Noah Cameron shoves

On the first Sunday after the All-Star break, Noah Cameron made a start at Kauffman Stadium against the San Diego Padres. It did not go well.

He allowed seven runs over five innings, allowing nine hits and struck out just two batters. It was following this outing that two things happened. One, the Royals decided they would use an opener ahead of his next outing. Two, Cameron and the Royals decided that from here on out he would call his own pitches.

The opener lasted for just one appearance. It's now been five outings (four starts) where the lefty has been making the decisions on the mound. The results have been nothing short of amazing. The apex of this journey came on Sunday in Anaheim where Cameron delivered the first complete game shutout of his brief major league career, a 3-0 victory. He retired the first 15 Angels hitters he faced; allowed just one walk and one hit and he struck out eight.

It was an absolute tour de force of starting pitching.

While Sunday's domination of one of the worst teams in the league was fantastic to watch, those recent outings from Cameron were all pointing in this direction. This wasn't some one-off, out of nowhere, time to beat up on a bad team start. This was coming.

The Dodger outing earlier in the road trip is the anomaly. Nearly every single time Cameron takes the mound these days, he's looking to dominate. Dare I say, I haven't seen a stretch like this from a Royals starting pitcher since the days of Zack Greinke.

While the Greinke comp may be wild, it's not entirely without basis. The last Royals starter to throw a one-hit shutout? That would be Greinke, back in August of 2009, his Cy Young season. Greinke finished that start with a Game Score of 89, his highest of that year. Cameron's Game Score on Sunday? How about a 92.

Let's break this gem down, inning by inning.

First Inning

This is one of the greatest exchanges in the history of cinema.

Crash: Why are you shaking me off?
Nuke: I want to bring the heater. Announce my presence with authority.
Crash: To announce what?
Nuke: My presence with authority.
Crash: To announce your presence with authority?! This guy's a first ball fastball hitter, looking for the heat.

Zack Neto is hitting .223/.310/.411 this year, good for a 101 wRC+, so he's basically a league-average hitter. When he puts a first-pitch fastball into play, he's hitting a much more robust .357 with a .690 slugging percentage. While a first-pitch fastball is generally favorable for all hitters, it's especially so for Neto. Naturally, Cameron opens his afternoon by announcing his presence with...an exquisitely placed changeup.

Watching that pitch, it just felt like some foreshadowing. To pull the string on the very first offering of the day, and locating it there? That's a pitcher with loads of confidence.

Cameron followed that up by breezing through the first inning. He got three batters on 11 total pitches with all out on harmless fly balls. The lone battle was against the number three hitter, Vaughn Grissom. Cameron threw a first-pitch strike on the outer edge, this one a slider and, after a change down and out of the zone, got a called strike on the cut fastball on the upper edge. From there the sequence was curve (foul), elevated four-seamer (ball) and then back to the curve on 2-2. I though this was some good pitch-calling on Cameron's part. Nothing too fancy but a change of speed and eye level was enough to speed up Vaughn's bat and get him to loft a fly ball at 46 degrees.

You can leave a curve in that location when you're working the edges for strikes and showing heat up and changeups down.

Second Inning

After the Royals pulled a NOBELTIGER in the top half of the secedon, Cameron went straight to work, retiring the first batter he faced, Jose Siri, on a first–pitch slider that went for an infield pop up. The next batter went down on only two pitches, this one a ground ball to first. If you're keeping track, that was the first ground ball of day.

Just like the first inning, Cameron's toughest challenge came against Denzer Guzman.

He missed down on the fastball—his first first-pitch ball of the day—and got a called strike on an elevated change. Neither pitch is where you want it. Cameron was kind of spraying the four-seamer in this PA and fell behind 3-1, but delivered a well-placed four-seamer to get another pop up.

Through two innings he was at 19 pitches.

Third Inning

Cameron opened the inning with another first-pitch ball. This one was a sinker, well down and off the plate. He came back with a nifty slider on the bottom of the zone. By this point, he had thrown 21 pitches and hadn't gotten a swing and a miss. He wouldn't have to wait any longer for his first whiff of the day.

