Rookie Brad Keller’s ‘wild’ start in win over Yankees is still a good sign for Royals

The day before he was scheduled to make his first career start in the Bronx, Royals rookie Brad Keller and a few of his teammates rode the early bus, dropped their belongings in the visiting clubhouse and climbed to the upper deck of Yankee Stadium on Thursday afternoon.

They do this most places. In Toronto in April, when the Rogers Centre had a hole punctured in its roof by a wayward shard of ice, they arrived early and made the trek up to the catwalk. They gazed out over Fenway Park in May, a view Keller said New York did not beat.

It’s a ritual, one suggested by reliever Brian Flynn at the beginning of the season that the team’s youngest players haven’t let go. It reminds those on a team of somewhat mismatched pieces how lucky they are to be in the major leagues.

And for Keller, the Rule 5 draft acquisition with a 3.43 ERA in 31 games (10 starts), the trek provided a chance to breathe.

He was supposed to pitch Friday, the day of his 23rd birthday. Inclement weather postponed Keller’s test against one of the best teams in baseball to Saturday afternoon. It was a blessing in disguise because Keller was already nervous. If it had been his turn to pitch Thursday, he said, he might have been too overwhelmed.

“You’d be fine,” said fellow rookie Tim Hill, who was getting dressed at his nearby locker before the Royals opened a four-game set here against the Yankees with a 7-2 loss on Thursday night. “You’d be fine.”

Keller shrugged. He wasn’t sure. Like so many of the cities the Royals have traveled to this year, Keller had never visited New York. He had never seen the Bleacher Creatures or heard raucous boos rain down from a sellout crowd other than perhaps on a television monitor.

By Saturday afternoon, he’d experienced it all. In the Royals’ 10-5 win over the Yankees, about 12 hours after the Royals had traded Mike Moustakas to the Brewers and signaled a shift in their rebuild, Keller toed the rubber in front of an announced crowd of 46,571. Keller held his own.

“Awesome, awesome experience,” Keller said. “It was kind of indescribable, honestly. It was wild.”

It was wild for multiple reasons. Keller battled his command, issued three walks and yielded nine hits for the second time since moving into the rotation at the end of May. Although he wiggled out of a bases-loaded jam in the second inning and stranded Giancarlo Stanton at second base in the third inning, Keller had no such luck in the fifth and sixth innings. He departed after 5 2/3 innings, four runs already across the board and two runners left on base for reliever Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy slammed the door, preserving a 6-4 lead.

But the start was also wild because Keller, who threw 92 pitches Saturday, made progress as he struggled. When Yankees fans pelted him with jeers after plunking catcher Austin Romine in the right wrist in the second inning, he learned to tune out the noise. He learned what he shouldn’t offer Stanton, who struck a belt-high 96 mph fastball 447 feet into the RedHot Terrace at center field for a towering two-run homer in the fifth. And Keller learned how to calm his nerves after allowing three straight singles to the middle of the Yankees order in the sixth.

“He made pitches where he needed to but also made uncompetitive pitches, you know, pitches that weren’t even close,” Royals manager Ned Yost said. “But he got key double plays when he needed to and he did OK.”

That’s what this 2018 season, in which the Royals have lost twice as often as they’ve won through 103 games, is about anyway. The small steps and the “fine” outings, the ones players like Keller can holster as they find their footing at the major-league level.

“It’s fun to watch them develop,” Yost said. “It’s fun to watch them have their successes and struggle through their failures and try to watch them learn from it. You know, ‘What are we doing, and why are we doing it?’ and then coming back and having success again. That’s the fun part of it.”

This story was originally published July 28, 2018 at 8:04 PM.