The ball had scarcely cheap jeremy guthrie socks left Adam Jones’s bat when Johnny Cueto asked for another. It had just settled over the center field fence at Camden Yards, some 450 feet away, when Cueto reached with his glove and hopped in the air to snare the new one, a playful move appropriate for cheap kansas city royals jeremy guthrie jerseys a sandlot. He looked, in a vacuum, as if he were having fun.

But how? The Kansas City Royals are in the conversation as the American League’s best team, and at the trade deadline, they made one of the sexiest acquisitions. Toronto landed David Price? Fine, fine, the good people of Kansas City could say. We got Johnny Cueto.

And yet, here was Cueto, part of the Royals’ postseason solution, looking very much like a problem Sunday night. In 6-1/3 innings of work, he allowed eight runs, seven of them earned. He gave up 11 hits, among them four absolutely blasted Orioles homers, Jones’s three-run shot in the first followed by Jonathan Schoop (twice) and Chris Davis, maybe 1,700 feet of damage in all. He had so little movement on his pitches that he struck out just three of the 30 Orioles he faced – and Baltimore strikes out more frequently than all but two teams in all of baseball.

This troublesome bit of evidence for the Royals adds another data point to a discouraging graph. In his first four starts after arriving from Cincinnati, Cueto was the front-line pitcher Kansas City needed for the postseason, dialing up a 1.80 ERA with 0.933 walks-and-hits wholesale jeremy guthrie jerseys china per inning pitched. In five starts since, disaster: five straight losses with a 9.57 ERA and an astonishing cheap jeremy guthrie t-shirt 1.975 WHIP.

“This is going to change,” said Royals coach Pedro Grifol, who translated Cueto’s words Sunday night. “He’s going to do what he came here to do.”

Yet currently, he’s not doing it. So what do we have here? Is it – and cover your ears, Royals fans – a month-long version of the 2013 National League wild-card game, when all of Pittsburgh chanted “Cue-to! Cue-to!” at the mound at PNC Park, and Cueto appeared so rattled that he, quite literally, dropped the ball. The Royals have a 10-game lead in the American League Central. They are, at the moment, fending off the Toronto Blue Jays for the league’s best record. They still have the lockdown cheap jeremy guthrie jerseys online bullpen that cheap jeremy guthrie caps propelled the 2014 postseason run. About the only thing they’re not doing well is pitching every fifth day – Cueto’s turn.