Seven winners and four losers from the Royals’ 10-2 Spring Training win over the Rockies

The Jac Wagon keeps growing!

The Royals won the game 10-2, but let’s not pretend this bore much resemblance to big league baseball. Starting pitchers Cole Ragans and Kyle Freeland were each relieved mid-inning twice, only to return at the top of the next inning, thanks to a Spring Training rule that allows a pitcher to re-enter a game if he’s pulled because the team doesn’t want him to throw too many pitches in a single inning.

Winners

• Hunter Renfroe has been quietly having a pretty good spring and even got a “Best Shape of His Life” article written about him last week. He gave up on the quiet part today, hitting a pair of doubles and a triple while driving in five runs.
• Cavan Biggio continued his excellent, if odd, spring with another pair of walks.
• Tyler Tolbert added a couple more hits to his resumé, plus his fifth stolen base of the spring.
• Carlos Hernández, hanging on to a roster bubble by a thread, pitched 1.2 scoreless innings with a strikeout and one hit allowed.
• Lucas Erceg struck out the side around a hit in his inning of work
• Cruz Noriega is a name you might want to remember for the future. He won’t be joining the Royals to start the season, but he pitched two innings to close this one out and struck out three while allowing only a single hit to continue a very good spring.
• Jac Caglianone made a late-game appearance and worked a nine-pitch walk in the ninth inning during his only plate appearance. Honestly, just the fact that he’s still in big league camp during its final week is pretty impressive considering he was only drafted last summer, but if he wants that to continue, plate appearances like that one are a good start.

Losers

• John Rave started the spring excellently but has been slumping of late. Still in big league camp, you have to wonder how much longer that will continue with games like today's 0-for-3 performance.
• Cole Ragans, as noted above, had to exit two separate innings early for pitch count concerns. In the end, he recorded only eight outs but also allowed eight hits and a pair of walks. There’s little concern about how good he can be, but unless he can clean up these occasional lapses like this, the start earlier this spring against the Cubs, and the ones against the Orioles and Angels last season, he may never be able to ascend from ace of the staff to Cy Young Award winner.
• Nelson Velázquez has had a terrible spring and added two more outs in two more at-bats today.
• MJ Melendez started the spring with a bunch of strikeouts, then hit the ball pretty well for a bit, but after today’s 0-for-4 performance with two strikeouts, he only has a pair of singles while striking out a total of three times without a walk in his past 13 at-bats.

The Royals play again tomorrow afternoon, hosting a split squad variation of the Diamondbacks at 4 PM CDT. Seth Lugo will take perhaps his final start of this year’s Spring Training.