Royals’ Mike Montgomery puts together another strong outing in intrasquad scrimmage
Royals left-hander Mike Montgomery pitched four scoreless innings and worked around baserunners to post another solid outing in Wednesday night’s rotating intrasquad game at Kauffman Stadium.
Montgomery struck out two and didn’t walk a batter. Despite starting his third inning with a runner on first and having an error committed behind him, he kept the runner from scoring. Catcher Salvador Perez lent a helping hand by throwing out a pair of runners attempting to steal second base.
Perez, who returned from the IL on Tuesday, caught each of Montgomery’s first three innings.
“I thought Mike did a nice job mixing up speeds,” Matheny said. “He did a fantastic job with the running game, making pitches when he had to. That’s Monty, mixing it up really well.”
Right-hander Kyle Zimmer pitched two innings. He worked around a leadoff triple by Bubba Starling. Starling blasted a ball off the wall in center, but Zimmer retired Hunter Dozier, Jorge Soler and Perez to strand the runner.
Maikel Franco’s RBI single in Zimmer’s second inning drove in the first run of the night.
A long introduction
Matheny’s introductory address to the ballclub — pitchers and positions players — took place on February 17, in Surprise, Arizona. He still hasn’t managed a regular season game, but he has been the manager for the past five months.
His inaugural season as skipper has hardly been normal. He’ll spend fewer days managing during the 60-game regular season (66 days) than he will with the team during the two spring training camps.
Always the optimist, Matheny found some positives to the unprecedented circumstances of his first few months at the helm.
“I think it comes down to building relationships,” Matheny said. “That’s how I view the position. Obviously, it’s about X’s and O’s and decisions made and everything people love hating managers for. I understand that’s just so much a part of it, but the way that I view this is a position about people.
“The baseball is part of it, but it’s not the whole story. It’s about building those relationships, building trust to then be allowed to go and make decisions that these guys trust as well. They trust the person. They trust the process. They trust the decisions that are being made whether it’s from upstairs or in the manager’s office and what happens on the field.”
Matheny also said he doesn’t believe there’s any “fast forward” button to letting players get to know him and for him to get to know each of them. It comes with time. That’s one thing they’ve had lots of over the past few months. In a way, it’s been a unique opportunity and a very different one than they would have gotten during the grind of 162 games.
“This has been a really good time in that I believe you learn the most about people during adversity,” Matheny said. “This could be easily classified as adversity, not exactly how we’d want it or we’d have drawn it up. The consistency I hope that they see through this period translates into the consistency they’ll see once the season starts. But it’s a whole different level of job description once the games get going and everybody understands that from their perspective as well as mine.”
Make some noise
For the first time since they started holding intrasquad games at Kauffman Stadium during spring training 2.0, the Royals tested out generic crowd noise pumped into the ballpark.
The pumped in crowd included loud roars and cheers from time to time. It did have artificially controlled ebbs and flows. Between innings, music also piped in over the speaker system.
Upon hearing the artificial noise, the first batter of the scrimmage, Whit Merrifield, jokingly motioned to pump up the crowd in an empty stadium before stepping into the batter’s box.
After he singled to left field off of Montgomery, he also played to the crowd as cheers rang out after he rounded first base.
“I think we found it later in the game,” Matheny said. “The first inning, to me, was a little much. I think the volume, they were trying to find it. I know they’re looking for our feedback. … How we ended the game, I thought, was good. It will be interesting to see if the league allows the influx of cheers. To me, I don’t know if we need to go there, but that’s not necessarily my call. My concern is having some kind of noise. The umpires agreed too.”
Matheny said there was a noticeably different live in the dugout and the scrimmage had more of a natural rhythm.
Viloria cleared
Royals catcher Meibrys Viloria was in uniform but did not play in Wednesday’s intrasquad scrimmage. He hadn’t been officially activated as of Wednesday night, but he has been cleared for activity.
Viloria went in the injured list on July 4 with an undisclosed injury.
This story was originally published July 15, 2020 at 9:45 PM with the headline "Royals’ Mike Montgomery puts together another strong outing in intrasquad scrimmage."
