Rotation questions emerge as Royals suffer four-game sweep in Cleveland

You probably don’t need a refresher course on everything that went wrong for the Royals here, a four-day quagmire of quiet offense and lackluster starting pitching.

You can probably remember the defensive collapse that started the chain of events Thursday night. You probably witnessed the carnage on Sunday, when starter Chris Young allowed five runs — including another four homers — in a 7-0 loss to the Cleveland Indians.

In a span of four days, the Royals, 30-26, fell from first place and suffered a four-game sweep — their first of the season — at the hands of a division rival. In four games, the Royals were outscored 25-6, a performance that nullified a significant portion of the vibes that remained from a 6-0 home stand.

“We kind of gave away the first game a little bit defensively,” Yost said, sitting in his office Sunday evening. “That kind of took our momentum from our great home stand.”

The weekend stood as a testament to the turbulent nature of a baseball season, to the hot and cold spells of the Royals’ offense. During a six-game winning streak at Kauffman Stadium, Kansas City averaged seven runs per game. In Cleveland, they mustered just six runs in four games.

But the sweep also reinforced the Royals’ greatest question mark, putting a harsh light on a rotation that turned ramshackle over four days at Progressive Field. Among the numbers: The Indians broadsided Young with four solo homers, adding to his league-leading total of 17 homers allowed in 41 innings. When the series was over, the Royals' starters had allowed 16 earned runs in 23 innings.

For the Royals, the rotation questions are concerning, of course, but perhaps not totally unanticipated after last season.

If decades of baseball thought had shown that starting pitching is correlated with playoff appearances and championships, the 2015 Royals were proof that you could do it another way.

The great riddle of the 2015 World Series champions was not how they mounted so many death-defying postseason comebacks, or how they built one of the great bullpens in modern history, but rather how the Royals could reign supreme with such a mediocre starting rotation.

It was a group that ranked 12th in the American League in ERA (4.34), a unit that spit in the eye of conventional baseball wisdom.

One season later, the club set out to duplicate the formula, hoping a dominant bullpen, elite defense and solid offense would meld with an adequate starting rotation and produce another playoff team. One glaring problem: The starting pitching has been a few ticks worse.

After four days at Progressive Field, the rotation’s ERA ballooned to 4.86 over 56 games. After electing to rest closer Wade Davis on Thursday night, the performance of the Royals starters ensured that Davis would not be needed for the rest of the weekend.

“We’re coming off an undefeated home stand where we pitched great,” Yost said, trying to tamp down the concern. “We just didn’t play well here. We didn’t do anything really exceptionally well. They beat us.”

While Yost offered an optimistic front, the numbers suggest a potential problem. How did we get here? You can start with the struggles of Young and Kris Medlen, move to the slight regression of Edinson Volquez (4.03 ERA in 12 starts), and land on the enigma that is Yordano Ventura (4.82), who appeared to stabilize during the second half last season. Ventura was the Royals' best pitcher in Cleveland. His search for consistency continues.

For now, the closest thing to a stalwart has been Ian Kennedy, who has posted a 3.44 ERA in 11 starts. Behind him, the Royals’ most effective starter has been left-hander Danny Duffy, who wasn’t even in the rotation when the season began.

And yet the Royals remain just 1.5 games behind the Indians in the American League Central, still four games over .500 as they begin the second leg of a three-city road trip in Baltimore on Monday night.

For Young, Sunday was another measurable setback in a confounding season. On May 9, he tied a club record by allowing five homers at Yankee Stadium. In the days after, he retreated to the disabled list with multiple strains in his right forearm. Young theorized that the injury was syphoning the “life” from his fastball. The lack of life was rendering him ineffective.

On Sunday, he allowed just one run through three innings. His fastball was good enough, he said. The game began to pivot in the bottom of the fourth. On the first pitch of the inning, Indians designated hitter Mike Napoli barreled an 87 mph fastball and lifted his 14th homer to left-center. Off the bat, Young thought the homer would be a fly ball. Yost said the ball was caught in a jet stream.

In the end, it only set the stage for more.

In the fifth, Young served up three more solo homers, allowing blasts to Tyler Naquin, Carlos Santana and Francisco Lindor.

Yost offered fatigue as a possible explanation for the inning. After making two bullpen appearances, Young was replacing Dillon Gee in the rotation. He entered Sunday with a pitch count of approximately 80 pitches. He reached that in the fifth inning, throwing 82 pitches before departing. As he stood before his locker, Young said he did not wish to use that excuse.

“I have to be better,” Young said. “It’s just frustrating. I feel like it’s been sort of the way my season has gone. I make a mistake, and it gets hit out.”

For Naquin, a rookie outfielder, it was his third homer in three days. For Lindor, it was his second homer of the series. All three bombs came on flat sliders that found the middle of the zone.

“Until the fifth there, I thought I’d thrown alright,” Young said. “For whatever reason, my slider got flat and they punished it.”

As Young struggled, the Royals could not touch Indians ace Corey Kluber, who allowed just two hits in six scoreless innings. The only force that could stop Kluber was nature, which intervened in the middle of the sixth inning.

With the Royals trailing 5-0, a series of rain storms popped up in downtown Cleveland. The delay lasted 3 hours and 12 minutes. It did little to wake an embattled Kansas City offense. By early Sunday evening, a row of blue duffel bags dotted the floor in the visitors clubhouse. A flight to Baltimore awaited. After four lost days in Cleveland, the Royals braced for a three-game series against the Orioles.

“We had a real hot streak,” Yost said, “and now we played four games and they weren’t very good. Now let’s go to Baltimore and see if we can do better.”

This story was originally published June 5, 2016 at 6:18 PM with the headline "Rotation questions emerge as Royals suffer four-game sweep in Cleveland."