Game 6: Sweep

At the start of this 10-game homestand, I wrote that, if the Royals were to find their way back into the Wild Card conversation, they needed to win seven games. At a minimum. Ideally, they would go 8-2. That would be enough.

Don’t look now, but after Sunday’s 6-2 thrashing of the Chicago White Sox, the Royals record on this homestand is at an impressive 5-1. They have done exactly what they needed to do against the Washington Nationals and now the White Sox. Hell, they are a Seth Lugo disaster start away from being perfect.

One missed opportunity aside, I don’t think we could’ve asked for much more out of this team this week.

It’s been a bang-up second half of the season for this team…especially the offense. Sunday was the 16th time in 27 second-half games that the Royals scored five or more runs. They pulled that off just 21 times in 97 games in the first half of the season. The Royals are now 16-11 since the All-Star Break, a .593 winning percentage. They are still a bit of a long shot for October baseball, but after a sluggish start to the season, to even be in the conversation at this point is impressive.

And they are most definitely in the conversation.

On Sunday afternoon, it took three trips through the order before the Royals collected their first hit against Chicago starter Davis Martin. A sixth inning double from leadoff man Mike Yastrzemski broke up the no-hitter, but he was stranded when Martin set down the next two batters.

The White Sox bullpen isn’t too shabby. While it may be a calvalcade of “who are these guys?” they have generally done well this season. Coming into Sunday’s game, their 3.76 bullpen ERA nearly matched the Royals 3.75 ERA. The Chicago relievers may walk a few too many guys, but it’s mostly a solid unit. It was not a given that the Royals would break through.

The first man out of the Chicago bullpen was Steven Wilson, who has limited opposing hitters to a .215 batting average this season, but allows a fly ball over half of the time when a ball is put into play against him. Yet he had allowed just three home runs in 43 innings of work.

Whoops! Make that four home runs now.

That was a monster blast into the fountains (YES!) off the bat of Jonathan India to tie the game. A Salvy-esque into the upper deck of said fountains. That home run came on the heels of an Adam Frazier two-out double that extended the inning to get to India. These are the types of sequences that were missing earlier in the season. I’m not certain you want to depend on two-out rallies to secure a win, but when those happen, it gives the offense a little more spring in their bats.

At a distance of 451 feet, that was tied for the furthest home run in India’s career. The other one he hit that far was in Colorado at Coors Field, so let’s agree to call Sunday’s bomb the farthest that India has hit while playing at a reasonable altitude.

This was the eighth game for India since moving out of the leadoff spot at the top of the batting order. In a span, covering 34 plate appearances, India is hitting .267/.353/.600 with three (three!!!) home runs. He had hit four total in the first four months of the season. Obviously, hitting dingers is not India’s primary objective at the plate. Still, it’s quite something that he’s unlocked some power—along with a modest bump in OBP—once he was dropped in the order. This can be such a mental game where guys hit a speed bump and that speed bump subsequently turns into a cliff. A little adjustment to the daily order can be beneficial. In this instance, it took the Royals acquiring another player in Mike Yastrzemski, who can fill that leadoff role when facing right-handed starting pitching.

Hell, I’d even go as far as to posit that his defense has improved since moving down in the batting order. That shouldn’t make any kind of sense, but again, he’s just looking more relaxed overall these days. We saw the benefit of that early in Sunday’s game. In the second inning, starter Ryan Bergert gave up a liner to right off the bat of Chase Meidroth. Yastrzemski dove for the ball and missed. (We don’t need to see these types of outfield adventures anymore, do we?) Edgar Quero, not exactly fleet of foot on the bases, was on first and off and running on the hit. He attempted to go from first to home.

Yastrzemski recovered quickly to make the throw from the right field corner to India. India made a perfect throw from about 15 feet past the infield dirt to Luke Maile at home. A seed. Maile was able to catch and apply the tag in one swoop. Shades of Gordon to Escobar to Perez back in the day.

That was such a key play. Miss at any point on the relay and the White Sox have a 2-0 lead with a runner on second, maybe third. The relay throw to get Quero at the plate kept this game under control for the Royals.

