The Royals’ joyride has become a hang-on-for-dear-life thing. Here’s the concern

Vinnie Pasquantino walked through the Royals’ clubhouse Thursday night, not long after departing an eventual loss in Houston with a thumb injury. Days later, he’d acknowledge that maybe he wasn’t in the best mental space — actually, “a wreck” is the terminology he used.

“Not my proudest moments,” he said. “I felt sorry for myself.”

That mood lasted an hour before a teammate approached him: longtime Royals veteran Salvador Perez.

The ensuing conversation changed Pasquantino’s perspective.

“Sal was the most direct person with me,” he recalled Monday, a brace on his broken thumb and neighboring wrist, ahead of planned surgery Tuesday. “Just (that) I gotta get over how I feel about myself right now and move on to how I can (help).”

Perez next moved through the room, sharing a rather simply stated message he wanted to be sure every last player heard.

“We’re going to be fine,” he said.

It is a snapshot of the lone survivor from the last time the Royals were here — as in, fighting for a playoff spot — trying to make a point. And it’s the point you think it is, and one perhaps valuable for a team that lost 106 games a year ago.

Look forward.

So, let’s.

In a phrase: Uh-oh.

A team that has provided an unexpected joyride for the last five months is in hang-on-for-dear-life mode at the onset of the first meaningful September baseball the organization has played in nearly a decade. The Royals have lost six straight games after their two-hit clunker Monday against Cleveland to open a three-game series at Kauffman Stadium.

Just one week ago, those two teams sat even atop the American League Central standings.

Since then, in Kansas City, it’s been a confluence of the uh-oh — Pasquantino’s injury, the least forgiving run of KC’s 2024 schedule and a team stuck in an extended losing streak for the first time this season. A resilient group defined by its ability to respond has provided a dud of a response to its most adverse moment yet.

I’ll interject with a deep breath for a moment, because it’s warranted: It never looks great when you pick at the valleys of a season, same as it looks far too promising when you amplify the peaks.

All but three teams in baseball have endured losing streaks of five-plus games this year, and one of those that hasn’t, the Boston Red Sox, lost four straight on six occasions. I can’t be the only one who remembers the Arizona Diamondbacks, winners of the NL pennant a year ago, losing nine straight in August.

And I know I’m not the only one who remembers the 2015 Royals were 11-17 in September.

This is part of baseball. It’s even part of good baseball.

The Royals trail Cleveland by 4.5 games in the AL Central. But they still have a 4.5-game lead in the AL Wild Card race, with time on their side and the playoff odds still pretty significantly on their side. That’s real.

The losing streak, on its own, shouldn’t induce panic. And if that was all we had to talk about with these Royals — this losing streak — I’d probably suggest people are exaggerating its meaning and move on.

We do, however, have more to talk about.

That returns us to the top of this column, on a very-much related note, because the Pasquantino injury isn’t changing anytime before the regular season concludes, much as he is intent on doing all he can to accelerate his eventual return.

A top-heavy team built on its stars now has one fewer. And, gasp, guess what, the Royals are worse without one of the three consistently dependable hitters in their lineup.

In case you needed the (very) small sample size of it, the Royals are 18-for-124 (.145) in the four games since Pasquantino’s injury. They haven’t scored more than two runs in any of those four. (The No. 3 hitter in their lineup is 1-for-16 with five strikeouts.)

We can’t use Pasquantino’s injury as blanket coverage for all that’s wrong with the offense. The Royals have faced some good starting pitching. But, man, that top-heavy lineup sure looks a lot different when some of the weight at the top is subtracted, and we’d probably say that — looks different — regardless of the early returns.

It’s a reminder, not an epiphany, of how the Royals are constructed. The lineup has been riding on the backs of three bats — Pasquantino, Perez and Bobby Witt Jr. — to the extreme. Those three comprise 44.5% of the Royals’ offense, judging by weighted runs created. That’s the second-highest percentage of a team’s top-three players in the league.

In other words, an injury was always going to affect them more adversely than the next team. Always going to put more questions into their lineup.

It has.

And in one particular spot: situational hitting.

Two hitters across the majors are filling not-talked-about-enough roles in baseball: the one hitting behind Aaron Judge, and the one hitting behind Bobby Witt Jr.

Pasquantino is not just a good hitter. He’s perfect for the above-referenced role. His most underrated quality is how adept he’s become at understanding how the opposition is trying to get him out, and what kind of out it aims to achieve. In fact, he still wants to be part of the team’s pre-game meetings while he’s injured. It’s intentional, not coincidence, that he leads baseball in sacrifice flies this year.

There are 148 players with at least 100 plate appearances with runners in scoring position this season.

The leader in average: Witt (.385).

Second: Pasquantino (.360).

Oh, and fifth: Perez (.341).

Witt is superhuman on his own, but Pasquantino’s situational hitting has supersized Witt’s impact. To be clear, that’s not simply saying teams will start to pitch around Witt more — I’ve analyzed why that’s not as easy as it seems, given his base-running (though we could see a bit more of it).

Rather, Witt has reached base safely 239 times. There are some run-producing opportunities there, and for five months, the Royals have had a left-handed hitter who built his approach at the plate to take advantage of them.

That’s gone for the remainder of the season. There will be some next-man-up talk, but if that could be replicated, it wouldn’t be sitting on the bench.

That’s the concern — that this injury not only takes Pasquantino’s bat out of the lineup, but it removes the complete impact of one of the best bats (and base-runners) in the game. And it’s a bigger concern than a baseball team going through a losing streak.

The Royals’ rotation is too good for this streak to last. That remains true.

But the offense has carried its weight, too. The Royals are seventh in the majors in runs scored this season.

The season’s final four weeks don’t necessarily demand similar magic. The Royals’ 4.5-game Wild Card lead with just 23 left to play offers them some protection. The aforementioned rotation brings protection, too.

The lineup, though, is absent a sizable chunk of it.