Well, whadda you know...a change up that had Oswald Peraza well out in front. How fun it is when that pitch works...and it was doing all sorts of work for Cameron on Sunday.

Peraza hit a shallow fly to center. The next batter, Travis d'Arnaud, became Cameron's first strikeout victim, going down on three pitches. In this confrontation, the first two offerings were changeups. The third?

That's a filthy back foot slider. d'Arnaud was cooked.

Cameron then closed out the frame with another fly ball out.

Since we're a third of the way through the start, let's total it up. Cameron retired the first nine batters he faced on 33 pitches. The opened seven of those confrontations with a first-pitch strike. Of the nine outs, seven of those came in the air. None of the air outs were hard-hit (an exit velocity greater than 95 mph). The average launch angle was 50 degrees. Yes, 50 degrees! The Angels batters were all on the front foot, early, lunging and getting under everything. The only hard-hit ball was a ground out at 95.5 mph off the bat. We were seeing something special.

Programming Note

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Fourth Inning

The Angels were getting their second look against Cameron. This is where things can be dicey for the Royals lefty. This season, teams are hitting .354/.393/.630 against Cameron the second time through the order. It's by far his worst times through the order split.

That didn't seem to matter in the fourth. After starting Neto off with a change the first time they met, Cameron tossed in a first-pitch slider that had Neto locked up. Neto then drove a four-seamer to center. At 96 mph off the bat with a launch angle of 28 degrees, it was easily the best batted ball off Cameron to that point. Perhaps there is something to that times through the order penalty for Cameron. Kyle Isbel in center, had to come in for it at the last moment as the ball just kind of died out there. Never a threat.

After Trout popped out to second, it was another confrontation with Grissom.

It doesn't look good, but Grissom, after taking the first pitch for a strike (a generous call from the home plate umpire, but one you're going to get when you're working the zone and have a catcher back there who presents that low pitch well), went into swing mode.

The first slider was on his back foot, which was where Cameron was throwing every slider. After that elevated curve that was fouled off he went back to the slider but was just a bit too far down. So Cameron stayed down but went to the change for his second strikeout of the day.

I loved what Carter Jensen had to say after the game about the Cameron cambio:

"Changeup looked like it had a parachute behind it."

I cannot think of a better way to describe what we were watching.

Fifth Inning

The fact that Cameron had nine of his first 12 outs coming in the air wasn't exactly surprising. According to Baseball Savant, 60 percent of the balls put in play against the lefty this year have been in the air. But, yeah...he was working at a 90 percent fly ball rate through the first four innings.

Regression to the mean can happen even in a single game. For Cameron, it came in the fifth when all three of his outs he recorded came on the ground. Only one of the three grounders was hard-hit.

The first two batters were retired on four total pitches. In the confrontation with Guzman, Cameron started him out with a four-seam on the outer edge.

The slider was down, but Guzman couldn't lay off and swung and missed. After ignoring the second slider, he was jammed on the curve and hit a harmless grounder to short.

That's 15 up and 15 down on 52 pitches.

Sixth Inning

This frame was when things started getting a bit dicey for Cameron. He opened up against Peraza with a changeup that was way up and out of the zone. Highly uncharacteristic for the lefty given how he seemed to have total command of that specific pitch to that point. After evening the count with a slider, he then missed with his next three offerings and the Angels had their first baserunner of the afternoon. There would be no perfect game.

That previous sentence is absurd to type, let alone even think about in the sixth inning of a ballgame. Yet it didn't feel that way on Sunday with Cameron on the mound. Given the opposition and the way he was dealing, it sort of felt like it was within the realm of possibility.

Never mind the walk. This was just the second time all day Cameron went to a three-ball count on a hitter.

While Cameron was struggling to hit his spots in this inning, his defense was there to bail him out. The first nice play of the frame was made by Nick Loftin charging in at third to pick a short-hop and make a throw across the diamond for the first out. Given how far Loftin had to come in to field the ball, there was no chance to turn two and Peraza advanced to second.

