Sunday Night Cyber Baseball Thread & Stream

Happy Easter, folks and welcome back to the shadow season of 2020 baseball provided by us here at Royals Review and MLB The Show 20.

Quick recap of last week’s action

Last week, we saw our KC Royals lose to the Toronto Blue Jays, 6-1, dropping the series to Toronto and bringing the Royals to 7-8 on the season

Jorge Lopez came into the game looking sharp with a 2-0 record and 3.46 ERA. Through the first 3 innings it appeared that Lopez had maintained the momentum, only allowing 1 run on a solo ding-dong to Rowdy Tellez (who was inexplicably batting lead off for the Jays). Jorge learned a valuable-ish lesson that you do not pitch to guys named Rowdy. Still Lopez had only allowed 2 hits through 3.

After a quick 3 outs from the Royals offense, Teoscar Hernandez led off the 4th with a single followed up by a weak ground ball single from Grichuk. The next batter reached on a throwing error by Maikel Franco and Teoscar scored from second. Grichuk scored on the next pitch after a weak ground ball to second base was enough to score the runner. That brings us back to the man named Rowdy, who jacked a second-deck, no-doubter giving the Blue Jays a 5-0 lead.

The Royals offense threatened in the 6th with 3 straight hits from Gordo, Whit, and Mondesi. Dozier hit a soft grounder to the right side, moving the runners over. The next batter, Soler, struck out in 4 pitches and McBroom followed that up with a walk, loading the bases for Salvy, who came in slashing .383/.423/.745. Unfortunately Salvy was unable to make much contact, striking out in 4 pitches as well. They would not be able to muster up much of anything further and the Canadian Bird Faces took the series.

If you’d like, you can watch the entire broadcast here.

We’re on to Cincinatt...errr...Chicago (again)

You guys voted to watch the Royals take on the Chicago White Sox again instead of the Baltimore Orioles (totally get it) so that’s what we’ll be doing tonight.

Per policy, we’ll be simming the final game of the series. The Royals took the first 2 games of the series winning 3-2 in game 1 and 4-3 in game 2. Brad Keller repeated a strong Opening Day performance in the first game, going 5.0 innings and allowing just 2 earned runs. Barlow, McCarthy, Kennedy, and Rosenthal all spun scoreless innings to keep the game in check.

In game 2, Danny Duffy and Dallas Keuchel went punch for punch, each going 6 innings allowing 3 earned runs a piece. The difference maker was the bullpen once again, with the Royals bullpen spinning 3 more scoreless frames between Holland, Staumont, and Rosenthal. Leading us to tonight’s action.

Tonight’s action (See? Told you that’s where I was leading you.)

The Royals will look to complete the sweep in Chicago and improve to 10-8 on the season. In their way of that is struggling pitcher, Carlos Rodon. Rodon has pitched 14.2 innings thus far and is carrying a hefty 8.59 ERA. The Royals bats have been doing most of their damage against lefties this year so hopefully that rough start for Rodon continues.

Opposing Rodon is the also struggling Jake Junis. Like Rodon, Junis enters tonight’s game with a 1-2 record but with a slightly lower ERA of 8.04. Junis is however coming off a solid start in Toronto where he went 7.0 innings, allowing 3 earned and striking out 5, earning the quality start. Hopefully Junis shows more of the same tonight against a White Sox lineup averaging 3.8 runs/game.

The teams will face off like this:

Hopefully the Easter Bunny left us another win tonight to complete the streak and maintain pace in the AL Central.

After tonight, we’ll likely be shifting these streams to Friday afternoons around 3 to get your weekends started off with some fun and games. We could all use that right now and the Sunday Scaries certainly interfere with that. We’ll see you then!