Game thread LVIII – Royals at Rangers

I don’t really know what to put here anymore. I mean, sure, I can preview the pitching matchup and offer some thoughts about the lineup. And I will. But I also like to contextualize the play of the team and the importance of the game. And… there’s just no context worth offering, and there is no importance to the game. The Royals are now 11 games back of first place after they were a mere half game back just three weeks ago. I guess we’ll spend a lot of the next few weeks wondering where it all went wrong for a team that even PECOTA thought could win the AL Central. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t seem reasonable to blame injuries.

So about that pitching matchup. Seth Lugo will pitch for KC. He’s had kind of an up-and-down year that has resulted in a perfectly cromulent 3.74 ERA. Remarkably, that ties him for 11th most valuable SP in MLB by fWAR and 58th most valuable by bWAR. Both are pretty good! He had a rough patch of three pretty bad starts out of four, but he’s now on a stretch of two straight quality starts. It could have been two straight starts of 6 innings and 2 runs or less, but he tried to push into the seventh of his last start against the Mariners and ended up giving up two more runs, though the Royals did go on to win that game.

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He faced the Rangers in both series last year. In the first, while he was still looking like the Lugo the Royals had had for most of his tenure, he pitched 6 innings and allowed 1 run on 9 strikeouts. In the second, in the middle of his injury-aided collapse down the stretch, he still went 6.1 innings and allowed only 2 runs. Both were Royals victories. They could use more of that tonight. Against an offense that, in the past week, had been struck out 18 times in 8 innings by Reid Detmers, and suffered a combined no-hitter by the Astros before exploding against Stephen Kolek and the Royals bullpen.

The Rangers will counter with Kumar Rocker. Rocker was once a first-round draft pick by the Mets before a physical revealed a potential injury concern. He was drafted in the first round again the following year by the Rangers, and made most top-100 prospect lists before his debut. But he has yet to live up to the hype. He has struggled to fully command his pitches or generate whiffs. The slider was once graded as an 80 by FanGraphs on the 20-80 scouting scale, but has been rated and performed just around average at the big league level. None of his other pitches has risen to the level necessary to give him a true put-away pitch, either.

Lineups

OK! Now we’re finally serious about mixing up the lineup! It only took us about a month after it had become whatever the level above obvious is that it needed to happen! Listen, I don’t know if this is going to work, but I appreciate seeing the team actually try something.