Royals v Guardians Series Preview: Central Warfare continues

It’s a stretch to consider an April series as a “must-win”, but the Royals and Guardians both have a lot to prove this weekend. The Royals need to prove their hitters are trustworthy and that they can hold their own against good opponents; the series wins against Baltimore and Minnesota feel less meaningful with their combined 9-17 records. Meanwhile, Cleveland was able to sweep Chicago to quickly even out their record after struggling against San Diego and the Angels earlier in the month; they too need to prove they can stand up to good teams.

Of course, the Royals and Guardians competed on opening weekend, with the Guardians taking the first and last games for the series win. With a major reason for the Opening Day loss being the Dairon Blanco and Kyle Isbel baserunning calamity, it felt like a very winnable series for the Royals. It’s still super early for the season, but this being the second series between the two leaves much less room for excuses. Whoever wins this series should be looked at as the superior team moving forward.

Cleveland’s lineup is weird. It begins with two of the most reliable players of their positions, the always-annoying Kwan and eternally-excellent J-Ram. They’re getting a nice breakout from Kyle Manzardo and Carlos Santana might be winning this year’s old-timer award. Yet, some of their other guys are underperforming to shocking degrees; Lane Thomas might not have been the best hitter in the past, but his fall-off has been brutal. Noel was a solid regression candidate for this year since his approach was never good, but even MJ Melendez has a higher xwOBA. You don’t have to know what xwOBA is to get it. Their expected stats don’t suggest fast turnarounds on the horizon which might be the more shocking aspect.

This shallow volume of hitting has kept Cleveland as one of the weaker lineups in baseball in pretty much all aspects. Describing a lineup as a bunch of free outs after X hitter is an overused meme, but the Guards might actually be the closest a team can get to embodying that right now. Not that the Royals have much room to talk.

By now far removed from blowing a save on Opening Day, Emmanuel Clase is still off to a rough start but the Guardians have a top-5 bullpen anyway, as they seemingly always do. They still have several scoreless *and* walkless relievers including a Jakob Junis Jumpscare, so the Royals can’t even expect to take advantage of normal inconsistencies like depth and availability. This bullpen is both very good and very deep and Clase is still capable of shutting games down.

Pitching Matchups

Friday, April 11 @ 5:10 PM
Kris Bubic (2-0, 0.00 ERA) v Tanner Bibee (1-1, 6.52 ERA) – The run-blundered-in from Sunday was erased, so Bubic’s ERA has returned to zero. “Bubalicious” (I chose to spell it that way for professional reasons only) is starting to get attention from the rest of baseball with his first two starts topping both WAR leaderboards for a bit. Bubic actually gave up three runs in three appearances against Cleveland last year, but those runs were scored by Josh Naylor who was traded over the winter. Bibee has been half as perfect; literally, because his first start was 5.2 scoreless against the Royals and his other was seven runs over four versus the Angels, who are some kind of dong parade all of the sudden.

Saturday, April 12 @ 5:10 PM
Michael Lorenzen (1-1, 3.18 ERA) v Luis L. Ortiz (0-2, 8.44 ERA) – So far, Lorenzen has been better than advertised by keeping the walks down. The Guardians are known to be pesky in counts and have a tendency to bloop in surprise hits so it would help to not offer a lot of free base-runners. Ortiz is a still-young pitcher who was acquired from some weird trade involving the Pirates and the Guardians pitching witchcraft has done no favors for him yet. He gave up too many walks against the Padres then too many home runs against the Angels; the Royals have been pretty bad at getting either of those so this might be the next best opportunity to run the numbers up.

Sunday, April 13 @ 12:40 PM
Cole Ragans (0-0, 2.81 ERA) v Ben Lively (0-1, 5.40 ERA) – Ragans is the one who’s started against the Guardians already and it was his one bad start. He cited a mechanical issue he was working through and has since been the Cole Ragans we know and love. In fact, he’s currently leading baseball in strikeout rate. Lively was Ragans’ match, going an equally middling five innings of 3-run ball that ultimately didn’t matter, but he doesn’t quite have the same upside. He’s coming off a scoreless start against the White Sox, but it’s a scoreless start against the White Sox.

Image credit: Reggie Hildred (USA TODAY)