Royals’ bullpen collapses in the eighth inning in 10-8 loss to A’s

For 31 days in July, the Royals’ bullpen was the best in baseball, posting a 2.00 ERA in 94  1/3 innings and lugging the club back into postseason contention. The unit was mostly unheralded, relying on a 38-year-old submariner named Peter Moylan and a sinkerballer named Scott Alexander and a host of other spare parts. But for one month, the formula worked spectacularly.

And then came August.

In the first 14 days of the new month, the Kansas City bullpen blew three saves and logged a 6.04 ERA. On Tuesday at Oakland Coliseum, the relief corps engineered its most epic blowup to date, squandering a four-run lead in the eighth inning in a 10-8 loss to the A’s.

The sequence was stunning and silenced the clubhouse late Tuesday night. Relievers Joakim Soria and Mike Minor combined to allow six runs as a three-game winning streak came to a halt. The Royals (60-59) remained a half-game back in the American League wild-card race.

The meltdown negated a five-run explosion from the offense in the top of the eighth — a sequence that erased a 4-3 deficit and included homers by Drew Butera, Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas. The collapse left manager Ned Yost trying to explain away another disastrous mark on the resume of Soria.

“You feel pretty good with a four-run lead and a rested pen,” Yost said. “We just couldn’t contain them.”

Called on to protect a four-run lead, Soria was rendered feckless without the presence of his best off-speed stuff. He opened the eighth by allowing four hits as the A’s closed the gap to 8-6. He had two strikes on each hitter, including 1-2 counts on Ryon Healy and Matt Olson. Soria maintained his season-long stance of no media interviews in the moments after the loss. That left Yost to speak for his reliever. He twice mentioned that Soria was without his “good change-up.”

“He was getting ahead of all the hitters,” Yost said. “But he just didn’t have his good change-up tonight. That’s a pretty big out pitch for him.”

Soria was charged with four runs while recording just one out, his ERA settling at 3.96. He could not be rescued by the left arm of Minor, who wound up taking the loss after coming on with the lead at 8-6 and two men on base. Moments later, Minor hurled a wild pitch, allowing both runners to move into scoring position before he struck out Chad Pinder. With two outs, Minor fell behind 2-0 against Rajai Davis before opting for an intentional walk.

That brought up the left-handed hitting Matt Joyce with the bases loaded. Joyce had opened the game with a solo homer against Royals starter Jason Hammel.

The Royals preferred the “higher-percentage matchup,” Yost said. When the day began, lefties were hitting just .130 against Minor, a starter turned reliever in 2017. Joyce, meanwhile, was batting just .213 with three extra-base hits against left-handers. The numbers did not matter when Minor elevated a fastball on the outside corner. Joyce clubbed it off the wall in left field. All three runners sprinted around to score. In seconds, the Royals trailed 9-8.

“I look back on it and I thought it was a good pitch,” Minor said. “The only thing I could say is that it was up. I thought it was where I wanted it, on the outer-fourth of the plate, on the corner. But it was up and he put a good swing on it.”

The loss was a dose of bitter medicine for a club that has specialized in unlikely late-inning comebacks. The Royals’ bullpen finished the night with a 6.94 ERA in August, the second worst in baseball behind the San Diego Padres.

The issues include a series of collapses on this road trip. In five of the first seven games, the Royals built leads of at least 3-0. On Tuesday, they dropped to 3-4 entering a series finale on Wednesday afternoon.

“We’ve had some back luck and we’ve run into St. Louis, who was hot,” Minor said of the bullpen. “We’ve made good pitches, I feel like. We just haven’t gotten rewarded. The mistakes that we’ve maybe got away with earlier in the year, we’re not getting away with now.”

Just two innings away from a fourth straight victory, the Royals finished the night a half game behind the Los Angeles Angels in the race for the second American League wild-card spot. They dropped six games behind the first-place Cleveland Indians, who will arrive at Kauffman Stadium on Friday night.

“Just a strange night,” said Hammel, who allowed four runs and three homers in six innings. “In a place where the ball doesn’t fly, it seemed like we were playing pepper with the walls tonight, on both sides.”

The Royals led 3-0 after striking for three runs against Oakland’s journeyman starter, Chris Smith, in the top of the first. The lead disappeared as Hammel gave up four runs in the first three innings.

Hammel had allowed just three home runs in his last seven starts, posting a 3.83 ERA across 42 innings in that span. On Tuesday, he was betrayed by two fastballs up in the zone and one hanging slider to Oakland’s Khris Davis.

The offense would vanish in the middle innings. Yet, the eruption came late. Butera clubbed a two-run homer that turned a 4-3 deficit into a 5-4 lead. Moments later, Hosmer hit a two-run bomb to left-center. Moustakas added his 35th homer of the season, drawing within one of Steve Balboni’s franchise record.

For moments, the Royals appeared destined to run their winning streak to four games. But then Soria trotted in from the bullpen in the eighth, and a horror show played out. A baseball team in the thick of a postseason chase suffered one of its most stinging losses of the season. A bullpen could not make a four-run lead stand up.

“Losing’s tough as it is,” Butera said. “But this one was a little harder tonight.”

This story was originally published August 16, 2017 at 12:30 AM with the headline "Royals’ bullpen collapses in the eighth inning in 10-8 loss to A’s."