Even in a loss, Kansas City Royals starting pitcher Kris Bubic finishes strong
Kansas City Royals backup catcher Cam Gallagher didn’t go the full “Bull Durham” and recite the line from character Crash Davis that went, “Don’t think. It can only hurt the ballclub.”
However, Gallagher did convey to his young Stanford-educated pitcher Kris Bubic that he needed to let his catcher, educated at Manheim Township High school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, think for the both of them.
It took some persistence, but Bubic got the message and he’s been all the better for it in the final month-and-a-half of the season. Bubic allowed two earned runs or fewer in each of his last five starts and pitched into the sixth inning or later in each of those starts, including a loss to the Minnesota Twins on Saturday night in his final start of the season at Kauffman Stadium.
“He’s a Stanford guy, and he thinks a little bit too much,” Gallagher said. “I tell him time after time. I said, ‘Hey, when I’m back there I’ll do the thinking, you just execute the pitch. Just trust me.’
“But no, he obviously has a good game plan going into it, but at times he can overthink things and kind of abandon things right away. I just tell him to stop trying to think about sequencing too much. Just whatever I put down, just trust it and try to execute the pitch.”
A seven-run drubbing in less than two innings at the hands of the St. Louis Cardinals on August 15 certainly helped Gallagher get the message across. Especially when Gallagher caughtBubic’s next outing in Wrigley Field and Bubic took a no-hitter into the seventh inning.
“Yeah, if you go back to the St. Louis game there was a lot of shaking going on,” Gallagher said, referring to Bubic changing Gallagher’s pitch selection. “In any job, when if you’re not just focused on what you’ve got to do and you’re thinking too much, you’re never going to execute what you’ve got to do.”
On Saturday, Bubic finished the season with his first loss since that dreadful outing in St. Louis, but he also finished the season pitching with a considerably different mentality than he took the mound with earlier this season.
His recent success has coincided with his willingness to pitch inside and continue to pitch inside. It has made him a more complete pitcher, particularly against lineups that have regularly been overloaded with right-handed hitters.
As Gallagher pointed out, pitching inside has made his at-time devastating changeup even more effective off the plate away.
“He should be very proud of a lot of the adjustments and the improvements he has made this season,” Royals manager Mike Matheny said of Bubic.
Bubic said the two main things that Bubic has done differently in his late-season outings have been “slowing the game down” and “knowing what my strengths are.
“Being able to pitch to my strengths, regardless of who’s in the box, kind of allowed me to pitch a little more freely, made me not try to do too much out there,” Bubic said.
Saturday’s game was the first of his 30 career starts that he did not walk a single batter. He also recorded his ninth quality start this season (20 starts) to finish one shy of Brady Singer, who made 27 starts, for the team lead in quality starts.
Slowing the game down has been how Bubic found “a good rhythm” with Gallagher and started trusting the game plan even if he hit some early speed bumps.
“Sometimes you make a bad pitch the previous at-bat and then you go into the next at-bat and you’re thinking about it,” Bubic said. “Then that spills over into the next AB and the next AB and then it kind of spirals. But I think committing to each pitch, having conviction in each pitch is an underrated thing.
“You know, I love numbers, and I love analytics and I love just game planning and all that stuff. But at the end of the day, you can’t fault 100 percent conviction behind every single pitch. At the end of the day, that’s what this game is.”
