Torey Lovullo was determined to get his money’s worth.
The D-backs’ manager popped out of the dugout in the seventh inning Monday and headed directly for home-plate umpire Jordan Baker. Lovullo, upset about a warning given to each team moments earlier, spent some time pointing and gesturing at Baker in animated fashion before the umpire served him with an ejection. It was the end of a frustrating night for Lovullo, who watched the Arizona pitching waver in a 10-4 loss to the Royals at Kauffman Stadium, punctuated by a couple of hit batters that prompted the events leading to Lovullo’s dismissal.
With Bobby Witt Jr. at the plate in the bottom of the sixth and needing only a single to complete the cycle, reliever Humberto Castellanos delivered a 91.7 mph sinker up and in that hit Witt on his left arm. With the fans at The K still booing lustily an inning later, reliever John Schreiber hit Gabriel Moreno with a 92 mph sinker, prompting the warnings.
Enter Lovullo with a heated response.
“What I said was: ‘If you think I was going to ask my team to hit one of the best players in Major League Baseball, you’re crazy.’ That’s how I feel about Bobby Witt Jr.,” Lovullo said.
“He’s an unbelievable player and I would never, ever endorse hitting another player. I would never, ever do that.”
Schreiber was adamant that he wasn’t retaliating when he hit Moreno.
“My scouting reports for most guys are sinker-slider,” Schreiber said. “I’m a sidearm guy. I just missed one and it is what it is.”
In the end, Witt didn’t get his cycle. He had another chance in the eighth, but flied out to right. But the Royals were comfortably ahead at that point after making Yilber Diaz’s first career road start a rough one.
After two excellent outings at home, Diaz was given a 3-1 lead in the third inning thanks to three consecutive extra-base hits. Kevin Newman and Alek Thomas opened the inning with doubles before Ketel Marte blasted a two-run homer 415 feet to left-center off Royals All-Star lefty Cole Ragans.
But the outing got away from Diaz when the Royals came back with three in the third and four in the fourth. Whereas Ragans was able to hit the reset button, Diaz was not.
“We got three, they got three and then [Ragans] comes back with a shutdown inning,” Lovullo said. “That was a big moment for him. He has been doing it a little longer than our guy, but our guy has been doing it the last couple of outings.”
With their starting rotation plagued by injuries, the D-backs need Diaz to quickly shake off Monday’s outing. He allowed seven runs on nine hits and a walk while registering just nine outs.
“I think I was leaving some pitches middle-middle [in the third],” Diaz said through an interpreter. “My stuff wasn’t 100 percent today.”
It was Witt’s three-run homer off reliever Miguel Castro that allowed the Royals to take an 8-3 lead in the fourth. The red-hot Witt has 12 hits in the past four games, and the D-backs know they will have to figure out a way to stop him if they don’t want to drop their first series since June 25-27 against Minnesota.
“[Witt] was the one guy we felt like we couldn’t let beat us,” Lovullo said. “He was the guy. Nobody was better on the baseball field today than him.”
