Royals can't break out of familiar patterns in series loss to Athletics

WEST SACRAMENTO -- Maikel Garcia was bent over in pain after a 106.5 mph line drive off the bat of the Athletics' Darell Hernaiz hit Garcia’s thumb instead of his glove as he intended to snag it.

As a trainer and manager Matt Quatraro checked on him, Garcia’s infield teammates were waving at the Royals' dugout to get someone up and ready to come in as a substitution, a sign of how bad it looked for Garcia. It sure didn’t feel good, he said postgame.

But he shook it off and stayed in the game -- and not 10 minutes later, Garcia was assuring everyone he was fine with a home run swing, sending a sweeper a Statcast-projected 395 feet over the left-field fence.

That gave the Royals the lead in the second inning, but even that was fleeting. Starter Noah Cameron allowed four runs (three earned) in the bottom of the frame to allow the A’s to rally and never look back, handing Kansas City a 6-3 defeat and the series loss on Thursday afternoon at Sutter Health Park.

“After we score another run in the top of the second, it stinks to give that big inning up,” Cameron said. “And then be behind the rest of the game. Just got to be better there.”

That’s kind of how this series went for Kansas City overall, winning the first game on Tuesday before dropping the next two to lose its seventh series of the year.

The Royals end the month of April with a 12-19 record and have won just three of their 15 games on the road while averaging just 2.6 runs per game away from Kauffman Stadium. As the calendar flips to May on Friday, they’ll be looking to put together a consistently better stretch of baseball than what they just went through.

They have their work cut out for them, but it’s also not impossible to dig themselves out of it; the Royals are last in the American League Central, but 3 1/2 games out of first place.

As frustrating as it is to hear that it’s still early in the season, that’s exactly what it is. The Royals have played about 19% of their season after 31 games.

“We’ve been playing good,” Garcia said. “We’ve scored more runs. We’ve been showing that we’re working hard and executing the plan. We just didn’t get the good hit in the good situation.”

Finding ways to do just that -- getting the big hit -- is what the Royals must do to turn their season around. They left 12 runners on base Thursday and went 1-for-8 with runners in scoring position. It’s a season-long trend: The Royals have a .221/.315/.306 slash line with runners in scoring position this year.

“We left a lot of runners on base, and that’s why we didn’t win,” Garcia said. “Move on, keep working. It’s a long season. We’re going to get a lot more chances with men on base. Just keep believing in ourselves.”

On Thursday, they had the bases loaded in two separate innings with only one run to show for it. In the first inning, Garcia doubled and moved to third on Bobby Witt Jr.’s flyout. It took four more batters for Garcia to score on Starling Marte’s RBI single, the first of three hits for Marte.

A’s starter Jeffrey Springs threw 30 pitches in the first inning, leaving the game after three innings with right hip soreness. But when a pitcher is working that hard early, the Royals would have liked -- and needed -- more than one run in the first.

“We don’t know how many times we’ll get the same situation,” Marte said. “Got a chance today to get in one run. Keep fighting with the guy. We saw him a little loose in the first inning. We got in one, but they came back and made it a tighter game.”

The A’s immediately tied the game in the bottom of the first and came back again in the second inning to put the Royals behind. To Cameron’s credit, he settled down after the second and got the Royals through 5 1/3 innings, allowing five runs (four earned) with five strikeouts.

Down three runs in the fourth, the Royals had the bases loaded again with two outs, but Salvador Perez flied out to center field. Catcher Elias Diaz hit a solo homer in the eighth, and Jac Caglianone hit a pinch-hit single to lead off the ninth.

The next three batters went down in order.

“We got to keep giving ourselves those opportunities and cash them in,” Quatraro said. “We didn’t do that today.”