SEATTLE -- The margin for error has been small all season for the Royals.
On Monday night, with the All-Star Break and Trade Deadline creeping ever closer and Kansas City facing one of the teams it's battling for an American League Wild Card berth, it got even smaller.
The Royals once again fell into the pattern of their rocky June in a 6-2 loss to the Mariners in the opener of this important three-game road series at T-Mobile Park.
The offense once again sputtered and couldn’t do enough to pick up starter Michael Wacha, who was effective early but ran into enough trouble in the fourth and fifth innings to seal Kansas City’s fate.
This time, the lack of proficiency with runners in scoring position that has helped define the team’s 8-18 slide this month wasn’t even the main issue. The Royals only had four runners in that situation all night, and Bobby Witt Jr.’s single in the third and fielder’s choice in the eighth scored two of them.
Manager Matt Quatraro insisted that despite the recent struggles, the Royals are grinding on the field and supporting each other in the dugout as always.
“Guys want to win,” Quatraro said. “They're disappointed, but they're trying to fight their butts off, and they're competing. This is just not happening for us right now. It’s a tough game.”
It’s particularly tough with the team playing to the same formula of late. While the Royals’ pitching staff brought an excellent 3.47 season ERA into the game, that number had grown to 4.18 for the month of June and went even higher Monday.
Wacha looked comfortable in the first 3 2/3 innings, limiting the Mariners to a lone single to J.P. Crawford in the first at-bat of the game as Kansas City held a 1-0 lead, but Randy Arozarena’s game-tying solo home run in the fourth was the first of three consecutive hits allowed, and in the fifth, a crooked number arrived.
After Cole Young, Crawford and Julio Rodríguez strung together base hits, AL Most Valuable Player candidate Cal Raleigh gave Seattle a 2-1 lead with a sacrifice fly, and Arozarena effectively put the game on ice with another blast, this one a three-run job to center field that gave the Mariners a 5-1 lead.
Wacha got two more outs to complete five innings of work, but the damage had been done, and reliever Daniel Lynch IV allowed an insurance run to the Mariners when Raleigh touched him up for his Major League-leading 33rd homer of the season to lead off the seventh.
“One rough inning,” Quatraro said of Wacha’s outing. “Randy hit a home run on a cutter the first time and then a bunch of soft contact that found holes and he’s trying to wiggle out of it there. He gets the sac fly from Raleigh and then you're hoping for a ground ball there, but he made a pretty good pitch and Randy went up and got it.”
Wacha said he thought he threw the ball relatively well all night but would change some of the pitch sequencing if he could do it again.
“Definitely some stuff to learn from in this outing,” Wacha said.
Meanwhile, Kansas City couldn’t solve Seattle starter George Kirby. Their three hits, which all came in the third inning, were singles. They did not draw a single walk against the right-hander, who logged five 1-2-3 innings in his six frames of work. Kirby struck out the last two batters he faced in the sixth and then the Royals fanned three more times in a row in the seventh against Mariners reliever Gabe Speier.
In the eighth inning against Seattle righty Trent Thornton, the Royals got some traffic on the bases courtesy of a John Rave infield single, a Kyle Isbel walk and a Jonathan India hit by pitch. That set up Witt for his RBI grounder, but Maikel Garcia couldn’t further capitalize with runners on the corners, grounding out to second to end that threat, and the Royals went down in order in the ninth against Mariners righty Matt Brash.
As the well-decorated leader of the Kansas City offense, Witt knows that panic is not the answer at this point of the season, especially not for a team that swept a Wild Card Series last season.
“You move on,” Witt said. “You learn what you do badly. You fix things. You fix the problems that are going on, and then you move on.”