Yordano Ventura may be struggling to live up to expectations as Royals’ No. 1 starter

Mystery is part of the “beauty of baseball,” as Royals manager Ned Yost called it. But it’s also what makes the game exasperating.

“You just never know from day to day what’s going to happen,” he said Saturday at Kauffman Stadium.

Yost could have said this in broad reference to his team, which lost 4-2 to Texas to tumble for the ninth time in 11 games … immediately after having won eight of 10.

The Royals abruptly have gone from one end of the pendulum to the other on the way to being defined somewhere in between extremes with 109 games left to play.

But Yost was speaking specifically of a microcosm of all this: Yordano Ventura, who in his last few starts seemed finally to have shrugged off the volatility that defined the early part of his season only to experience a dramatic relapse Saturday.

By the end of three innings, Ventura had thrown 78 pitches, allowed four runs on six hits, two walks and a hit batsman and committed an error.

Whatever the unsightly numbers left unstated in the suggestion to Yost to remove him, it was amplified by some pouty body language and apparent lack of command and focus.

So that was that for Ventura, who didn’t even come out for the fourth inning.

The number of pitches in a mere three innings, Yost said, was “a huge workload for a young man; we just didn’t want to push it,” he said. “You’re borderline getting into dangerous situations … .”

That’s true, of course, but the ongoing cycle that leads to that spiral is the point of concern here.

As Ventura grappled with the strike zone, he’d overcompensate by catching too much of the plate or overthrow and compromise his mechanics.

Then he’d get the ball up, in contrast to Texas’ Wandy Rodriguez.

“The difference between the two, and the reason that Wandy won today, is because Wandy works down and he works on the corners,” Yost said. “He changes speeds with the change-up and the breaking ball.

“Now, Ventura has the capability of doing that, and when he does that he’s unhittable.”

Not when he’s succumbing to frustration, though.

That as much as anything else is why he allowed four hits in a row and threw a ball away, and why first baseman Eric Hosmer pulled him aside in the dugout to try to simmer him down and lock him in.

He urged Ventura to understand that everyone is frustrated now but that there was a lot of game left and that his teammates needed both innings and composure from him.

Hosmer reminded him, in vain, that he can’t let emotions get the best of him and can’t betray it to the other team even if he feels it within.

“He wants nothing more than to go out there and throw eight shutout innings and get us back on track,” Hosmer said, “and obviously it didn’t go the way he planned.”

Through the translation of infielder Christian Colon, Ventura acknowledged he perhaps let his “guard down, thinking too much of other stuff.”

The impact was that Ventura came into the dugout and “didn’t regroup,” as Yost put it, and then didn’t regroup again … so it was time for a change.

Everyone’s entitled to a rough outing, of course.

Such lulls are part of the grand scheme of the marathon baseball season, and this could just as well have been a glitch as it might be a return to a trend.

What makes it unsettling is that Ventura has gone from must-see, appointment TV as a rookie to being mesmerizing for another reason:

You never know what’s going to happen or how long he’ll last in a season that’s already seen him leave games twice with cramps, another time by ejection and sit out with a suspension.

And what makes this so puzzling is that Ventura is a year older after rather a seamless season in which his maturity was best symbolized by a fabulous start in game six of the World Series — a game the Royals had to win to stay afloat, a game that came days after his friend Oscar Tavares was killed in a car accident.

After he gave up three hits in seven innings in the Royals’ 10-0 win over San Francisco, the National Baseball Hall of Fame secured the hat he wore paying tribute to Taveras.

There was little reason to think Ventura’s career wouldn’t continue to stay on a tidy upward trajectory, and that’s what the Royals thought when they anointed him the No. 1 starter.

The day is coming when he’ll suit that role.

But he’s simply not wearing it well now.

That may or may not have anything do with that designation, which in a sense really only matters on opening day.

But it’s also the only real change in his role, so it’s natural to wonder if that backfired in some way and warped Ventura’s ability to just be.

Through Colon, Ventura seemed to scoff at that, but Yost wonders — and why shouldn’t he?

“He’s 24 years old, he’s got a lot of weight on his shoulders of being the No. 1 guy: He needs to kind of let that go a little bit and get back to being himself and focusing on command,” Yost said.

Asked what the organization might do to facilitate that, Yost said, “Sometimes those weights are self-imposed” and added that Ventura may be thinking he has to lug a more significant load now.

As if speaking to Ventura, Yost said, “‘Well, you don’t. You’ve just got to be yourself. That’s it. Because yourself is really, really good.’”

You never know what’s going to happen day to day in baseball, yes, and Saturday could have been a blip for Ventura.

But it resembled other outings this season in which he wasn’t himself, at least not the self he was in 2014.

And the “beauty of baseball” looming or not, the Royals and Ventura likely have to find a way to get him back to that temperament and be able to count on him to revive their season.

This story was originally published June 6, 2015 at 7:45 PM with the headline "Yordano Ventura may be struggling to live up to expectations as Royals’ No. 1 starter."