This was one of those games that, given the struggles earlier in the season around the offense, you never really knew if you should actually believe that the Royals could get back in it. Getting no-hit for 5.1 innings against the Chicago White Sox is nobody’s idea of a fun time. But once they grabbed those runs an inning later to tie the game, it was easy to feel confident about the outcome.

Again, it was a rally where most of the damage was done with two outs. Bobby Witt Jr. got things started in the eighth inning with a single that was sandwiched between two outs. That brought up Maikel Garcia, who fell behind 1-2 against reliever Grant Taylor and his 99 mph gas. Taylor threw one of those four-seamers down and away. Look at Garcia’s swing.

That’s just textbook plate protection with two strikes. The ball had an exit velocity of 98 mph, which is impressive given how Garcia offered at the pitch, and it had just enough behind it to scoot into right field. Witt scored easily, and the Royals had their first lead of the game.

An errant pickoff throw to first—just to remind you that these are the White Sox—moved Garcia to second. He scored on a 415-foot single off the bat of Salvador Perez. Hey, it was hot out there…you want Salvy to move with urgency?

The great thing about that inning was that Perez was able to eventually score with minimal effort on his part. That’s because Frazier doubled the lead with a home run. Right…India and Frazier going yard in the same game? Baseball can be a strange game.

We’ve made it this far without discussing the performance of starter Ryan Bergert. Let’s correct that.

He gave up a solo home run to Lenyn Sosa in the first but also punched out the other three hitters who came up in the inning. All on sliders.

It did not matter if the hitter was up from the left side of the plate…

Or the right…

There’s not a lot of run to the Bergert slider, but there is about 30-plus inches of drop. By movement, it’s not a special pitch, but there’s some kind of deception there that gets major league hitters out. On the afternoon, Bergert recorded seven strikeouts. Six of them came with Sox hitters going down swinging. Five of those were on the slider.

Bergert threw 28 sliders on the day, got 17 swings against the pitch and recorded eight whiffs, good for a 47 percent swinging strike rate.

A huge part of the deception of the pitch is where it finishes.

That’s just some impressive locating. The cluster of pitches off the plate down and toward the first base side is just too tantalizing for hitters, especially with two strikes.

In addition to the home run in the first, Bergert allowed another run in the sixth, but that was the result of a Frazier error in left field, so he was only charged with one earned run on the day. A really impressive performance from the rookie while the Royals bats were chilling out, waiting for the later innings to find their collective groove.

Do you want the good news first? Or the bad news?

Fine. The bad news is the Yankees won again on Sunday, sweeping their way out of St. Louis. They are 7-3 over their last 10 games, and 5-1 in their last six, so that means the Royals, during their own stretch of good baseball, have been unable to make any kind of move in the Wild Card race. They remain four games back.

The good news is the Cleveland Guardians were swept at home this weekend by Atlanta. That means the Royals have shaved three games off their deficit of late and now stand just a half game behind the Guardians in both the Wild Card and AL Central standings.

Also of note: both the Red Sox and Mariners lost on Sunday. While at this point, I think the focus should be on the team closest to the Royals in the Wild Card hunt, but if the entire pack is going to tighten up, then game on. There is now a difference of just five games in the win column. While the Royals are four games out of the final Wild Card spot, they are just four and a half games back from the top spot.

It’s getting interesting.

So the upcoming series with the Rangers…it’s huge. Extremely important. Should the Royals take three of four, they will likely be within a game or two of that final postseason spot. There are some tasty probable pitching matchups this week:

Monday - RHP Jack Leiter (7-6, 3.94) vs. RHP Michael Wacha (7-9, 3.35)
Tuesday - RHP Merrill Kelly (9-7, 3.36) vs. RHP Seth Lugo (8-6, 3.77)
Wednesday - RHP Jacob deGrom (10-5, 2.76) vs. LHP Noah Cameron (7-5, 2.47)
Thursday - LHP Patrick Corbin (6-9, 4.45) vs. RHP Michael Lorenzen (5-8, 4.43)

The Royals swept the Rangers in Arlington a couple of months ago. Since that series, both clubs have played to similar records: The Royals are 24-23 and the Rangers are 24-24. But the Rangers are slumping in August, going just 5-10 this month.