{"id":2000595,"date":"2025-09-05T23:28:27","date_gmt":"2025-09-05T23:28:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2000595"},"modified":"2025-09-05T23:28:27","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T23:28:27","slug":"kansas-city-royals-vs-minnesota-twins-live-discussion-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/kansas-city-royals-vs-minnesota-twins-live-discussion-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Kansas City Royals vs. Minnesota Twins Live Discussion"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The 71-69 Royals had a real opportunity to gain ground on their Wild Card foes this past week, but they could not as they lost too many games to the Angels and Tigers. The Mariners were just swept by the Rays and lost 2 of 3 to the Guardians before that. The Rangers lost 2 of 3 to the Diamondbacks. The Rays, however, have won seven games in a row to tie the Royals in the Wild Card standings. The Mariners are still in control of the third Wild Card spot, and now a huge jumble of teams are fighting them for it instead of just the Royals. It\u2019s a mess.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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With that context, the Royals start a three-game weekend home series<\/a> against the 62-78 Twins. They\u2019ve lost four in a row in a sweep at the hands of the lowly White Sox. The Royals are running out of time to make a push into the third Wild Card spot. They need to sweep this series against a worse team. They cannot accept anything else.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Unfortunately for the Royals, the Twins activated Pablo L\u00f3pez from the 60-day IL earlier today and he will start tonight. He hasn\u2019t pitched a game since June 3rd. He has faced the Royals twice this year, allowing only 1 earned run (two total) across 10.1 innings with 11 strikeouts and only one walk. Despite missing three months of the season, L\u00f3pez remains number two in fWAR among Twins pitchers. He\u2019s their best pitcher (though yes Joe Ryan is also good). The Royals have to hope for some rust.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Against L\u00f3pez, a right-handed pitcher, the Royals have loaded up on lefties in the lineup. The only righties in the lineup are Witt, Garcia, and Perez. Jac Caglianone will make his first start in RF since returning from the IL. I imagine we\u2019ll see plenty of the bench tonight when the Twins go lefty out of the bullpen.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Royals will start Michael Wacha, who is doing the same stuff he did last year. His ERA, xERA, FIP, etc etc in 2025 are all pretty close to 2024\u2019s values. He\u2019s gonna do the same stuff he\u2019s always done. I\u2019m going to throw out there that he\u2019s 21st among all starters in fWAR (no innings cutoff). Y\u2019all know what he is.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Twins will have star Byron Buxton playing in this series. He\u2019s missed some time here and there, as he is wont to do, and he\u2019s somehow missed every game against the Royals except two early-April games. He\u2019s in the midst of an excellent season, hitting a career-high 29 home runs on the way to a 139 wRC+. The Royals will need to shut him down to get a sweep.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The game starts at 6:40pm US Central time at Kauffman Stadium. You can watch on FanDuel Sports Network Kansas City or listen on the Royals Radio Network.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.royalsreview.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 71-69 Royals had a real opportunity to gain ground on their Wild Card foes this past week, but they could not as they lost too many games to the Angels and Tigers. The Mariners were just swept by the Rays and lost 2 of 3 to the Guardians before that. The Rangers lost 2 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2000596,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[334583],"class_list":["post-2000595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty","tag-2025-royals-gamethreads"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Kansas-City-Royals-vs-Minnesota-Twins-Live-Discussion.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2000595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2000595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2000595\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2000596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2000595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2000595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2000595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}