With that runner in scoring position, perhaps Cameron grew tight. You couldn't blame the guy if that was the case. The Royals were up just 2-0 at that point and all the hard work Cameron had put in up to that point could be erased in just one pitch. This was how he attacked the ninth-place hitter, left-handed hitting Josh Lowe.

Lowe isn't a dangerous hitter, batting just .204/.263/.353 with a 69 wRC+ on the season, but Cameron didn't want to make a mistake. No pitcher wants to get beaten by the number nine hitter. As you can see from the chart above, Cameron clearly wanted to stay away. That's because Lowe is hitting just .118 on pitches on the outer half of the strike zone. Cameron missed on his first couple, but was then able to dial it back in to get a swinging strike on a cut fastball and a foul on a four-seamer to level the count. He then missed badly on a curve that just didn't snap out of his hand the way he wanted it to. Cameron then came back with that trusty slider to ring up Lowe.

Cameron still needed to get that third out. Facing Neto for a third time, the Angels leadoff man scorched the hardest-hit ball of the day off Cameron, a 99.5 mph scorcher back up the box. No problem for second baseman Michael Massey, who was positioned up the middle.

Cameron ducked out of the way and kept the no-hitter intact through six. He had thrown just 67 pitches, with 44 of them going for strikes.

Seventh Inning

After setting Trout down on strikes to open the frame (on a changeup), the no-no was broken up by Grissom who looped a soft single to left. He was jammed on a cut fastball that was up and in that landed in no-man's land between Bobby Witt Jr. at shortstop and Isaac Collins in left.

Unlike the sixth, there would be no wobbling with a runner on base. Cameron got Siri to fly out on a curve and then retired Wade Meckler on a 3-1 cutter that was lofted to medium-deep center. Of all the Angels, I thought Meckler was getting the best looks at Cameron on the afternoon. He fouled off a pitch earlier in that at bat that where he had a healthy cut. Officially, Cameron allowed six hard-hit balls in his start. Wade Meckler had three of them.

Eighth Inning

Cameron had been getting plenty of swing and miss to this point, but had rung up only four strikeouts. He changed that up in the eighth, setting all three batters down on strikes, all swinging.

Let's classify Cameron's eighth as effectively wild. He was missing around the zone, but given how he had thrown in the previous seven innings, the Angels remained in swing mode.

Only five pitches of the 18 he threw in that inning would've been called strikes. He was really missing with his slider, which had been so effective prior to the eighth. The changeup was missing as well. But the Angels hitters expanded the zone laterally and chased a couple of offerings that were well down.

All three strikeouts were swinging, all coming on different pitches.

Cameron really leaned on his slider on Sunday, throwing it more than any other pitch at 22 percent of the time. He throws it just 11 percent of the time on average. It was working for him. The lefty got six whiffs on 13 swings. The changeup was, as noted, a killer offering. He got eight misses on 15 swings and had a 50 percent chase rate. Good luck with that.

Ninth Inning

On July 30, Cameron twirled a gem against the Minnesota Twins, going eight innings while allowing just one hit while striking out seven. It was an eerily similar line to what he posted to this point on Sunday. In both instances, the Royals entered the ninth inning with a 3-0 lead.

In that game against the Twins, Cameron was at 97 pitches and didn't come back out for the ninth. All the Royals bullpen did was load the bases and surrender a walkoff grand slam.

At 99 pitches on Sunday, there was no way Cameron wasn't coming back out to finish this off. Please! Keep the Royals bullpen on the sidelines at all costs. Fortunately, he was able to reel in that wildness that punctuated his eighth inning of work and brought things back in to the edges. He retired both Lowe and Neto on changeups to set up his final confrontation of the afternoon: Future first-ballot Hall of Famer, Mike Trout.

Perhaps a bit too amped up, Cameron fell behind 3-0. He dropped a curve too low, a changeup well up and away and then a cutter too far inside. By this point, he was at 111 pitches. Ugh.

As he did in the sixth and seventh innings, he quickly got right, pumping a pair of fastballs in the zone that Trout watched as the count rolled full. After Trout fouled off a pitch, Cameron finished off his day with...what else?...another beaut of a change.

What a ballgame. What an outing. What a complete-game shutout.