Two starts ago, Seth Lugo faced off against his original big league team in a wild game that the Royals ultimately won despite him pitching quite poorly. He will look to do better today against his other former club, the one that first gave him a shot to resume starting after what had seemed a permanent shift to the bullpen.
We all know who Lugo is at this point; he throws everything but the kitchen sink. But sometimes he’ll add a faucet in there. When he can avoid the middle of the plate and keep guys guessing, he succeeds, when he gets backed into a corner, he can get pounded. The Padres don’t seem like a team that’s likely to pound him, necessarily, but
The Padres have been a bit up-and-down this season with an elite bullpen, an offense that has struggled to hit home runs, and a starting pitching staff that is extremely suspect after Michael King. Unfortunately for the Royals, King is the one who gets the start tonight.
King throws five pitches. What’s odd about his success from the outside is that, well, it looks like a bit of smoke and mirrors. None of his pitches get chase, none get whiffs, his xwOBACON is awful. His stuff is rated average. His 3.49 ERA is backed by a 4.49 SIERA and 4.01 FIP. His K-BB% of 11.1% is a career low. If the Royals had a good offense, I’d wonder if they could find a way to break him out of his lucky streak. But they’re not.
Not much has changed with the Royals’ lineup since last weekend. For some reason, Salvador Perez still has to be in there despite actively making the team worse. But otherwise, this is about as good as it gets with the current group of players. A group that likely won’t be together much longer.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.royalsreview.com ’
