‘Get cleaned up’: The task for Kansas City Royals’ Daniel Lynch after horrific start

If the Houston Astros taught the baseball world nothing else, it was how devastating the best hitters on the planet can be when they know what’s coming from an opposing pitcher.

Kansas City Royals highly touted left-handed pitcher and ultra-prospect Daniel Lynch may have received that same lesson in one of the harshest manners n Saturday night. Lynch’s issues may have stemmed from slight differences in his pitching mechanics that tipped off hitters to what he was throwing.

The Chicago White Sox pummeled Lynch for eight runs on one walk and seven hits, including one home run, in two-thirds of an inning. A 6-foot-6 hurler with an upper 90s fastball, a wickedly breaking slider and a complementing changeup, Lynch’s offerings got smacked around the ballpark with such frequency that it was undoubtedly eyebrow raising.

Royals manager Mike Matheny’s reaction after the game hinted at the improbability of the outing when he said, “You could almost tell anybody what pitch is coming and what location and still not have those kind of results.”

Kris Bubic, a young left-hander like Lynch, pitched 5 2/3 scoreless innings of relief and allowed just one hit against at White Sox team he’d faced three times last year during the pandemic-shortened season.

During his postgame comments, Matheny did not say that it was suspicious that the White Sox seemed to hammer a variety of pitches with the same level of authority — Lynch gave up three hits on fastballs, two on sliders and two on changeups.

What Matheny didn’t say on Sunday also spoke volumes.

Asked if anything stood out when he rewatched the game, Matheny replied, “Yes.”

After a pregnant pause, he added, “We’ll leave it at that, but there were some things — without divulging too much — absolutely some things that we need to get cleaned up. Now, it’s just going to be how can we do that in a timely manner.”

Matheny certainly seemed to indicate that Lynch had been unwittingly tipping pitches in a way that let White Sox batters know what pitches were coming. He alluded to the next challenge, which will be making the fixes needed to keep Lynch from running into similar problems in future outings.

In the 2019 American League divisional round of the playoffs, Tampa Bay Rays pitcher Tyler Glasnow was hammered by the Astros in the first inning of his start in one of the more high-profile examples of pitch tipping in recent years.

Glasnow acknowledged he’d been tipping pitches. Glasnow’s tipping issues predated his playoff game. His problems showed up in the last game of the year for the Rays. He reportedly addressed the issue in the aftermath of the incident.