April Fools? Guess not
By Davie Wong, Sports Editor
It has not been a pleasant month for the Royals baseball team. What started off as a slow start to the season has now snowballed into a complete free-fall. The team is leaving April having lost their last six conference games, a list of problems that gets more and more complicated as time goes on.
The team has had difficulty batting within the conference this season, with only one player hitting over .300. Only five players are batting over .250. The team has totalled 110 strikeouts in 16 games. They’ve also lacked the power at bat, having failed to hit a single homerun in conference play. The results speak for themselves on the scoreboard: the team has been shutout in four of their conference games so far.
The team has also been quite error prone. They’ve accumulated a total of 46 errors in 16 games, which equates to nearly 3 errors a game.
In the pitching department, things have been quite touch and go. Cole Russell and Liam Kano-McGregor have made themselves known to the baseball world, leading the team with a 3.92 and 3.60 ERA respectively. However, the rest of the pitchers have fallen short of expectations, with only four active players with an ERA lower than 5.00. They bring the team’s cumulative ERA to 6.64.
But all is not lost in the world of baseball. The team is still young. The experience and patience of last year’s team is obviously missing, but since the end of last year’s run brought a lot of turnover, but this year may just happen to be a growth year, where the squad learns from their losses and turns up next year as real conference competitors, and that’s okay. Every team goes through rebuilding years, where their team spends the majority of the season hugging the bottom of the standings. But those are the teams that are usually the most dangerous the following year.
That’s just how it might have to be. As it stands, the Royals’ chances of getting into the playoffs are slim to none. They need to win the rest of their games this season, and need the fourth place to lose their next eight.
