Royals’ Brady Singer won’t forget his WBC experience. But it came with a consequence

A handful of minutes after 1 p.m. in Peoria, Arizona, Royals starter Brady Singer fired a first-pitch fastball, and Padres leadoff man Fernando Tatis Jr. whipped it into left field for a base hit.

But, hey, to hell with the result — for the first time in 11 days, here was the ace of the Royals rotation, throwing pitches to actual hitters. In a game.

Really. Saw it happen. And I get that a man paid to throw baseballs for a living isn’t typically worthy of headlines when he simply throws a few pitches in a game.

But it just so happens this came on the heels of Team USA preventing him from doing exactly that. Pitching.

At the top, it needs to be said that Singer has no complaints, at least not publicly, about the World Baseball Classic experience — plenty of positive things to say, on the contrary — but in the pros and cons list of that experience, we sit squarely in the latter now.

Whether there’s a bad guy to this story or not, Singer is behind schedule as Opening Day nears. That simple. He’s pleased with his outing on Thursday. The fastball had life, the slider some bite.

But even including a bullpen session following his three innings in the spring game at the Padres’ spring home (1 ER, 5 strikeouts), he totaled about 60 total pitches. That trails the initial blueprint for his spring.

That’s the trickle-down effect of Team USA deviating from the blueprint. To be fair, that’s a team playing to win, playing to advance, playing to survive. In the process, though, it sacrificed an effort to include Singer in those plans after his shaky outing against Mexico.

“I didn’t throw as much as I wanted to there, but I was preparing in between games and stuff like that — throwing sides,” Singer said, later adding: “It was an experience. I’ll never forget it. It was unbelievable.”

This is the reality on the other side of it: The MLB season is less than a week away. Singer will almost certainly require another start to accomplish what the Team USA did not allow him — to build up his pitch count in anticipation of the regular season. Because that was not their primary objective.

Singer threw two innings in the tournament. Two. That represented his total over a 16-day span, including travel. Couldn’t find another spot for him, apparently. That just doesn’t sit well, and I cannot stress enough that’s a reference to his usage, which had other initial designs, not the concept of the tournament.

Singer returned to Surprise, Arizona, this week to rejoin the Royals, along with shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. The two of them were greeted with hugs from teammates in the clubhouse in Surprise in the morning.

Witt hardly played too, by the way. Three plate appearances. And there’s an argument to be made that his absence was a bit more egregious — could USA coach Mark DeRosa really not have provided Witt a couple of at-bats in a 12-1 win against Canada?

Witt will receive something in the neighborhood of 20 plate appearances before the opener Thursday at Kauffman Stadium. He’ll be fine. It’s not apples-to-apples with a pitcher. Besides, a year ago, Witt told the front office the final 10 days of spring ahead of his rookie season proved a bit tricky, when he was just trying to keep the timing he’d established over the first few weeks. Maybe this wrinkle will iron out another issue. We’ll see.

The silver lining for Singer, on the other hand, rests solely with soaking in the experience of the WBC — he says it’s the best atmosphere he’s ever captured, and there’s something to be gained with sharing a clubhouse alongside veteran starting pitchers at that level. His words.

It just comes with a temporary price.

“We knew there was that risk going into it,” Royals general manager J.J. Picollo said, while acknowledging the obvious: The Royals sure would have liked to have seen Singer pitch more in the tournament. “In our discussions with Brady, we told him that before we see where you’re going to slide into (the rotation schedule) to start the season, we gotta see how this goes the next two weeks. We didn’t want to get too far ahead. So we knew there was a risk.”

Team USA felt it needed someone to be the break-glass pitcher. The problem is Team USA never needed that someone, yet kept that someone consistent every game. And the problem for the Royals is their guy — their ace — happened to be that someone.

No doubt, the WBC is an important growth tool for a game that needs more growing. There’s no advocating here that they should do away with it. The opposite, actually. Baseball needs more moments like we were treated to on Tuesday night. Like we received over the previous couple of weeks. It has the potential for long-term gain in a sport that needs it more than most, and that’s in addition to the fact that it was entertaining as heck.

But just because the consequences don’t outweigh the benefits doesn’t mean the consequences aren’t still real. They are. And the Royals will probably more seriously inform their players of the potential risks in three years when the WBC rolls around again.

They aren’t alone in feeling the consequences, either. The Mets lost their All-Star closer to an injury, and that’s long-term. Across the state, St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Ben Frederickson outlined his issue the usage of Cardinals starting pitcher Miles Mikolas.

This column isn’t a complaint about which role Singer confronted. It’s that he had no role.

Well, unless you include the just-in-case-of-emergency guy. He was the long man, ready to go if needed. DeRosa passed on an opportunity to allow him to piggyback some innings on a Mikolas outing that spanned four innings. That could’ve been an opportunity, you’d think. Instead, Singer was relegated to side sessions, though he couldn’t really extend those. Had to be ready for tomorrow, after all. Just in case.

But just in case never came.

The season still will.

When it does, Singer won’t be on the same pitch-count schedule as his teammates in the rotation next week. And it doesn’t help that one of those teammates, lefty Daniel Lynch, departed Thursday’s spring game with an injury to his throwing shoulder that will require further testing.

We’re days away from the season when that Lynch injury potentially alters an opening rotation. And the team’s best pitcher and best position player have had unorthodox preparations for the year.

Look, in the end, the hope is this is a short-term pain, and it probably will be. It’s just a pain they’d rather not endure, particularly when they started 7-14 a year ago. The opening weeks might have a real impact on morale.

You’d like to be full-go.

The ace of the staff is instead just getting going again.