<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the good news: After winning a wild game last night, the Royals have a shot to take the series with a W this afternoon. The bad news: They\u2019re going to have to do it with Randy Dobnak taking a turn in the rotation because Stephen Kolek needs a tune-up start for Omaha (also occurring today) before he\u2019s ready to rejoin the Royals\u2019 rotation following an extended stay on the Family Medical Emergency list to be with his prematurely-born baby daughter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Dobnak has danced around trouble – allowing 9 hits and 4 walks while only striking out 4 in 9.2 innings – in 2 appearances for the Royals. If he earns at least one out today, it will be the most major league innings he has thrown in a season since 2021. He didn\u2019t pitch in the bigs at all in \u201822 or \u201823, pitched 9.2 innings in \u201824, and only 5.1 innings last year. When the Twins called him up as a 24-year-old in 2019, it seemed like he could be a swingman in their rotation and bullpen for years to come but it just didn\u2019t work out that way for him. The Royals, of course, acquired him for cash from the Mariners when he exercised an upward-mobility clause in his contract with them earlier this year. The Royals actually just sold Rudy Martin Jr.\u2018s rights to the Orioles for the same reason yesterday.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The Padres will send Griffin Canning to the mound. Canning is something the opposite of last night\u2019s starter, Michael King. His K-BB% is better, but his LOB% is worse, so he carries an unwieldy 6.47 ERA despite a SIERA of 4.57. So, he\u2019s the opposite of King in that he\u2019s been unlucky, but the same as King in that his true performance has been closer to mediocre than the results would seem to indicate. Don\u2019t ask me what the Royals might do about it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Canning has seven pitches, though he only throws four of them more than 10% of the time, with three of those – his four-seamer, slider, and changeup – accounting for almost 3\/4 of his pitches thrown. He doesn\u2019t generally get anyone to chase his pitches. His slider and cutter can generate some whiffs. Batters don\u2019t do well when they put the knuckle-curveball or sweeper into play. The changeup grades out the best of his pitches. It\u2019s a mish-mash of stats that only tell you that he doesn\u2019t seem to have a clear identity as a pitcher. That can be a problem for a good offense, but I could see how it would make it difficult for a bad offense to figure out a plan against him.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Speaking of bad offenses, the Royals will send out the same nine they used last night. I wouldn\u2019t hate it if they did better with runners in scoring position before the tenth inning. Only time will tell if they can manage it.<\/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":" Here\u2019s the good news: After winning a wild game last night, the Royals have a shot to take the series with a W this afternoon. The bad news: They\u2019re going to have to do it with Randy Dobnak taking a turn in the rotation because Stephen Kolek needs a tune-up start for Omaha (also occurring […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2507588,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[446438],"class_list":["post-2507587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty","tag-kansas-city-royals-game-information"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Royals-vs-Padres-July-18-game-discussion.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2507587","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=2507587"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2507587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2507589,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2507587\/revisions\/2507589"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2507588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2507587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2507587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2507587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}