Hey, I said I’d write if the Royals made the playoffs; I
didn’t say I’d write a lot.
I did write about the ALDS and ALCS, over at Grantland,
which you can read here
and here.
I also wrote about the wonderful 30 for 30 documentary on Sung Woo Lee here.
And today
I wrote for Grantland about the 15 biggest plays in major league history, and
gave it as much of a Royals flavor as I could.
And now they’re back in the World Series. I have so many
thoughts and not nearly enough time to write about them all, but I just want to
start by trying to put into words my astonishment that, one year after they got
about as close as you can to winning it all – and quite possibly closer than
they would ever be again in my lifetime – they’re back to take another shot.
Back-to-back American League pennants. That’s just
jaw-dropping. The Chicago White Sox and Cleveland Indians, both original AL
franchises dating back to 1901, have never won back-to-back pennants. The
Royals have gone to the World Series as many times in the last two seasons as
the White Sox have in the last 95.
If we go back to 1986, the year the Royals’ run of
futility began, they have won two pennants in the last 30 years. In a 15-team
league, you would expect a team to win an average of exactly two pennants in 30
years. (The actual number is 2.13, as the AL had 14 teams for most of that
time, but close enough.) When it comes to pennants, the Royals have wiped out
an entire generation of futility in the last 13 months. If they win the World
Series, they will have paid off that debt in full as well.
And that’s if we back things up to 1986, which puts the
Royals in the worst possible light. They’ve won four AL pennants in their
existence, compared to an average expectation of 3.43 pennants for a team that
began play in 1969. If they win the World Series they will once again have an
above-average amount of hardware in their existence, and once again will be
able to stake a claim as one of the most successful expansion teams of all
time.
Or try this: over the last 40 seasons (1976 to 2015), the
Royals have won four pennants. Do you know how many American League teams have
won more in that time? One: the Yankees. ONE.
AL Pennants, 1976 – 2015
New York: 11
Kansas City: 4
Boston: 4
Oakland: 3
Detroit: 3
Cleveland: 2
Toronto: 2
Baltimore: 2
Texas: 2
Minnesota: 2
Milwaukee, Tampa Bay, Los Angeles, Chicago: 1
No one: 1
Or consider this: the Royals have won as many playoff
games (18) in the last 13 months as they had in their entire 45-year history
before 2014 (18). The difference is that they’ve only lost 8 postseason games in the last 13 months, compared to 25
before.
And along the way, they’ve proven themselves almost
impossible to kill. They came back from four runs down in the eighth inning of
an elimination game in the Wild Card game last year; they did the exact same
thing in Game 4 of the ALDS this year. They came back from down 3-0 in the
seventh inning against David Price in Game 2 of the ALCS.
They’ve overcome adversity over and over again. Their
eighth-inning uprising in Houston in Game 4 came one inning after Terrance
Gore, who can not be captured using traditional weaponry, and representing the
tying run in a 3-2 game, was called out on replay after stealing third base
because he came off the bag for an infinitesimal amount of time, which as we
are learning is almost unavoidable for any basestealer who doesn’t either go
hands-first or bowl over the fielder at full speed, both of which are
unacceptably dangerous as a general basestealing tactic. (Also, the umpires
apparently ruled that the back of Luis Valbuena’s wrist, the only part of his
arm that was in contact with Gore, constituted a tag.) This was followed by
back-to-back home runs from Carlos Correa and Colby Rasmus to give Houston a
6-2 lead…and the Royals came back from that the next inning like it was nothing,
tying the game and putting the go-ahead run at third base before an out was
even recorded.
They overcame an ill-timed rain delay and Ned Yost’s
frustrating reluctance to deploy his best relievers earlier in games to close
out the ALCS, because Wade Davis is a cyborg and cyborgs don’t care if their
arm has to rest for an hour in the midst of a relief appearance. I’ve seen
better baseball teams, and I’ve seen more resilient baseball teams, but I’m not
sure I’ve seen a team that was both. They are the team I’ve been waiting to
root for my entire adult life.
