Kansas City Royals lose sixth in a row as Brady Singer only lasts three innings

The encouraging signs for the Kansas City Royals came in the form of Adalberto Mondesi’s return, Salvador Perez’s continued assault on American League pitching and the club’s ninth-inning offensive surge.

However, the reasons for concern seemingly continue to fester as their losing streak stretched to six games Wednesday afternoon.

Another one of the Royals’ young pitchers hit a speed bump as right-hander Brady Singer pitched just three innings because of a nagging shoulder ailment, while the team’s woes with runners in scoring position still plagued them up until the ninth inning and the bullpen allowed five runs in a 6-5 loss to the Detroit Tigers in front of an announced 11,327 at Kauffman Stadium.

The Royals fell to 30-37 after getting swept in the three-game series. The Tigers (29-39) last swept a three-game set in Kansas City on May 2-4, 2014.

“I think right now we’re being reminded of the test that this game is physically and mentally,” Royals manager Mike Matheny said. “I’d say you mix emotionally in there too because you wear these wins and losses. You wear the losses hard.”

Mondesi, who came off the injured list on Tuesday night, one day after Andrew Benintendi went on the IL, homered in his first at-bat. Perez blasted his seventh home run since the calendar flipped to June and tied Hal McRae for fifth place on the franchise’s career home run list with 169.

Singer threw 51 pitches and gave up four hits and one run in three innings before coming out of the game with right posterior shoulder tightness.

“It’s just something that we were going to be cautious with,” Matheny said. “We knew going into today that we were going to just see how he was feeling and try to limit the work if we needed to. He got to the number that we were talking about after talking with the medical team. He did a nice job of making some good pitches in tough spots.”

The shoulder issue began after Singer’s most recent start in Oakland on Friday. He still felt it during a recent side throwing session, but insisted that he wanted to pitch.

Singer, who made 12 starts last season, said he wasn’t aware that his 14th start of this season would essentially be a piggyback start with Carlos Hernández waiting. Singer deferred to the experience of Matheny and the coaching staff.

“I didn’t know about the three innings, but that was obviously Skip and the rest of the coaches and the training staff trying to protect me,” Singer said. “It’s an extremely long year. They’ve done a lot more than I have. They know a lot more than I do about the workload throughout the whole entire year, so I trust them and that was the decision they had in place.”

Singer escaped the second inning unscathed after giving up a single and a double to start the inning and put runners on second and third with no outs.

Santana made a great snag on a sharply-hit ground ball to first base and kept the runners from advancing as he got the force out at first. Singer then struck out Niko Goodrum on three pitches, finishing with a slider, for the second out of the inning. Willi Castro’s grounder to second base ended the threat and stranded two runners in scoring position.

Singer showed no noticeable signs of discomfort in his third and final inning. Singer gave up one run on back-to-back doubles by Akil Baddoo and Jeimer Candelario. After Baddoo scored on Candelario’s double to right-center, Singer got Jonathan Schoop to hit an inning-ending ground ball to second base.

“I felt like I had good life to the fastball, and the slider was working well to lefties,” Singer said. “I got out of that jam in the second inning. So signs of positivity for sure.”

Hernández, who pitched three innings in relief of Singer, began warming up in the bottom of the third inning as the Royals were taking the lead back on Perez’s 17th home run of the season.

Singer (3-5, 4.76) has been at the head of the Royals’ 2018 draft class that also included Singer’s former college teammate Jackson Kowar as well as left-handers Kris Bubic and Daniel Lynch. Each of the four have started games this season for the Royals.

Kowar has had two extremely rocky starts in which he has never seemed able to get comfortable on the mound and allowed eight runs in two total innings after dominating at Triple-A.

On Wednesday, Kowar warmed up in the bullpen during the ninth inning. Kowar had been on pace to start again on Friday, but Matheny said they have not decided on a starter for Friday and indicated that Kowar could pitch out of the bullpen.

The Royals have an off day on Thursday as well as one next Monday, so they could easily go with a four-man starting rotation.

Several of the Royals’ bullpen mainstays struggled on Wednesday. Veteran relief pitcher Greg Holland gave up three runs in the seventh, while Jake Brentz and Josh Staumont also gave up one run apiece in the eighth and ninth innings, respectively.

Those five runs against the bullpen gave the Tigers a 6-3 lead going into the bottom of the ninth.

The Royals, who entered the day having gone 3 for 43 with runners in scoring position during their recent offensive struggles, were 0 for 5 with runners in scoring position before Whit Merrifield and Carlos Santana delivered two-out hits in the ninth inning to make it a one-run game. Perez struck out with a runner on to end the game with the tying run on first base.