Less than an hour after he hit a baseball 420 feet that soared beyond the center field fence in Anaheim, Kansas City Royals catcher Salvador Perez took a detour to talk about his starting pitcher. More specifically, Perez would conclude, left-hander Kris Bubic had just thrown perhaps his best game of the season.
A week earlier, that would have represented an anomaly to the league’s worst pitching staff. Now? It fits into a trend that has developed over the past seven days.
Can it last? That’s what we really would like to surmise from this recent run, right? And to figure that out, we’ll look at the metrics for why the Royals pitching staff — and particularly the rotation — has taken an abrupt turn for the better. There are signs of legitimate improvement here, which stretches beyond the gift that three of the seven games on this road trip through Monday came against the listless A’s lineup. We will dive deeper into it, but it can basically be summarized in a word.
