Royals outfielder Michael A. Taylor leaped at the center-field wall and did to Jackie Bradley Jr. what Bradley is used to doing himself.

It may or may not have been a home run-saving catch, but Taylor’s grab helped add to the Brewers’ recent misery in a 6-4 loss at Kauffman Stadium on Wednesday night.

“He definitely got one,” Bradley said. “It was a great play, and it was a big momentum stopper for us.”

Most of the club’s momentum of late has been of the negative variety. Bradley snapped a streak of 22 hitless at-bats with a tying home run in the fourth inning, then he hit a go-ahead sacrifice fly to Taylor in the sixth to give Corbin Burnes and the Brewers the briefest of leads before the Royals snapped it back. Kansas City scored two runs apiece in the seventh and eighth and sent Milwaukee to a 12th loss in the last 16 games.

At 21-22, the Brewers are under .500 for the first time since they opened the season at 3-4.

“We know we're going through a little stretch right now,” Bradley said. “Everybody is together. Everybody is communicating. I think that's huge. You definitely can't let the downs get to you. You have to continue to keep uplifting one another because it's a long season.”

The Brewers were swept in the two-game series despite pitching gems from top starters Brandon Woodruff and Burnes. Woodruff has a 1.58 ERA after nine starts and Burnes has a 1.79 ERA after seven starts. Their combined win-loss record is 4-5.

“Wins have been hard to come by,” manager Craig Counsell said. “It takes all four phases -- starting, relieving, defense and offense -- to put wins together. It probably takes three of those to sync up to win and we just haven’t been doing that enough lately.”

Bradley’s productive night -- he scored twice and had two RBIs -- was a small step in the right direction.

He has always feasted on fastballs and struggled with breaking stuff, and this season opponents have been exploiting that more than ever. Thirty-nine percent of the pitches he’s seen in a Brewers uniform have been classified by Statcast as breaking pitches, the highest rate of Bradley’s career, and he entered the night 4-for-51 with 25 strikeouts in plate appearances that ended with a breaking ball.

On Wednesday night, Bradley finally bit back.

After he pounced on a first-pitch fastball in his first at-bat and grounded out, Bradley saw nothing but sliders in his next two plate appearances. Royals starter Brad Keller threw two straight in the fourth and Bradley hit the second to the left-field seats for his fourth home run. In the sixth, lefty reliever Jake Brentz threw Bradley five consecutive sliders, and Bradley hit the last of them 101.3 mph off the bat to center for his highlight-reel sacrifice fly.

“That's the cat and mouse game that we talk about a lot and I think it exists,” Counsell said. “But at some point, the best way to get past it is you've got to square some balls up and get them afraid to throw those pitches.”

Said Bradley: “They've been able to kind of hold me down at the moment and I've got to make an adjustment and go from there. ... I've seen a lot of hard-hit balls that are just outs. That's baseball for you. There's no other way around it. You can't make any excuses for it. Results are the only thing that matter.

“How hard you hit it is not in a box score. The numbers speak for themselves and I personally haven't performed at my best. I have to pick it up in order to help the team. A lot of guys are hitting the ball hard, but we have to continue to stay with our approach and hopefully things will turn.”

The game turned for the worse after Counsell elected to go to the bullpen after six innings and 92 pitches from Burnes in his second start off the COVID-19 injured list. Burnes lobbied to continue, Counsell said, but with his bullpen mostly rested, the skipper instead handed a 3-2 lead to J.P. Feyereisen, who was coming off his first poor outing on Sunday, but he had allowed only one earned run in 19 appearances before that.

Feyereisen surrendered the lead on a home run to the first batter he faced, Jorge Soler, and the Royals manufactured the go-ahead run later in the inning with a pair of bunts. In the eighth, they padded the advantage with help from a pair of Brad Boxberger wild pitches.

“All it's going to take is for one game for everything to line up,” Burnes said. “We'll get on a run, look back on this and be able to say it was a tough stretch, but we got through it.”