KANSAS CITY – The Royals’ pitching staff is bruised and battered right now, and Kris Bubic’s most recent setback didn’t help Wednesday after the club had been eyeing some sort of reinforcement. Right now, the Royals need innings from their starters and to get through games with health on their side.
Lugo gave them one Wednesday, even with the three runs allowed. He was at 85 pitches after six innings with a case to be made to go out for the seventh, but a combination of the heat, the Rays’ nine hits against him and the quick innings on offense with Rays starter Shane McClanahan efficiently shutting out the Royals caused manager Matt Quatraro to turn to his bullpen for the back-end of the game.
“That’s the goal every time, but after the past week we’ve had, it’s extra important to pitch as deep as I can,” Lugo said. “Now we turn the page and get a win tomorrow.”
Six days ago against this same Rays team and nearly an identical lineup in St. Petersburg, Lugo only made it five innings and allowed seven runs. The clear issue in that start was the lack of execution on his breaking balls, and to combat that Wednesday, Lugo made the adjustments by trying to slow down his delivery.
“I felt like I was slower with my lower half to allow my arm to catch up to get the ball glove-side and down below,” Lugo said. “It worked out well. … If you get hit around, it’s easy to really look at yourself in the mirror. When you’re pitching well and making mistakes and getting away with it, that’s when you let it slide and don’t make the adjustment so easily.”
Lugo was hurt on the sweeper he left up in the zone to Cedric Mullins in the sixth inning, a ball that seemed to just carry and carry until it landed over the right-field fence. And Lugo was ambushed on an in-zone sinker when Junior Caminero, the hottest hitter in baseball at the moment, blasted it for his sixth consecutive game with a home run.
In his last start, Lugo allowed two of the three home runs Caminero hit that day. After the first-inning homer Wednesday, Lugo struck Caminero out in his next two at-bats, including on a curveball in the fifth inning.
“Compared to last start, the idea was to challenge more sinkers in the zone rather than breaking balls,” Lugo said. “After the first pitch, I flipped the script on that one. Got away from that, tried to execute more pitches away.”
Lugo still had to work around nine hits and a hit batter, but he didn’t walk anyone and struck out seven. Three of those strikeouts came on cutters, which was Lugo’s most-used pitch over his four-seam fastball. The effectiveness of the cutter might have also been a byproduct of the adjustments Lugo made with his delivery after last time out.
“I didn’t really think about it going in, but after slowing up my delivery a little bit, I think it put my arm in a good position to really stay under the pitch to get a little more carry,” Lugo said. “And I noticed it was playing well, so we stuck with it more.”
Unfortunately for the Royals, Lugo wasn’t the only pitcher who made adjustments Wednesday. They beat McClanahan on June 23 with six runs across six innings in their 12-5 win at Tropicana Field. On Wednesday, McClanahan needed only 69 pitches across six shutout innings.
He never reached a three-ball count, he threw 16 of 21 first-pitch strikes, and the Royals never reached second base against him because of two of the three double plays they hit into Wednesday.
“From the left-handed side, he brought out the changeup a lot more,” Jac Caglianone said. “Once you have that into the mix with the curveball and slider, both the 97 mph fastballs, it took a few seconds to kind of get used to it.”
The only scoring opportunities came in the eighth and ninth innings, but they ended quickly.
“There’s a lot of frustration with everything that’s going on and how we’re playing,” Bobby Witt Jr. said after grounding out with runners on first and second in the eighth. “... We’re way better than this. So it’s really frustrating.”