And I want to say that no matter what happens in the
World Series, they’ve won back-to-back American League championships, and that
is something we can and should celebrate for a long time to come. But let’s be
honest: if they don’t win this series, it will probably hurt a lot more than if
they had just succumbed to the Astros two weeks ago yesterday. I said this before
the World Series last year: getting that far actually made me more nervous
about losing than I was before the ALDS or ALCS, because as much as the 2014
Royals had accomplished already by that point, the difference in the way they
would be perceived had they won the World Series versus had they lost dwarfed
everything else they had accomplished.
They lost that World Series, as nobly as a team can lose,
but still: they lost. They lost Game 7, and with it, their chance at permanent
glory. I thought that was the end of it. I thought that it would be a long time
before they’d be back in this position. If you had offered me a proposition
after Game 7 last year, that the Royals would next play in the World Series 7
years later, I would have taken it. I probably would have taken 10. I know how
precious these opportunities can be, and I just didn’t want to live another 29
years without another chance at a championship.
It took 12 months. The Royals made it back to the World
Series without even surrendering their title as AL champs. And it means that if
they win the World Series this year, it will change the way I perceive last
year’s team as well. The 2014 Royals aren’t a self-contained story anymore.
They now feel like only the opening chapter of an even greater story, the
Preamble to the 2014-2015 Royals, and if this season ends with a championship,
the MLB-sanctioned Championship Blu-Ray better not start with Opening Day. Because
in my mind, this Championship Season would not have started this April: it
would have started when a pop-up settled into Salvador Perez’s glove in Chicago
last September, when this crazy ride began.
The 2015 Royals aren’t just playing for themselves; they’re
playing for the 2014 Royals too. If they win, they’ll forever alter the way
they are perceived, and they’ll forever alter the way last year’s team is perceived
too. The 2015 Royals have already proved that, as Eric Hosmer wrote,
the 2014 Royals were No Fluke. Now they have a chance to prove that the 2014
Royals were actually champions themselves. They have a chance to turn
Unfinished Business into finished business.
First they have to get past the Mets. The Mets weren’t as
good as the Royals during the season, but then the Giants won fewer games than
the Royals last year. They have ridiculous starting pitching, and Jeurys
Familia throws a 94 mph splitter now, and Daniel Murphy had a productive
meeting with Mr. Applegate earlier this month. The Mets are, on paper, a better
team than the Giants were last year.
But then the Royals are a better team than they were last
year too. They have an actual offense now, a lineup that doesn’t quit, that can
start or end rallies from any spot in the lineup. They scored 5 runs or more in
six straight games from Game 4 of the ALDS through game 4 of the ALCS. The last
time the Royals scored 5 runs or more in six straight games: September, 2011.
I’m picking the Royals to win, because I think their
fastball-hitting ways counter the Mets’ fastball-throwing ways well, and
because the Mets don’t have a dominant lefty reliever in their pen to take
advantage of the Royals’ 4-5-6 hitters (something that worked to the Royals
against the Astros, as well as against the Blue Jays, whose loss of Brett Cecil
was crucial in that series), and because the Royals DO have a dominant lefty
reliever in Danny Duffy to throw against the five left-handers in the Mets’
lineup. I had the Royals in five against Houston because they didn’t have to
face Dallas Keuchel twice, and I had the Royals in seven against Toronto
because they didn’t have to face Cecil. I’m sticking with the Royals to finish
this off, this time in six games, because Johnny Cueto having another random
dominant outing to finish out the year would just be so in keeping with the
theme of this season. (I’m looking forward to Raul Adalberto Mondesi having a
big hit off the bench in New York for the same reason.)
But win or lose, I’m going to try to enjoy this series
without worrying too much about what the outcome means for the legacy of the
2014-15 Royals. They will always be champions to me. I just hope that at the
end, the world sees them the same way.
