The Royals have now lost five straight. Those five losses all have a lot in common. The most obvious similarity is that they were all close games decided in the seventh inning or later. Tonight\u2019s was the first game where they lost by more than a single run. It did, unfortunately, continue the streak of a different reliever blowing the game. John Schreiber blew it on Sunday, then Nick Mears blew it on Tuesday, Eli Morgan lost it on Wednesday, Lucas Erceg lost it on Thursday, and tonight it was Alex Lange\u2019s turn.<\/p>\n
Of particular note to me is that Matt Strahm has only pitched in one game this week. It\u2019s not an excuse, but with him unavailable, guys are being forced to pitch innings they otherwise wouldn\u2019t and throwing off routines like that or asking guys to pitch in higher leverage than they\u2019re used to could be a contributing factor. Since we haven\u2019t heard of any injury, I\u2019ve wondered if he (and other pitchers in the bullpen) might be ill and that could be contributing as well. But we won\u2019t know unless someone asks manager Matt Quatraro and he gives an honest answer.<\/p>\n
OK, so those are the negatives. I want to spend some time on the positives for a bit before we call it a night.<\/p>\n
OK, yeah, that\u2019s probably enough. The Royals will try again to snap the skid tomorrow. Noah Cameron (3.94 ERA, 4.15 SIERA) will face off against Will Warren (2.45 ERA, 3.29 SIERA). Don\u2019t forget it\u2019s an East Coast afternoon game, so first pitch will be at 12:35 Kauffman time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Royals have now lost five straight. Those five losses all have a lot in common. The most…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":678239,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2290],"tags":[5,83102],"class_list":{"0":"post-678238","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-baseball","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-kansas-city-royals-scores-standings"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116424860366754095","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678238","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=678238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678238\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/678239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=678238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=678238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=678238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}