Kansas City Royals: Brad Keller underwhelms on innings limit against A’s

Brad Keller and the Kansas City Royals had hoped for a better start to their ten-game homestand but were dismantled at the hands of the Athletics.

Prior to the opening game against the Oakland Athletics, Kansas City Royals manager Ned Yost spoke with the media regarding Brad Keller. It had been known up to this point that Keller was on an innings limit in his first full season, but that number had long remained a mystery.

However, Yost provided some clarity on the situation indicating that the team was going to evaluate him after Monday night’s game but were ultimately going to limit him to 180 innings this year. Keller entered the evening at 164.0 innings but added just an inning and a third to his total after getting roughed up by the Athletics.

He had a lot of trouble finding his command as he walked in the first two runs of the game. Then with the bases loaded, Marcus Semien cleared them all with a triple into the right-center field gap and that was it for Keller.

The 24-year old had been really good in his last 7 starts, tossing 45.1 innings with 37 strikeouts and walking just 12 batters to the tune of a 3.18 ERA. But lately, it feels like nobody in this rotation can even give the offense a fighting chance outside of Eric Skoglund‘s start on Sunday.

Even so, Skoglund didn’t strike out any batters and primarily played to contact. It’s obvious this rotation is a mess right now and it likely won’t get any better until some of the pitching prospects start coming up. We’ll see what happens in Keller’s next start as he’ll obviously look to improve on Monday’s start.

The Royals did receive some good news regarding Danny Duffy in that he will return to the rotation on Friday or Saturday against the Baltimore Orioles. He pitched 5 really strong innings in his rehab outing for Double-A NW Arkansas on Sunday evening.