Kansas City Royals drop eighth in a row even as Salvador Perez snaps out of funk
Salvador Perez snapped out of a recent slump with four hits, including a home run, but it wasn’t enough to fend off the eighth straight loss for the Kansas City Royals.
A J.D. Martinez home run provided all the scoring the Boston Red Sox needed Wednesday night as the Royals lost 6-2 in front of an announced 24,616 at Fenway Park. The game featured a 31-minute rain delay before the first pitch, and then rain stopped the game for another one hour and 50 minutes after the Royals batted in the top of the sixth inning.
The Red Sox clinched the series, and the Royals will try to avoid a four-game sweep on Thursday afternoon with left-hander Kris Bubic slated to start.
The Red Sox have the American League’s best record (50-31) and became the first team in the league to reach 50 wins.
The Royals drew first blood on Perez’s first homer since June 18, his 19th of the season. He launched a 2-2 changeup over the green monster for a solo homer.
“That’s doing it in a big way,” Royals manager Mike Matheny said of Perez snapping out of his recent funk. “Giving us a lead early. Four hits is hard to do, especially coming off of a day when you’re not seeing the ball that well. He gave us a good jolt.”
Perez had been scuffling at the plate during the three-city road trip. He entered the day having gone 3 for 31 (.097) with a double and a run scored. Perez went 4 for 4 on Wednesday night.
The Royals (33-46) became the third team in the majors to have two separate losing streaks of at least eight games this season. They joined the Baltimore Orioles and Arizona Diamondbacks.
Royals starting pitcher Mike Minor (6-6) allowed five runs, seven hits and two walks in five innings. Three of the runs came in the third inning.
In the third inning, Martinez hit his 16th homer of the season to give the Red Sox a 3-1 advantage.
Minor hadn’t given up a hit in the first two innings, but he gave up a leadoff single and a one-out walk in the third. There were two or three borderline pitches in the walk to Enrique Hernandez that were called balls.
Then Alex Verdugo hustled down the line on a soft roller to shortstop, and the Royals weren’t able to turn what would have been an inning-ending double play.
“There were actually three pitches I thought were pretty good on the walk, after looking it over again during the delay,” Matheny said. “It put him into a bad place when you start getting into the middle of their order. And they had a guy getting down the line.
“I thought (Hanser Alberto and Whit Merrifield) turned it as good as they could. The ball was just hit soft enough that it made it hard to get Verdugo. He runs well. Then, (Martinez is) a guy that has been very good about getting pitches to hit. This is a couple times he has hurt us on changeups, but Mike’s changeup is good. It gets him out of a lot of trouble. Unfortunately, that one — Martinez got.”
With runners on the corners and two outs, Martinez got a hold of a 2-1 changeup that drifted over the middle of the plate and sent it 420 feet to center field.
“I wish I had maybe — obviously, thrown a better pitch — or maybe a different pitch,” Minor said. “I felt like he might have been sitting on it even though it was a really, really bad pitch. But I felt like that’s kind of how the at-bats were going. Last time I faced him and this time I faced him he was trying to get his hands extended a little bit, trying to drive the ball the other way. That was a perfect pitch for him to take to center field.”
In Martinez’s earlier at-bat against Minor in the game, he hit a fly ball to center field.
Martinez faced Minor three times on June 20 at Kauffman Stadium. He grounded into a double play on a changeup, hit a fastball for a triple and popped up on another changeup.
“If I made a better pitch in the corner and he rolls over or whatever and we’re out of it, then maybe we don’t talk about it,” Minor said. “I thought I threw some good fastballs to him during the game. He fouled off a bunch of them, popped out in the first inning. So I felt the way he was swinging at those, he was either not looking for (the changeup) or didn’t like it.”
The Red Sox added two runs in the fifth on a Xander Bogaert single off the wall in left field and Hunter Renfroe fielder’s choice. In the eighth, Renfroe added the final run of the day on a solo home run against reliever Anthony Swarzak. Renfroe has now hit three homers in his last three games.
The Royals second run came in the sixth inning after Merrifield doubled and scored on a Carlos Santana RBI groundout.
The Royals grounded into three double plays in the game.
Left-handed relief pitcher Richard Lovelady pitched 1 2/3 scoreless innings for the Royals after the second rain delay. He left the game after a sharply-hit ground ball back up the middle hit him in the abdomen.
Lovelady had the presence of mind to gather the ball and still get the out at first base after he’d been hit. The initial check from the medical staff was encouraging.
This story was originally published June 30, 2021 at 11:39 PM.
