Is Bailey Ober Starting To Figure Things Out Against the Royals?

Minneapolis – Bailey Ober looked as sharp as he ever had against the Kansas City Royals during his start on Sunday. The only problem was that his counterpart on the mound, Kris Bubic, pitched even better.

Bubic has been the second-best pitcher in baseball behind Max Fried, who holds the best ERA at 1.29. Bubic is at 1.49. In the past, the Minnesota Twins have crushed Bubic when he’s on the mound. He had a career 5.27 ERA in 42 ⅔ innings against Minnesota.

“You’ve got to give hats off to him, obviously he’s been very good this year,” said Twins catcher Ryan Jeffers, who hit a double off Bubic in his first at-bat on Sunday. “I think early in the game, always when you face a guy with good stuff, you try to take away their best pitch. I thought we did a good job trying to take away his fastball, and then he went in soft and threw a bunch of slow stuff the rest of the day.”

This season, Bubic has become an entirely different pitcher, developing his changeup into one of the most unhittable pitches in the game. Hitters are only hitting .106 off it in 53 plate appearances.

The Twins are the first team to score a run off him in the first inning this season. Still, he dominated Minnesota’s lineup, allowing only two base runners on two walks after Ty France drove in Jeffers for a 1-0 lead and struck out nine.

“It would be nice to say yes,” Jeffers said on being the first team to score a run on Bubic in the first this year. “But it was just a double and a single and nothing else, the rest of the day. I think we need to do better than what we did today, yeah.”

“The changeup for him has pretty much been an equalizer,” said Twins manager Rocco Baldelli. “He’s been able to attack righties with that pitch. Guys don’t seem to see it great, and that’s been across the board this year.”

Ober went 6 ⅔ innings, allowed seven hits and a walk, and kept Royals runners from getting past second base until the last batter he faced. Catcher Freddy Fermin hit an RBI double to tie the game 1-1.

“I mean, he didn’t hit it over 90 MPH, but I thought he’d be off the changeup,” Ober said on his battle with Fermin. “I threw him three sliders and wasn’t really close to those, and I thought he’d maybe be looking for something out, over, and threw a changeup that darted underneath the zone and just hit a ball where we weren’t.”

While the RBI double from Fermin saw Ober exit the game, his start against KC showed he’s turning the corner against the team that has plagued him the most at the plate in his career.

Royals hitters own a collective .301/.327/.504 slash line in 248 plate appearances and 57 innings against Ober since his MLB debut in 2021. Kansas City’s .831 OPS against Ober is .160 points higher than any other team he’s made at least 10 starts against, which, for now, is just the other three AL Central teams.

Things looked like they may continue this way for Ober against the Royals in the first inning he pitched against them this year on April 10, when he allowed three hits and a run to score. But since that first inning on April 10, Ober has seemed to take a turn in the right direction against the Royals.

The Royals have a .245/.275/.347 slash line against Ober the two times they’ve faced him this season, and he’s only allowed two earned runs in 12 ⅔ innings of work with seven strikeouts and just two walks.

However, the Royals still had 12 hits against him, seven of which came on Sunday. Keeping all but one of those hits from turning into runs highlighted how Ober has improved against this divisional foe.

“We pitched our way out of all of those, or it felt like almost all of those, but they had more opportunities,” said Jeffers. “They had more opportunities to score as an offense than we did today. But when they did, they were able to work out of it.”

And despite Ober having a shortened start due to weather earlier in the week, he’s beginning to feel it in his pitches that the Royals aren’t as challenging to take down as they’ve previously been.

“I just kind of, the way my stuff was playing, just trying to get a little bit down that last inning or two,” Ober said. “Felt good, just, I was locating still, mixing, but yeah. I obviously wanted to get that guy out and have a clean seventh inning.”

“Bailey did a heck of a job out there,” said Baldelli. “A lot of pitches were made by Bailey Ober, and we’re going to win a lot of starts if he pitches like that.”

Ober still owns a career 5.10 ERA against the Royals at home and a 5.57 ERA at Kauffman Stadium, and their lineup could look much different when they face them again on August 8.

As long as he keeps pitching as he has against them this season and the Twins lineup can pick up more runs against Bubic their next time out, Ober’s progression against the Royals could be a key separator in where these teams find themselves in the AL Central race in the dog days of summer.