On Monday, Jeanmar Gomez gave up the winning run after he made a pitiful toss to third attempting to cut down the lead runner on a bunt.
Gomez's presence prompts a lot of questions, and it's worth the scrutiny. He's 30 years old, he's a free agent after the year, and he has a 5.00 ERA. Rick Renteria probably finds some comfort in veterans, and that can be detrimental to the development of prospects.
But watching Ryan Burr in the fifth inning on Wednesday, I was reminded that Ned Yost likes to torment rookie pitchers with the running game.
The Royals attempted three steals on Burr over his 1 2/3 innings. The first was a double steal where Welington Castillo couldn't even throw.
Hunter Dozier tried adding a third after his RBI single with what Hawk Harrelson calls a Lance Johnson jump. He might've left a half-second too early, although who knows what Burr would've done if Dozier kept running.
It brought back memories of Chris Beck facing Terrance Gore, Jarrod Dyson and Whit Merrifield in 2016. It started with a pair of pitchouts Gore didn't bite on, followed by Gore stealing on 3-0, and it went downhill from there.
Now, this might be an argument for bringing in Burr with the bases empty in the 10th versus two on and one out in the fourth -- as in, wait until he has baserunners of his own before anybody can determine how well he holds them -- but there's one argument for using a veteran. Do with it what you will.
The good news is that Nate Jones looked fantastic in his first action since June 12, throwing seven of eight pitches for strikes and fanning Alex Gordon with a pair of perfect sliders.
"During the warmups, I could start feeling the adrenaline coming on being back in a big league game," a noticeably happy Jones said. "I was lucky enough to keep those emotions under control and stuff like that. It feels good now and next step being make sure it feels good tomorrow, which I'm sure it will be.
"It's a grind whenever you go on the DL. It's a grind with all the boxes you have to check and all the exercises you have go through. But in the end it's all worth it to get back out here. It was different and it was exciting. I got that adrenaline going and that was nice too.
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Over at FanGraphs, Jay Jaffe pokes at Tommy John surgery trends after torn UCLs sidelined Michael Kopech and the pitching version of Shohei Ohtani.
There isn't anything conclusive, because imagine the celebration around baseball if there were. But he points to a study from 2016 saying fastball usage had a stronger connection than fastball velocity when it comes to Tommy John surgery, which seems quite pertinent for a guy like Kopech.
However, research also revealed that the pitchers who received Tommy John surgery threw significantly more fastballs than the control group, with a 2% increase in risk for UCL injury for every 1% increase in fastballs thrown, and that fastball usage above 48% was “a significant predictor of UCL injury.”
For what it’s worth, the small sample of Kopech’s Pitch Info data for his four starts shows him throwing four-seam fastballs 62.5% of the time.
Chris Sale came to mind for me, as he was somebody who backed off his fastballs in different ways over the course of his White Sox career. Sometimes he'd throw his fastball 60 percent of the time and gear down on the velocity, seeing if he could get away with it. Sometimes he'd throw harder fastballs, but maybe only 51 or 52 percent of the time.
The latter approach is the one he's chosen with the Red Sox, as his fastball rate is a touch under 50 percent with Boston, and he's gone with more sliders instead. It's worked for him in terms of velocity and success, although he's been battling shoulder inflammation during the second half of this season. He made his first appearance for the Red Sox in a month on Tuesday as an opener, throwing 26 first-inning pitches as he battled erratic command.
Noah Syndergaard, he pitcher Kopech is most often compared to, also came out throwing fastballs 62 percent of the time in his rookie season. Three years later, he's down to 53 percent as his changeup has become a bigger part of his arsenal. He also had a major injury to contend with, but it was a torn lat in 2017.
Kopech sounds like he's comfortable being somebody who uses his fastball for strikes one, two and three, but I'm guessing one force or another will eventually level out his pitch mix.
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Speaking of Kopech, my column for The Athletic on Monday was a companion piece to my hunt for silver lining here. Everybody knows that pitchers are likely to get injured, and the White Sox had to plan for it, but why does it still feel so gutting?
The seven straight losses add to the pall, but here's my attempt to figure out the rest of it:
This season, the answer to those questions resulted in a team that’s flirting with 100 losses. Maybe the Sox are truly taking it step by step, and everything will be better the second time around, but they won’t have the benefit of the doubt.
That right there is my best guess for why Kopech’s injury registers as such a blow. It takes the last chance for true progress off the board, and now everybody’s resigned to another 60-something-win summer before this one is even over. It turns out the light at the end of the tunnel was a sign reading “162 MORE GAMES OF TUNNEL.”
