Brad Keller can’t find the strike zone, Royals can’t find hits in another night to forget

What happens when you combine a pitcher entering the game with the second-highest walk rate among all pitchers with at least 20 innings pitched and the opposing team with the second-highest walk rate in the big leagues? You get what we got tonight: a bloodbath of walks and another Royals loss. Somehow only 4-0, though.

It was a minor miracle that Brad Keller gave up so few runs. He stunk to high heaven, walking eight (8!!!) Padres and hitting (and injuring) another. Keller hit Manny Machado right on the back of the hand, and Machado couldn’t even remove his other glove afterwards. He left the game.

Meanwhile, the Royals were getting no-hit by Michael Wacha, who struck out 11 batters, and finally exited the game after Michael Massey got a hit in the eighth inning.

In, like, the third inning, I decided that I wanted to spend my time doing something else before returning to see just how bad the Royals were. I fired up Amazon Prime to watch an episode of Stargate SG-1, my favorite television show. Based off the eponymous 1994 Roland Emmerich film, SG-1 is a delightful show that ran for 10 seasons and 214 episodes from 1997 through 2007. I recently picked up a book about the making of the show, and it inspired me to watch an episode.

The episode I selected was one of my favorites, titled “48 Hours” from its fifth season. In the episode, Teal’c takes some time to kill a bad guy and then basically gets stuck inside the stargate itself. Jack O’Neill and Harry Maybourne go off to get some intel from a corrupt government organization, Daniel Jackson negotiates with the Russians to get their DHD, and Samantha Carter tries to figure out science stuff with Rodney McKay in his first appearance in the series. McKay would obviously go on to a starring role in the spinoff, Stargate Atlantis, which itself ran for 100 episodes. At the end of the day, Teal’c gets saved and the good guys win.

When I turned the game on, the Royals were still only down by three runs. Maddeningly, Max Castillo and Josh Staumont had been more or less keeping the Royals in it, preventing me from firing off one of those satisfying early game recap publishes.

I would highly recommend watching Stargate SG-1 rather than the entirety of a Royals game, to be perfectly honest. It comes from a now quaint period in TV history where run counts were 43 minutes on the nose and from a network business model that just does not really exist so much anymore for sci-fi and fantasy shows. But it’s entertaining and aware of when it’s being cheesy.

In any case, the Royals are still so very bad. They make me sad. Go to bed, everybody.