Come October, assuming the Blue Jays make the playoffs, and these words might come back to bite me big time, the Kansas City Royals will be nowhere in sight, unless they open the banks of prospects and bucks and buy three or four major pieces at the trade deadline.
There is no better testimony to my contention than to point to today’s game between the Jays and the Royals, to see that not only are the Royals not the team they were for the last two years, but that the decline is now obvious, and will only become more so. Last night’s Jays’ 6-2 win was a decent ball game between two competitive teams, a 1-1 tie with both starters still in the game. When Royals’ manager Ned Yost tried to squeeze a seventh inning out of an Edinson Volquez who had pitched well for six, he gave the Jays an opening, and Luke Hochevar stood at the door and waved them through, instead of shutting it. Meanwhile, Sanchez went eight strong, and there was no time left for a comeback. Typical game story. It happens. Not much predictive in it.
Ah, but tonight. It was a resurgent R.A. Dickey taking to the hill for the Jays, still looking for run support, but not conceding a lot to his opponents in the last two months, as an early-season ERA north of 6.00 gradually and inexorably works its way down towards the magical below-4.00 level. And getting the call for the Royals was Chris Young, a six-foot, 10-inch veteran right-hander who has been a regular in the Royals’ rotation for the last couple of years, posting an 11-6 record and an ERA of 3.06. But this year? Nada. His record going in to today’s game was 2-7, with an ERA of 6.24. In his last two starts, he had given up 8 earned runs over 6.1 innings of work. Worst of all, his WHIP is atrocious, at 1.63, meaning that he’s closer to allowing two base-runners an inning than one.
So if the Royals, currently third in the AL Central, three games over .500 after tonight, but only a half game ahead of the White Sox, have any pretensions to contend in their division, let alone the league, why is Chris Young even in the rotation? It’s a definition of something, I don’t remember what, maybe stubborn futility, that you keep doing the same thing over and over again and keep expecting a different result. This is an apt description of Ned Yost sending Chris Young out for his scheduled starts given his performance so far this year.
It didn’t help the Royals tonight that Dickey’s flutterball was jumping all over the zone, but not so much outside the zone, and the Royals’ hitters just could not figure out an approach. When the knuckler’s not moving well, or the hitters have it timed, it’s not very effective, and Dickey’s in big trouble, run support or not. But tonight they didn’t have a chance against him. He struck out the side in the first inning, two more in the second, two more in the fourth. He went seven innings on 111 pitches, and gave up two earned runs on five hits, walked three, and struck out eight. Though they picked up a run off him in the ninth, Manager John Gibbons’ decision to bring in the big young right-hander Joe Biagini, whose fast ball is in the mid nineties, after the knuckler didn’t do a lot to help the Royals mount a comeback.
A word about Dickey’s pitching line and the official scoring before moving on from the pitching to the Jays’ dismantling of Chris Young in the third inning. The two runs given up by Dickey came in the fourth inning, via a two-run homer off the bat of Cheslor Cuthbert, that new guy with a funny name who actually swings the bat pretty well. Maybe he needs a nickname, like Chesty, if that doesn’t sound too much like a stripper. Chesty Cuthbert. No, maybe not. Anyway, his blast came with two outs, immediately after Michael Saunders absolutely butchered a deep shot to left by Salvador Perez. Mind you, the ball was hit hard, but it was eminently catchable. It was originally scored, correctly, I think, as an error, making the two runs unearned because Cuthbert should never have come to the plate in the fourth—that’s how the allocation of earned runs works. But when I was looking over the box score just now, I saw that Dickey’s line showed two earned runs and five hits, not zero and four hits. I went back to the official play-by-play report on MLB.com, and looked at the fourth inning, and there it is: “Salvador Perez doubles on a fly ball to Michael Saunders.” If Perez gets a hit, of course, the runs are earned. I really don’t like this sort of retroactive whitewashing, and it smells even more when it’s a home-team decision, and even more yet when it comes on the very night that Saunders—god bless his soul, and his bats—was named as one of the five candidates for the Final Man Vote for the 2016 All-Star Game. We need a bit more integrity, or at least accountability, from our official scorers. Or has that been said before?
So, how did Chris Young fare against the Jays tonight? Well, not bad, in the first two innings. In the first, he struck out the side, except that the one hitter he didn’t strike out, Josh Donaldson, hit one out on him, putting the home boys up one-nothing. In the second he gave up a bloop single to Justin Smoak, which sounds like an oxymoron, but otherwise retired the side with ease: strikeout number four, a ground-out and a pop-out.
But he ran into a wall in the third, departing with one out, having given up three more homers, five more runs, and five more hits. After two and a third innings, the Jays were up 6-0, the knuckler was dancing, and the game was essentially over. Here’s what happened, for the record: after Josh Thole flied out deep to right for the first out, Zeke Carrera and Donaldson went deep back to back. Edwin Encarnacion singled, Michael Saunders doubled him to third, and Troy Tulowitzki brought them both home with a three-run blast to left. Young’s time on the hill was over, and Ned Yost brought in former Jay Chien-Ming Wang—remember him?—who gave up a single and a walk, but no more runs.
After the Cuthbert homer cut the lead in the fourth, the Jays manufactured another run in their half of the inning against Wang, Donaldson eventually scoring after he had reached on a fielder’s choice, driven in by Encarnacion with a bloop single.
While the Royals continued their futility against Dickey, the score remained at 7-2 until the Jays added another singleton in the seventh at the expense of the magnificently-named rookie Brooks Pounders, just called up to fill the spot on the roster vacated by Wade Davis’ move to the disabled list. Kevin Pillar eventually delivered Donaldson, who had led off the inning with a single, with a sacrifice fly.
With the Jays up 8-2 and Biagini in to finish up for Dickey, the Royals picked up one in the ninth as mentioned earlier to complete the scoring. Not only was it too little, too late, it was fated to be never enough, from the beginning.
So Dickey stifles the Royals, a member of the Royals’ rotation surrenders four homers in two and a third innings, and the Jays are home and cooled out, basically, after three innings. That makes two in a row for the Jays against the formerly intimidating Kansas City Royals, and a lot of the wind has gone out of the big rematch between last year’s titans of the American League.
Tomorrow night it will be Marcus Stroman on the mound for the Jays, hoping to build on the improvement shown in his last start. He’ll be facing Ian Kennedy, who was signed as a major free agent by the Royals in the off-season. From the looks of his record up to this point, maybe the Royals shouldn’t have busted the piggy bank for him.
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