Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: the Kansas City Royals face a rookie pitcher. A soft-tossing lefty rookie, in fact, who isn’t a top prospect by any means, and one who is making his big league debut. It should be an easy win for the Royals. However, Kansas City batters are utterly flummoxed, and the team loses.
It’s a tale that Royals fans go through every year, for whatever reason. Every left-handed rookie making his debut against the Royals turns into Cy Young for precisely one start. It happened again tonight, as 24-year-old Los Angeles Angels starter Mitch Farris twirled five innings, allowing only one run along the way.
To be fair, the Angels bullpen also did their part. But the Royals just could not get it going. Their one run came from Bobby Witt Jr., who tripled to deep right field, and from Vinnie Pasquantino, who hit a sac fly.
That’s it. Meanwhile, the Angels chipped away at Royals pitching, scoring on Michael Lorenzen, John Schreiber, and Luinder Avila. Lorenzen in particular was a little sloppy, hitting the very first batter of the game and repeatedly allowing the leadoff man to get on.
The highlight of the game came early, when Witt ranged to his right in nearly left field to make a diving stab at a ground ball, hoist himself off the ground, and unleash a laser throw to first base. My jaw literally dropped in the press box.
Carter Jensen made his big league debut in the bottom of the ninth inning with two outs, but did so against potential future Hall of Famer Kenley Jansen. He got a good ovation, even if you could surmise that a strikeout in such a scenario was inevitable. Still—a nice moment, and good on Q for giving him that opportunity in his first possible big league game.
While the Royals have done a nice job bouncing back from their terrible June over the last few months, this game exposes a few key factors about the Royals. First, that Kansas City’s pitching is fraying under the stress, which Brian Henry wrote about recently. Second, that the team has a weakness to left-handed in pitching in general, which I wrote about and will go live tomorrow. And third, that the Royals just have a lot of hitters who struggle to get on base, and sometimes that is going to rear its ugly head all at once.
The Royals get five more chances to beat up on the Angels this month, however. If they can win the rest against the Anaheim squad, we can all forget about this game with glee.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.royalsreview.com ’
