KANSAS CITY, Mo. _ For the second night in a row, a Royals starting pitcher deflected a comebacker off a body part.
Jason Hammel was the victim Wednesday at Kauffman Stadium.
The perpetrator: former teammate and current Brewers center fielder Lorenzo Cain.
Cain turned Hammel's 92 mph two-seam fastball, a pitch Hammel has rediscovered this season in an effort to limit the fly balls that upended his first campaign in a Royals uniform, into a land missile.
The ball popped off Cain's bat at 109.5 mph, with the back of Hammel's left thigh in its crosshairs. As he went down, Hammel somersaulted off the mound. Shortstop Alcides Escobar made quick work of the play, throwing Cain out at first base for the last out of the third inning.
Perhaps pinning the Royals' 6-2 loss on as friendly a foe as Cain is extreme. Cain did no damage against Hammel, going 0 for 5 against his old team. And Hammel remained in the game for a total of 6 2/3 innings.
But the line drive did at least one thing. It disrupted Hammel's flow.
Hammel had retired nine of the first 10 batters he faced before the fourth inning. Then, the Brewers scored all four of the runs they needed to saddle the Royals with their 12th loss in 14 games.
Christian Yelich drew a leadoff walk and scored when fellow left-handed hitter Travis Shaw ripped a double under the glove of diving first baseman Lucas Duda at the line and into right field for a double.
Hammel almost retired Domingo Santana on a sacrifice fly that scored the Brewers' second run. But Jorge Soler, who has made strides in the outfield, seemed to take his eye off the ball before he'd captured it. The ball popped out of the tip of his glove and trickled onto the grass. The error allowed Santana to reach base _ and bit the Royals again, as he later scored on an RBI ground-out before the inning's end.
The inning undermined an otherwise quiet outing for Hammel, whom the Brewers touched for just five hits and four runs (three earned). He retired eight of his final 10 batters and enticed relatively weak contact _ if you don't count the batted balls Cain, Yelich, Ryan Braun and Shaw hit with an average exit velocity of 96.5 mph in the fifth inning.
The Royals flailed at a rally. Mike Moustakas drilled his seventh homer of the season in the fourth, and Salvador Perez drove in Jon Jay on an RBI force-out in the sixth. In the eighth, Escobar was stranded at third base despite leading off the inning with a scorched double to left field. Brewers reliever Josh Hader, who entered with one out and runners on the corners, struck out Moustakas and Salvador Perez in back-to-back at-bats to end the threat.
The Brewers had already tacked on a pair of runs (one earned) against Royals rookie Eric Stout, who made his major-league debut in relief of Hammel in the seventh.
And for an offense that entered the game having scored only eight runs in Hammel's previous 25 1/3 innings, the four-run gap proved insurmountable. They stranded six men on base and were 1 for 10 with runners in scoring position.
The Royals dropped to 5-17, one night prior to welcoming the Chicago White Sox for a five-game series in which both teams will attempt to climb out of the American League Central division cellar.
