After sixth straight loss, Royals’ Danny Duffy calls umpire's balk call ‘garbage’

Danny Duffy clasped his hands and stared back at home-plate umpire Bruce Dreckman in the early moments of Tuesday night’s game. He took one step toward the plate, then another. As his feet touched the infield grass, he mimicked his set position and yelled toward home.

“I stopped,” Duffy said.

It was the bottom of the second inning at Guaranteed Rate Field, just moments after Duffy, the Royals’ starter, had been called for a controversial balk with runners at first and second and two out. The moment infuriated Duffy and irked the men inside the Royals dugout. It moved the runners up 90 feet, and served as the first tug of the thread in a pitcher’s unraveling.

“It was garbage,” Duffy said. “It was terrible.”

Whether the call cost the Royals a run was a matter of some interpretation. Duffy walked White Sox catcher Omar Narvaez to load the bases before allowing an RBI single to Leury Gonzalez. Royals left fielder Alex Gordon cut down Chicago’s Matt Davidson at home plate, ending the inning and limiting the damage to just one run. But as Duffy walked back to the dugout, he was still livid.

In the end, after a 10-5 loss to the White Sox, after a sixth straight defeat on this road trip and another night of suspect offensive production, the balk call was a mere footnote. The Royals absorbed another shot to the chin Tuesday. They gave up at least 10 runs to the White Sox in consecutive games for the first time since 2004. They fell deeper into an early-season hole.

Yet the balk — and the anger it aroused — served as a harbinger for the night to come. In his fifth start, Duffy was rattled early and could never regain control, allowing six earned runs and nine hits in 4  2/3 innings. The line signaled his shortest outing of this young season and his worst since giving up six runs in 3  2/3 innings against the Detroit Tigers last September. As he stood before his locker afterward, Duffy spent more than two minutes criticizing the umpire’s call.

“It was a terrible call,” Duffy said. “And that’s something that you have to legitimately be looking for in order to make that call. And I came to a full stop. It just was not a good call.”

Dreckman ruled otherwise, saying Duffy did not come to a complete stop while in the stretch. Royals manager Ned Yost disagreed after watching video of the play during the game. But by the end, Duffy was most upset that the call made him hesitant to use his slide-step, neutralizing a tactic he uses to keep hitters off-balance.

“That takes away one of my biggest weapons, which is a slide-step,” Duffy said. “Which is something that I practiced for 10 years. It wasn’t a good call. It put a guy on second and third. And I wasn’t happy about it.

“Now it’s not sour grapes. I still need to locate (my pitches). I still need to make pitches. But it was a terrible call. And that’s something that, in that situation, you just got to let the players play, man.”

As he offered his side of the argument, Duffy acknowledged that he might be fined for his comments. That fact did not deter him.

“I was leery to slide-step for the rest of the game,” Duffy said. “So I’m sure he was trying to make the right call. I’m sure he’s a good guy. I’m sure he’s just trying to do his best. But it took away one of my best weapons and I was not happy about it.”

As Duffy made his case, the rest of the Royals milled about a quiet room and processed another loss. A team that was once plagued by the worst offense in the majors has now been felled by three straight days of mediocre results from its starting rotation.

The run began on Sunday afternoon in Texas. It continued across two nights in Chicago. In three games, the starting rotation has given up 12 runs in 12  2/3 innings. When the latest performance was over, the Royals could do little but swallow hard and feel the sting of a 7-13 record after 20 games.

“Danny just wasn’t real sharp,” Yost said.

The Royals did not have the firepower to fight back. They managed two runs against White Sox starter Dylan Covey, a Rule 5 pick making his third major-league start. When Covey exited after four innings, the White Sox bullpen took command, recording four scoreless innings before the ninth.

Mired in a tempestuous and confounding slump, the Royals almost failed to score more than two runs for a ninth straight game, which would have extended a franchise record. Designated hitter Brandon Moss offered relief with a two-run homer in the ninth and Mike Moustakas followed with his seventh blast of the year. But in some ways, the latest performance featured all the hallmarks of a frustrating April. Slumping stalwarts. Strikeouts. No long rallies.

The night had opened with some hope. Salvador Perez delivered a 1-0 lead in the first with an RBI single to center. But after the White Sox tied the score in the second, Eric Hosmer snuffed out a potential rally by grounding into his league-leading seventh double play with nobody out in the third.

The grounder to shortstop came after Moustakas and Lorenzo Cain opened the inning with a double and a walk, respectively. The moment conformed to a month-long pattern. The Royals had opened the day with the worst run total (47) and team batting average (.199) in the majors. They finished it with five members of their lineup hitting worse than .200.

“Sometimes slumps go until you reach that point of letting go,” said Moss, who struck out seven straight times before ending the skid with a fly-out and a homer. “When you finally reach the point where you realize, you’ve dug yourself a hole that you’re not going to get out of in one day.”

So let’s reset for a moment. This is not the first time the Royals have been mired in a hole like this, of course. A few hours after arriving at the ballpark on Tuesday, Yost recalled the early-season ruts of 2013 and 2014. The club changed hitting coaches on both occasions, settling on Dale Sveum in 2014. That season concluded with a postseason trip, clinched here in Chicago, and the franchise’s first visit to the World Series in 29 years.

“It’s no different,” Yost said. “We went through this in 2014 and ended up going to the World Series. I had to make a hitting-coach change in ’14 because it got rough. And I had to make one in ’13. And we ended up close to making the playoffs.”

And yet, even Yost understood the empty feeling that accompanies a stretch like this. They have been through this before, he said. And they opened Tuesday just 3  1/2 games out of first in the American League Central. All things considered, it was not a Def-Con 4 level disaster.

“We could really be buried,” Yost said. “You go through phases like this, you feel like you haven’t won in a month. It’s been five days. It just feels like a month.”

But it has now been six days. On Wednesday, the Royals will try to avoid their first three-game sweep in Chicago since July of 2010. They are not buried yet. But the hole is getting deeper by the day.

White Sox 10, Royals 5

This story was originally published April 25, 2017 at 10:37 PM with the headline "After sixth straight loss, Royals’ Danny Duffy calls umpire's balk call ‘garbage’."