On Sleep Deprivation and Seeing-Eye Singles

Frustration has a way of building upon itself, but sometimes a bit of relief makes a big impact.

Parenting a newborn can be a challenge. On top of the physical difficulties of sleeping a couple of hours at a time (if that), the mental exhaustion can manifest in myriad ways. You might forget to turn on the coffee maker, or forget to put on deodorant, or forget to text someone back for a week.

(I may or may not have done all of these things.)

Plus, being so exhausted makes it easier to be on edge, and when you’re holding a screaming infant at 2:00 in the morning, it can make you tense, which the baby senses, which causes the baby to scream more, which causes you to feel frustrated, which the baby senses, and around and around it goes.

In those moments, you wish for just an extra hour of sleep, just a chance to breathe and relax, so you can get your bearings again.

I’ve been thinking back to those days while watching the Royals this season.

Most nights, the Royals are rolling out a lineup with seven players no older than 27, and four players no older than 25. It’s a young offense, and while several guys have seen some success in the bigs, none of them have been consistently producing every night. That’s no surprise, because hitting major-league pitching is exceptionally difficult!

Pitchers today are effectively wizards. If you showed an early 20th century baseball player a video of Jacob deGrom or Gerrit Cole, he would spontaneously combust. And on top of the physical challenge of making hard contact with these pitches, a player must also combat the mental element, particularly when they don’t succeed. That’s made even tougher when a player makes hard contact, but the hits aren’t falling.

This is where several Royals players found themselves early on this season.

Guys like Vinnie Pasquantino, Bobby Witt Jr., and MJ Melendez were hitting rockets all over the field, but many of them were finding leather instead of grass. When that happens, it can be extremely easy for a player to question their process, to wonder if they need to change something in order to see the right results. It can be easy for a player to start trying to hit six-run homers, or swing at more pitches instead of staying disciplined in their zone.

Put more simply, it can be easy for guys to start pressing.

This is often amplified in scoring opportunities, because for a team that’s struggling to score runs, those opportunities feel more important. They start doing things that aren’t typical for them, chasing too often, trying to pull every pitch, etc.

With the bases empty this season, the Royals have a strikeout rate of 25.3 percent, the eighth-highest in baseball. Not great! With runners in scoring position, that rate jumps to 34.2 percent. Much worse! And while the Royals aren’t an overall patient team, they have become even more walk-averse in those situations, with a walk rate of only 5.8 percent when men are on second or third base. Only the White Sox have a lower rate, at 4.4 percent, which, woof.

Those poor swing decisions and mechanics in scoring opportunities has also manifested in lower quality of contact. Using the FanGraphs definitions, the Royals have a hard-hit rate of 28.6 percent with runners in scoring position (tied for 22nd in MLB), as opposed to 33.7 percent with the bases empty (8th).

While pulling the ball is generally helpful, if the contact isn’t hard, it’s not going to matter, and the Royals have seen their pull rate jump from 40.1 percent with the bases empty (15th) to 47.1 percent with runners in scoring position (3rd). Again, pulling the ball is great, but combined with a lower hard-hit rate, you see even worse results.

Basically, the Royals have been showing a strong approach overall, but because the results weren’t following, the few scoring opportunities they did see have been ruined by poor approaches in those specific plate appearances. And this can have a snowball effect, because guys will start pressing even more, making it even less likely they’ll have scoring opportunities, making the scoring opportunities feel even more important, making the guys start pressing even more, and the whole thing goes around and around and around.

However, if a player can have even the tiniest bit of success, like, say, a game-tying, line-drive single in the ninth inning, in a two-strike count, after collecting precisely zero hits in 22 previous at-bats with two strikes before that game, then that can change things.

As a matter of fact, Melendez collected another hit with two strikes in Wednesday’s game. I’m not saying that second hit is directly related to the first one, but I’m also not not saying that, you know?

Looking at the expected stats on Baseball Savant, Melendez has hit into some absolute buzzard luck this season.

So has Massey, as you can see, but Melendez’s expected wOBA is .414, which is in the 87th percentile among the 270 players who have seen at least 100 pitches. He’s been striking out a lot, which also contributes, but now that he's seen the ball hit some grass, perhaps that loosens him up, allows him to get back to swinging at the right pitches, and he can start to put together more consistently solid at-bats.

I’m certainly not guaranteeing the Royals 10-run effort on Wednesday means they’re about to go on a three-week heater, but I also don’t want to underestimate the mental aspect of getting that little breakthrough.

My youngest daughter hasn’t been a good sleeper for most of her 17 months of life. Like many parents, my wife and I have figured out how to function on just a few hours of sleep each night, but it can, and has, worn on me at times. So when she started to sleep for four or five hours at a time, instead of two or three, it felt like a weight had been lifted. I felt like my brain was able to actually function without a constant stream of caffeine. I didn’t stop the constant stream of caffeine, mind you, but I think I could have.

Getting her ready for bed, reasonably thinking it was possible to get a decent night’s sleep, also made her bedtime routine less stressful, as well as my own, since I didn’t constantly worry that if I didn’t immediately fall to sleep I wouldn’t get any sleep at all. Long-term, those extra couple of hours may not have made a difference, but in the moment, every extra bit of rest felt massive.

It remains to be seen if the Royals bats can keep their momentum going against a very talented Braves pitching staff this weekend, but days like Tuesday and Wednesday can, at the very least, give those young players a chance to breathe and relax. And sometimes, that’s all a person needs.