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Fenway, like the homes of so many AL East clubs, remains a house of horrors for the Royals. They haven't won a series in Boston in nine years. Including Friday's victory, they have won just six of their last 23 games at Fenway. And given that the 2026 edition of the Kansas City Royals just isn't very good, it's unsurprising that they lost both the game and the series on Sunday. The final score of the game: 4-1. The final tally of the series: Two games to one.

I have an idea for one of those online baseball games. Sort of like the Immaculate Grid, only this one is multiple choice...a pitch chart showing one full inning of work where all three outs were recorded on a total of nine pitches. Three, maybe four options. It would be called Pick The Immaculate Inning.

(I'm still very clearly workshopping this.)

Payton Tolle's first inning where he retired the Royals on nine strikes without a ball being put in play kind of beggars pitch chart belief.

If you saw that in a pitch chart array asking you to identify the immaculate inning, would you pick the one above? I don't think I would. Not with two crazy elevated four-seamers. Especially that one really up and out of the zone.

Of the nine strikes Tolle delivered to the top of the Royals order, seven were of the swing and miss variety. There was one foul ball, the sinker in the middle that was the first pitch to Jac Caglianone. There was one called strike, the third one on the lower corner to Nick Loftin. I get that an elevated four-seamer can be tempting, especially early in the game when a batter may be in attack mode. I do not know what Caglianone was doing swinging at that 0-1 pitch that was delivered up an in. At least he didn't look at the third strike, the four-seamer that is down and next to the sinker.

I want to focus on the 0-1 pitch Caglianone swung at and missed. This one:

The 2026 season is in the books. That means tons of left-handed hitters have gone to the plate. A fair number of pitches have been delivered in that general location—zone 33 in Baseball Savant's attack zone chart, also known as a "waste" zone because pitches thrown there are uncompetitive. It's 3,950 to be exact. There have been a grand total number of 28 swings by left-handed hitters on pitches in that spot. Even knowing that Caglianone is often tempted by the high heat, that was the first time this year that Cags offered at a pitch located there.

This isn't to take away from Tolle's immaculate inning. I tend to think it's a cool, if somewhat trivial, achievement. But sometimes you need some help.

Tolle generates the strikeouts. He's averaging over 10 per game. He recorded a total of 22 swings and misses on Sunday. And the final pitch of the first came in at 97.9 mph, his fastest of the day. He was amped. That made him dangerous...and successful.

The game ended in similar-ish fashion. The Royals went down swinging with all three outs coming on strikeouts against reliever Ardolis Chapman. It just so happened that these strikeouts came after he walked the first two batters which meant each of the final three batters represented the tying run. This was most assuredly not an immaculate inning.

More than one way to get the job done, I suppose. And more than one way to beat the Royals. But you already knew that.

In between the strikeout-o-ramas of the first and ninth innings, the Royals offense did actually attempt to ignite. Just like so many other games in 2026, things just never broke in their favor. They started to work Tolle as he progressed through the game, but, even after putting a couple runners in scoring position in the fifth and sixth innings, found that run-scoring hit to be elusive. Carter Jensen finally got the Royals on the board in the seventh, via a run-scoring single. I was not aware Jensen hit singles.

Prior to that single, the last 12 of Jensen's hits had all gone for extra bases. That broke the Royals record of 11 consecutive extra-base hits that was held by Hal McRae. It was also the first run of extra-base hits of 12 or more since 2018 when Matt Carpenter accomplished the feat. Going back to 1961, the longest stretch of extra-base hits is 15 by Brad Fullmer in 2002, so Jensen wasn't all that far off from the Expansion Era record.

The extra-base hit streak is over, but his string of games reaching base remains intact at 17. Timely, too, as the Jensen single tied the game at one. It was close because starter Noah Cameron was, once again, second half Noah Cameron. The lefty worked mostly fastball, getting a 36 percent chase against his cutter and a solid 50 percent on his slider. He was working the edges, mixing his pitches and avoiding hard contact. In other words, he was being Noah Cameron.

His flow was interesting. He scuffled a bit to open the game, needing 47 pitches to get through the first round of Sox hitters over the opening two innings. An error on a pop up from catcher Luke Malle didn't help matters as that certainly resulted in an increase in Cameron's pitch count. In that first time through the order, he relied mostly on his slider, but it didn't seem like he had a feel for that pitch in that moment, often yanking it down and away, well out of the zone. Too far to tempt the opposing batters.

He altered his approach in the middle innings, leaning more on the hard stuff. There was some danger in the fourth when the bases got loaded on an error, a single and a hit batter, but Cameron steadied and got Nick Sogard on a first-pitch curve. It was a bit of a hanger, but Sogard somehow got on top of it and grounded it back up the middle and into an easy inning-ending double play.

With the bats scuffling to get anything started and with Noah Cameron once again pitching extremely well, the fate of the game was handed over to the bullpens. That's never a good game plan for the '26 Royals.

Coming after the Royals opened their half of the seventh against the Boston bullpen with back-to-back walks resulting in their lone run, Reliever Craig Kimbrel likewise delivered two consecutive bases on balls. His came with one out and was enough to chase him from the game. New reliever Connor Thomas came in with the task of recording two outs. He did, but sandwiched between those was a run-scoring single that broke the tie.

Nate Pearson came on in the ninth and allowed two more runs to score. By that time, interest, and the game, had been lost.

Twelve more games to go.