The Royals announced they have placed closer Carlos Est\u00e9vez on the 15-day Injured List with a left foot contusion and have called up pitcher Steven Cruz. Est\u00e9vez was hit by a line drive in his only appearance of the year on Saturday and has been wearing a walking boot since then.<\/p>\n
Est\u00e9vez looked off in his season debut against the Braves, allowing six runs while recording just one out in the 6-2 loss. He had trouble breaking 90 mph in spring training, raising alarm bells with many observers. On Saturday, he averaged 91.2 mph on his fastball, and had erratic command, particularly on his change up. He gave up three singles and two walks before giving up a walk-off grand slam to Dominic Smith. After the game, manager Matt Quatraro suggested Est\u00e9vez may pitch in lower-leverage situations<\/a> to ease him back after he spent some of his spring training with Team Dominican Republic in the World Baseball Classic.<\/p>\n Cruz made 47 appearances with the Royals last year, with a 3.74 ERA and 38 strikeouts in 45.2 innings. The 26-year-old right-hander gave up two hits and two runs with a walk and three strikeouts in his only appearance for Omaha.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Royals announced they have placed closer Carlos Est\u00e9vez on the 15-day Injured List with a left foot…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":657671,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2387],"tags":[5,936,2123,55,83353,35554,2596,2595,4,252],"class_list":{"0":"post-657670","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-kansas-city-royals","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-kansas","10":"tag-kansas-city","11":"tag-kansas-city-royals","12":"tag-kansas-city-royals-injuries","13":"tag-kansas-city-royals-news","14":"tag-kansascity","15":"tag-kansascityroyals","16":"tag-mlb","17":"tag-royals"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116332116453241672","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=657670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657670\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/657671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=657670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=657670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=657670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}