The Kansas City Royals dropped two of three to the New York Mets this week, and shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. wasn’t hiding his frustration after the series finale.
Kansas City put up 16 runs in the opener but managed just five combined over the final two games, capped by a 7-3 loss in which the Mets blew it open with a five-run fifth inning.
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Witt made it clear afterward that the vanishing offense is wearing on him and the rest of the clubhouse.
“It’s always tough,” Witt said. “You always want to put runs on the board when he’s on the mound just because of how well Wacha has been pitching. So yeah, it’s frustrating. It’s always frustrating losing series.”
Wacha Takes Another Tough Loss
Michael Wacha took the loss in the finale and fell to 5-7 on the year with a 3.77 ERA.
While this outing was one of his rougher ones, he gave up six earned runs in 4.2 innings before getting pulled in the fifth, the 35-year-old right-hander has still been the most reliable arm in the Kansas City rotation for most of the season.
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Witt Jr.’s frustration was aimed at the bigger picture of an offense that has not shown up for Wacha nearly enough this year.
Witt Is Doing Everything He Can
While the Royals sit in last place in the AL Central, Witt continues to carry this team in a way that few other players in the league could.
The 26-year-old three-time All-Star is hitting .288 with a .823 OPS and 13 home runs, including a solo shot in the fourth inning of the finale that gave Kansas City a brief 2-1 lead.
He is also second in the majors in stolen bases and has been doing all of this while the players around him have struggled, on top of battling through a right knee MCL sprain in June that briefly knocked him out of the lineup.
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The numbers he is posting on a 38-56 team speak to how special of a player he really is.
Another Series, Same Story
The Mets series was a perfect snapshot of what this season has looked like for Kansas City.
The Royals put up 16 runs in the opener and looked like they had found a groove, but then the bats disappeared.
In the finale, the Mets loaded the bases in the fifth and strung together a sacrifice fly, a two-run single and an RBI single to blow a 2-1 game wide open.
That kind of swing is what has defined the 2026 Royals, a team that came into the year expecting to fight for a playoff spot after reaching the postseason in 2024.
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For now, Witt will keep doing what he does and hope the rest of the roster starts pulling its weight.
The Royals open a series in Baltimore on Friday night, and they need a lot more from their lineup if they want to stop the bleeding before the trade deadline reshapes this roster even further.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source sports.yahoo.com ’
