didn’t get him squarely.

This gave the Royals both opportunities and options. Quatraro opted to pinch run Tyler Tolbert for India. Kyle Isbel was up at the plate and we all know about Isbel and his ability to get down a sacrifice bunt or even get a bunt down for a base hit.

What ensued was the worst plate apperance I’ve seen this season.

Isbel decided to bunt on the first pitch. Reliever Cade Smith delivered a four-seamer well out of the zone. Isbel committed anyway.

Isbel swung at the next pitch and missed: A four-seamer that started off the plate and stayed off the plate.

Isbel was now down 0-2. Tolbert was anchored to first. Smith delivered another four-seamer.

This is one of those moments where I would describe myself as flabbergasted. It’s not unlike watching someone turn on a stove and then proceed to place their hand on the burner. Because the question to a sequence of events like that is: What are you thinking?

Isbel is, in that moment, the most important batter in the game. He has to progress the inning in a positive fashion. This can be done a number of ways. He can get a base hit. He can take a walk. He can, like India before him, get hit by a pitch. He can also bunt to move the runner. Yes, in that moment, I will accept a sacrifice. While I’m never happy about surrendering an out, the runner on base in that situation is more important. He must be moved. It is imperative.

Isbel bit on the first fastball. Fine. He tried to pull back. Except it was never, ever going to be a strike. Smith’s four-seamer doesn’t rise. It was elevated from the moment it left his hand. Sure, he’s throwing gas at around 96 mph, but Isbel is an accomplished bunter. He needs to keep the bat back on that pitch.

I’m not against shifting the plan and swinging away down 0-1. The infield is in at the corners. Make them think. Again, the pitch that Isbel swung at was not a competitive pitch. It started outside and stayed outside.

With the count 0-2, I have absolutely no idea why Isbel squared. At that point, Smith had thrown three pitches in the inning. He missed on all three. By squaring with two strikes, Isbel is betting on that pitch being at least close enough to the zone where he could get that elusive bunt down.

Sigh.

The GIFs are bad enough. The pitch plot is even worse.

From there, pinch hitter Nick Loftin struck out on a four-seamer well out of the zone. Yastrzemski flew out to right. Tolbert never budged off first. And that was the ball game. And probably the season.

After the game, Quatraro was asked about Tolbert not stealing in that situation:

“We could have taken a chance,” Quatraro said. “But Smith’s a 1.1 [second] to the plate [guy]. It’s not a good proposition. We could have taken that chance. Then if he gets thrown out, you got no chance to flip the lineup over.”

That’s certainly understandable from my perspective. This season, Smith has faced situation where a runner could steal a base 99 times. They’ve attempted to steal one time. We’ve been conditioned to think that a pinch runner is in to steal a base. That’s usually the case, but not always. In that situation, Tolbert isn’t in to swipe second. He’s in to advance on the Isbel bunt and then to score on a hit. Except neither of those outcomes came to pass.

FanGraphs has the Royals Wild Card odds at two percent. It’s not even worth putting up the graph. The damage they inflicted upon themselves is better reflected in the standings.

I am not one to tell anyone how to be a fan, but to me, it seems foolish to abandon a team this deep into the season while there’s even a glimmer of hope. The Royals are off for three games in Philadelphia against the leaders of the NL East. After that, it’s three at home against the once again scorching-hot Mariners. This is not an easy stretch of games.

Yet it’s important to be realistic. Five games back with 15 to play is a bad place to be. It’s made worse by the fact there are three teams between the Royals and the Wild Card.

The curtain hasn’t come down on the 2025 season, but it’s damn close to the ground.