KANSAS CITY, Mo. _ Royals starter Jason Vargas made the All-Star Game this year. He flew his family to Miami. He pitched a scoreless inning, facing just three hitters. He basked in the glow of the finest individual moment of his career, a hard-earned reward for a spectacular first half.
In 17 starts, he won 12 games and posted a 2.62 ERA and generally diced up opposing hitters with surgical precision. Everything in the first two paragraphs of this story happened.
That was worth remembering Wednesday night when Vargas labored again in a 5-3 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays at Kauffman Stadium. The veteran southpaw surrendered five earned runs and seven hits in six innings as his ERA settled at 7.18 in August. By the end, he had yielded three homers, including solo shots by Steven Souza Jr. and Logan Morrison in the fifth inning that proved decisive.
With the game tied at 3, Souza hammered a first-pitch curveball into the seats in left field with one out. Moments later, Morrison jumped on an 0-1 fastball and ripped his 33rd homer out to right field.
For Morrison, who grew up in the Kansas City area and spent time at Blue Valley West High School, the blast represented his second homer of the series. For the Royals, the shot foreshadowed another lost evening.
The Royals dropped two of three to the Rays, another team in the heart of the American League wild-card race, and fell to 65-67 on the season. They will have a day off Thursday before opening a three-game series at Minnesota on Friday night.
The Royals erased a 3-0 deficit in the third inning when Whit Merrifield clubbed a three-run homer to left field off Rays starter Jake Odorizzi, the former Royals farmhand.
Merrifield recorded his 17th homer while stealing his 26th base earlier in the game. With three more homers and four more stolen bases, he would become just the third player in franchise history to hit 20 homers and steal 30 bases in the same season. For now, the list includes just Carlos Beltran, perhaps a future Hall of Famer, and Amos Otis, a member of the Royals Hall of Fame. But the milestone discussion will come later.
On Wednesday, the Royals could not conjure momentum following a 6-2 victory the previous night. Odorizzi allowed three runs and four hits in five innings before giving way to the Rays bullpen.
The offense did not collect another hit until Salvador Perez snapped a 0-for-16 mark in the bottom of the ninth inning. But Rays reliever Alex Colome responded with strikeouts of Mike Moustakas and Jorge Bonifacio to end the game.
In the end, the Rays had nicked Vargas for five runs. The second-half regression continued for another night.
Earlier this summer, Vargas was an All-Star. On Wednesday, he lost for the fifth time in six games as his ERA spiked to 3.87.
