NEW YORK – The Chicago White Sox, as you may have noticed, are missing from this postseason. When you set a modern record for losses, you don’t get invited. There’s a sure way, though, to impersonate a team that went 41-121 in the regular season: issue eight walks in a game.
In the last 30 postseasons – the wild card era, that is – teams are 23-73 when their pitchers walk at least eight hitters in a regulation game. That comes to a .240 winning percentage, or a 39-win, White Sox-esque pace for a full season.
The Kansas City Royals thought they’d outgrown this. Last season, on their way to 106 losses, their pitchers issued the 10th most walks in the majors. This season, when they improved by 30 games, their pitchers issued the 10th fewest walks.
“We had to throw more strikes; we had to challenge hitters more,” manager Matt Quatraro said before the opener of the division series at Yankee Stadium on Saturday. “We didn’t do a very good job of that last year. We walked a lot of guys, we got behind in the count a lot. This year it’s been a lot different, and I think that’s the biggest change.”
Hours later, in a 6-5 loss to the Yankees, the Royals reverted. Starter Michael Wacha walked the first batter he faced. He walked the last batter he faced, too. Angel Zerpa, who relieved Wacha, walked in a run. So did John Schreiber, who relieved Zerpa.
Sam Long relieved Schreiber and walked his first hitter. Michael Lorenzen relieved Long, and the one time he wished he’d thrown a ball – to Alex Verdugo with two outs and a runner on second in a tie game in the seventh – he served up the go-ahead single instead.
“That situation, you have an open base,” Lorenzen said. “I mean, shoot, that’s gonna keep me up at night. My miss needs to be in off (the plate). Like, it’s gotta be a ball if I’m gonna miss. And it just backed up, down and away.”
The Royals didn’t hit much in Baltimore, but swept the Orioles with stingy pitching that walked just four batters in two games. They doubled that total on Saturday night in the Bronx, wasting a seven-hit effort against the Yankees’ ace, Gerrit Cole.
It reminded the Royals of the opener of their last series here, in a lopsided loss on Sept. 9. That was the last time they had walked at least seven in a game.
“About a month ago, we had a game where we gave up way too many free passes, and that was similar again tonight,” Wacha said. “We pride ourselves on making them earn their way on base. And we’re going to do that. We’ve got to get back in the zone and filling it up and making quality pitches in the zone.”
Wacha’s night ended when he walked Gleyber Torres – who had walked and homered already – to lead off the fifth. He was thinking of how to approach Juan Soto, he said, when Quatraro surprised him by calling for Zerpa.
Zerpa had been pristine lately. He had worked 8 ⅔ shutout innings in his last nine outings, and saved Seth Lugo from a bases-loaded jam in the fifth inning of Game 2 in Baltimore. This time, though, Zerpa made things worse: Soto singled, then Aaron Judge and Austin Wells walked. That was it for Zerpa.
The @Yankees regain the lead on a pair of bases-loaded walks! #ALDS pic.twitter.com/oVvE3b7doc
— MLB (@MLB) October 6, 2024
“You try to get perfect with the pitches (but) they’re hitters and they tend to fail too,” Zerpa said through an interpreter. “You get too fine and you miss. They looked at a lot of pitches. We were close, but not good enough pitches to make them count.”
It is no easy task, of course, to make the Yankees swing. Their hitters led the majors in walks this season with 672, or 70 more than the next-closest team, the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Yankees also led the majors in walks in their last playoff season, 2022, and their last championship season, 2009.
Walking a lot is an October tradition for the Yankees, which made Saturday’s game seem retro, in a pre-pitch clock kind of way – at 3 hours 21 minutes, it was the longest game of the postseason so far, at least until the Dodgers and Padres took the field later in the evening.
For the Royals, it was retro in another way. They had only two games of eight walks in the regular season, down from 11 in both 2022 and 2023. Closer Lucas Erceg, who walked Wells in the eighth but was otherwise sharp, was perhaps the best model for their approach: he had 10.33 strikeouts for every walk for Kansas City in the regular season.
“I started my professional career as a hitter, so when I started pitching again, I kind of understood that hitting is definitely a little harder than some of these guys make it look,” Erceg said.
“For me specifically, keeping that in the back of my head and knowing that I have a hard fastball and some decent secondary stuff that I can throw for a strike, it’s going to make the hitters guess what’s coming. We work a lot on harping on the same two or three things, and that’s staying aggressive in the zone and letting the baseball take care of itself.”
The Royals traded for Erceg at the deadline, part of an in-season build-up that followed a six-year stretch of finishing fourth or fifth in the AL Central. In those six seasons, they were 5-31 when they issued eight walks or more.
This season, their pitchers often wore T-shirts in the clubhouse with a royal-themed motto: “Reign The Zone.” As dangerous as the Yankees can be, it must apply to their hitters, too.
“Our belief is that we need to go right after these guys with our best stuff in the zone,” Long said. “We know what our strengths are and we know how good it is in the strike zone.”
They lost the zone on Saturday, and even when the majors’ leading hitter thought he’d worked a walk, he hadn’t. Bobby Witt Jr. – who led MLB in batting at .332 – finished an 0 for 5 night by taking a fastball at the bottom of the zone for strike three in the ninth. Had he looked at a replay after the game?
“Yeah,” Witt said. “I thought it was a ball.”
When the Yankees had that thought in Game 1, they were usually right. It’s the reason they struck first in the series – but they have not seen the real Royals quite yet.
“That was uncharacteristic and unfortunate,” Quatraro said, “because that’s not really who we are as a staff.”
(Top photo of Royals manager Matt Quatraro removing Angel Zerpa from Game 1: Luke Hales/Getty Images)
