Pitches hit Royals batters 12 times this season, one of them sending Alex Rios to the disabled list. Interestingly, the Royals don’t seem to think they are being head hunted:

Gordon and third baseman Mike Moustakas led the club with four hit-by-pitches heading into Wednesday night. Both are left-handed pitchers who can wield power if pitches are out over the plate. General manager Dayton Moore also speculated the proliferation of plunkings stemmed from pitchers trying to combat the bevy of Kansas City base runners.

“I think team’s are trying to pitch us inside,” Moore said. “There’s a lot of slide-stepping going on. A lot of guys are using the slide-step to try to control the running game. When that happens, pitchers tend to miss arm side.

“I don’t think anybody is necessarily throwing at us intentionally. They’re just trying to make pitches. It’s just one of those deals right now.”

Royals pitcher Danny Duffy gives us his take on missing inside:

“It’s something that’s hard to speak on, because it’s got to be policed,” Duffy said. “In the same breath, I’ve had my fair share of misses up and in, too, that I didn’t mean to throw up and in. You want to go in off the plate, you want to utilize that part of the plate, and if a ball takes off on you, it’s hard to sit there and defend it. Because you want to act like you meant to throw it there, regardless of where it went.”

So if players believe a pitcher is throwing at them, it may be because the pitcher doesn’t want the batter to think a spot was missed!

At the game between the Nationals and Red Sox, I saw five hit batters. Two of them were so low that they would have hit the dirt if they had not hit the batter. On top of that, all seemed to occur in situations where it was ludicrous to try to hit a batter. All of them just looked like pitches that got away.