KANSAS CITY – When Noah Cameron received his handshake from manager Matt Quatraro on Friday night, signaling the end of his outing, Cameron turned to Cole Ragans and remarked that it felt a little weird.
After all, it had only been five innings. Lately, Cameron has been pitching much deeper.
“I told Cole, ‘Man, this is weird. I want to go deeper,’” Cameron said. “But it’s one of those things, baseball is a game of runs, it’s a game of streaks. I’m just trying to make this one go as long as possible and get back on the horse.”
It might have only been five innings, but it was five shutout innings with just two hits allowed for Cameron on Friday in the Royals’ 5-2 win over the Tigers at Kauffman Stadium, their sixth win in a row.
The season-high six-game win streak was started last Sunday by Cameron, when he threw a one-hit complete-game shutout against the Angels in Anaheim. He threw a career-high 115 pitches in that one, so the Royals went into Friday keeping a close eye on Cameron’s workload.
The 27-year-old had eclipsed the 95-pitch mark in 10 of his last 13 appearances, too, so the Royals have been looking for ways to manage Cameron’s workload as he enters the final stretch of his sophomore season having surpassed his career high in innings with 143 1/3 after Friday.
“They’ve tried deloading me for a couple of weeks now,” Cameron said. “Obviously last week, I was like, ‘Hey, we’re not deloading this week.’ Throwing really well obviously. But we had conversations all week. I’m trying to say, ‘No, no, I’m good,’ but obviously, battled a lot of high pressure pitches tonight, and definitely was an OK time for me physically and mentally [to] have a little bit of a break.”
The only issue with workload management at a time like this is that Cameron has been pitching so well for the last month that the Royals don’t want to take him off the mound. In his last six appearances dating back to July 24 against these same Tigers, Cameron has allowed five runs in 42 2/3 innings, and four of those runs came in one start last week against the Dodgers.
Friday, though, was a bit more taxing on a muggy night in which Cameron didn’t have the best command and the Tigers were working the count well against him. He worked three walks and was at 85 pitches after five innings.
“It’s moreso how taxing each inning is,” manager Matt Quatraro said. “There were 20-plus pitches in three of the five innings. The heat, the humidity, the grip, all those things. It’s really not the number of pitches. It’s more how he gets there.”
Cameron was still able to keep the Tigers scoreless and work out of the jams he created by relying heavily on his cutter and changeup while staying away from his four-seam fastball and sinker. He didn’t stack the strikeouts (two) or whiffs (20%), instead relying on some solid defense behind him.
“It was more just us kind of behind counts a lot, which usually – teams know it, I can say it on the air – I don’t like throwing fastballs behind in counts as much, until maybe later in the game,” Cameron said. “I think it was just one of those situations. I was giving a lot of 2-0, 2-1 counts today. Just kind of needed [the cutter].”
For Cameron to pitch as well as he did without the sharpest of stuff and his arm perhaps starting to feel the load of the innings he’s been posting lately speaks to his growth throughout this run he’s been on lately. Hitters aren’t seeing his stuff well as he stays unpredictable.
“It feels like he’s very confident with every pitch he has, no matter what the count is,” Tigers shortstop Kevin McGonigle said. “He can throw anything, it felt like. If you see the outings he had before, I feel like we did good at working at-bats, making him go deeper in at-bats, make him throw more pitches.”
The Royals' bullpen did its job despite some shakiness. After Jose Cuas tossed a scoreless sixth, John Schreiber was tagged with two runs in the seventh when he allowed an RBI double to Zach McKinstry and Steven Cruz allowed another RBI double to McGonigle. But Cruz got the Royals through the eighth, and Nate Pearson struck out Dillon Dingler, representing the tying run, to end it in the ninth.