KANSAS CITY, Mo. — With a rash of injuries to his starting rotation, Kansas City Royals manager Matt Quatraro put together a plan to rely exclusively on the bullpen Wednesday afternoon, when his team hosted the Atlanta Braves in the finale to a three-game interleague series at Kauffman Stadium.
Quatraro never could have imagined nine relievers would execute it so perfectly, nor that they would tie a Major League Baseball record in the process.
However, by the time struggling reliever Sam Long escaped a two-on, no-outs jam by retiring three straight Braves in the top of the 10th inning, and Salvador Perez slapped a single to right field to score MJ Melendez in the bottom half and give the Royals a 1-0 win, they had done exactly that: tied an MLB record by using nine total pitchers in a shutout.
The only other club to use that many arms in a shutout was Cleveland, which did it in 2016, also in a 10-inning game.
“Not only did they pitch incredibly well today, but they had a huge workload these last four or five days,” said Quatraro, whose team bounced back from Monday’s 10-7 loss to Atlanta to win 9-6 on Tuesday night — behind starter Seth Lugo, who was fresh off agreeing to a contract extension — before wrapping up the series victory. “I can’t credit them enough (for) keeping in the right frame of mind down there, and just the plan these guys had to execute.”
The Royals, who improved to 54-55 with their third win in four games, entered Wednesday four games out of the final wild-card playoff spot in the American League.
The Braves slipped to 45-62 and a season-worst 17 games under .500, and they’re ahead of only the Washington Nationals and the Colorado Rockies in the National League despite reaching the playoffs the past seven seasons in a run that included six NL East Division titles and the 2021 World Series championship.
Kansas City’s nine pitchers allowed a combined five hits and one walk while striking out 10 batters and throwing 157 total pitches.
Long, who has a 7.40 ERA this season, finished off the victory by throwing 18 pitches, all but one of them a strike. The ending came 2 hours, 38 minutes after fellow reliever Angel Zerpa, pitching on no rest, took the mound and breezed through the first inning and into the second to set the tone.
Jonathan Bowlan was the only Kansas City reliever to retire more than three batters, going two full innings. John Schreiber struck out the side in the fourth. Hunter Harvey escaped a two-on, no-outs jam in the sixth. And the team’s two primary closers this season, Lucas Erceg and Carlos Estévez, made some important pitches and plays in the late innings.
Erceg allowed a pinch-hit single to Drake Baldwin with one out in the eighth, then watched pinch runner Luke Williams swipe second base. He bounced back to retire Jurickson Profar and Matt Olson and keep the game scoreless.
Estévez managed to snare a line drive by Michael Harris II that appeared destined to be a one-out single in the ninth.
“I’m glad he caught it,” Quatraro said. “You’re going to throw a shutout, you need some good defense behind you.”
They certainly needed those big plays in the field the way Joey Wentz was pitching for the other side.
Wentz, who was claimed off waivers by the Braves earlier this month, allowed one hit and three walks in 6 2/3 innings with seven strikeouts in a return home. Wentz was born in Lawrence, Kansas, and played at Shawnee Mission East High School in the Kansas City suburb of Prairie Village, where he had one of the best careers in Sunflower State prep baseball history.
The Braves actually selected Wentz in the first round of the 2016 MLB draft, but he has largely failed to live up to expectations for such an early pick. He has bounced around several clubs, including the Pittsburgh Twins and the Minnesota Twins this year, and had a 5.76 ERA heading into his fourth start for Atlanta.
“We never could solve him,” Quatraro said.
The way their bullpen was performing, the Royals didn’t have to.
They had the luxury of relying on their relievers with a day off Thursday before beginning a weekend series against the host Toronto Blue Jays (64-46) — who are in first place in the AL East — and they also needed to rely on them with injuries beginning to take their toll on the starting rotation.
Cole Ragans, an MLB All-Star last year, has been on the injured list with a left rotator cuff strain, and Michael Lorenzen recently joined him with a left oblique strain. Then on Monday, the Royals announced that 2025 MLB All-Star left-hander Kris Bubic would be placed on the IL with his own rotator cuff injury, one likely to end his season.
So it fell upon a bullpen that wound up with only one player (Thomas Hatch) still available by the time Perez singled off Daysbel Hernández in the 10th inning to give Kansas City the victory.
“It wasn’t easy. There was danger at times there,” Quatraro said. “But you go backwards and see what Sammy did there, and to really execute, that was enormous — but even more so than the 10 shutout innings, the workload they have had and they way they responded, especially a day game after a night game.”
Atlanta is two-thirds through a nine-game road trip, and its next three contests are against the Cincinnati Reds, with the first two at Great American Ball Park before Saturday’s MLB Speedway Classic at Bristol Motor Speedway. MLB announced Monday that more than 85,000 tickets have been sold for the latter game, which will be played on a temporary field inside the half-mile track that annually hosts two NASCAR Cup Series races and will mark the first game ever played in Tennessee by teams from either of the two current major leagues (AL and NL).
Atlanta’s scheduled starting pitcher for Thursday night’s game is newly acquired right-hander Carlos Carrasco, who was 2-2 with a 5.91 ERA this season in eight appearances for the New York Yankees before being traded Monday. The NL Central’s Reds will start left-hander Andrew Abbott (8-1, 2.09).