I know I may be too hung up on the final game of
the World Series, but I need to document it here so I’ll have a way to look
back on this when I’m 90 years old and my memory is failing me. One of the
things that made the 2015 Royals not just a championship season but a storybook season was the way it ended.
Game 5 of the World Series hearkened back to earlier moments in the Royals’
playoff run over and over again. In particular, the events of Game 5 and the events
of last year’s Wild Card Game, the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega,
the two best games of the past two seasons, are connected in a way that’s almost
eerie. One game was played on the last day of September – the earliest playoff
game in Royals history – and the other was played on the first day of November,
making it the latest game in Royals history.
If they were to ever make a movie about these
Royals, imagine a series of flashbacks occurring before each of these plays.
- Lorenzo Cain leading off the top of the ninth: a
flashback to him leading off the bottom of the eighth against Toronto in Game 6
with a walk, and him drawing a walk in the top of the eighth against the Mets
in Game 4, set to the words of someone (in my mind it’s Mike Moustakas)
screaming out, “keep the line moving!”
In 16 playoff games this year, Cain drew 11 walks.
Granted, three were intentional, but even eight walks in 16 games was a much higher rate than his seasonal total
of 37 (a career-high!) in 140 games. As a team, the Royals were only a tiny bit
more patient than in the playoffs as they were during the regular season – they
drew 2.38 unintentional walks per game in the postseason, compared to 2.19
UIBB/game during the regular season. But Cain, perhaps getting a great view of
Ben Zobrist’s plate appearances from the on-deck circle, fought for three
difficult walks – all three came on full counts, one in a seven-pitch at-bat
and the other two on eight-pitch at-bats – in three crucial situations.
- Eric Hosmer, batting next: a flashback to his
triple off Dan Otero in the Wild Card game last year. Or perhaps, if the
footage exists somewhere, a flashback to his performance in the Texas League
playoffs in 2010, which I was calling the greatest clutch display by a Royals
player since 1985. (Hosmer homered six times in the playoffs. Twice he batted in
the eighth or later with the Northwest Arkansas Naturals facing elimination;
both times he homered to tie the game. The Naturals would win the
championship.) I know it’s not rational, but ever since his 2010 performance I’ve
thought of him as someone who would never let the pressure of the moment get to
him. Nothing that happened last postseason, when he hit .351/.439/.544, changed
my mind. I expected him to have another monster October.
And then he hit .212/.236/.288 in the playoffs this
year. He was terrible…except, somehow, he drove in 17 runs in 16 games.
Multiply his numbers by 10, and imagine a player over a full season hitting
.212 with 20 doubles and 10 homers – and 170 RBIs. That’s how weird Hosmer’s performance
was this postseason. He had more RBIs (17) than hits (14). He almost had more
RBIs than total bases (19). His RBI
total is a testament to his teammates, who were on base over and over again –
he had three sacrifice flies during the playoffs, equaling his amount for the
entire regular season – and then made Hosmer look good with their brilliance on
the basepaths: Cain scored from first base on a Hosmer single twice in the playoffs.
But it’s also a testament to Hosmer’s performance
with runners on base. I don’t think it was a skill of Hosmer’s – for his career, he’s hit worse with men in
scoring position (.279 BA, .417 SLG) than with the bases empty (.294 and .448).
But this postseason, for whatever reason, he concentrated his meager production
into those moments when it would pay off the most. Twelve of his 14 hits came
with runners on base; 10 of them drove in at least one run.
And in the ninth inning of Game 5, as in the 12th
inning of the Wild Card game, with the Royals again down to their final at-bat,
with Hosmer again representing the tying run…he again drilled a fastball the
other way over the outfielder’s head. It was a double this time instead of a
triple, which set up…
- Salvador Perez at the plate, Hosmer leading off
third: a flashback to Game 7 of the World Series last year, Alex Gordon batting
in the ninth inning, hightailing it to third base when his line drive was
misplayed by two outfielders, and…stopping. It was the right call. A good throw
would have nailed him. A bad throw
probably would have nailed him. But still, a year of regret had passed, regret
enabled by the hindsight that comes from knowing what Perez did next. Maybe
Brandon Crawford would have panicked and his throw would have sailed over
Buster Posey. Maybe it would have bounced and Posey would have had trouble
getting a handle on it. Maybe Crawford’s throw would have pulled Posey away
from home plate, and there would have been a desperate foot race between him
and Gordon, making for one of the most dramatic moments in baseball history.
Probably not. But we’ll never know. All we know is
what Perez did, which makes it tempting to second-guess. We’ll probably also
never know if the memory of that moment, buried deep inside Hosmer’s
subconscious, triggered the synapses in his brain that sent the electrical
signal to his legs to run like your life
depends upon it the instant David Wright committed to first base.
I’ve seen it written in places that Hosmer got
lucky, that even a decent throw by Duda gets him at the plate, even that it was
a bad baseball decision. I could not disagree more. The situation was very
nearly the same as last year – if he holds, the Royals are down a run with a
man on third and two out, meaning the break-even point for trying is no higher
than 30%. But the odds of success this time were much higher. I put the odds that Gordon would have been safe last
year at no higher than about 15%, while I’d put the odds that Hosmer would be
safe the moment he committed to home at around 40%, perhaps even higher.
Here are some notable differences:
1) While Crawford’s throw would have been much
longer – somewhere around 200 feet – it was only one throw. The Mets had to
make two throws – Wright’s throw was (I’m approximating) about 95 feet across
the diamond, and then Duda’s throw home was about 85 feet. Factor in the time
it took for Duda to catch the ball, transfer the ball to his throwing arm, wind
up and throw home, there’s no question the Wright-to-Duda-to-D’Arnaud relay
would take longer than the direct line between Crawford and Posey.
2) Hosmer had a large lead off third base, and
because the ball was hit well to Wright’s left, Hosmer didn’t instinctively
retreat to the bag as Wright gloved it. He then did a phenomenal job of
anticipating the perfect moment to take off for home – as soon as Wright made perfunctory
glance back towards him and then looked to first base. By the time Wright let
go of the ball, Hosmer was 15-20 feet past third base and accelerating quickly.
By contrast, Crawford had the ball in his glove a split second before Gordon
touched third base. Even if Gordon had been waved home by Mike Jirschele and
never broken stride, he’s probably not more than 5-10 feet past third. True, he
was already at full speed and Hosmer wasn’t, but then Hosmer wasn’t worn down
from running 270 feet at top speed. The time it would take from the time Wright
let go of the ball until Hosmer touched home plate was, I’m pretty certain,
less than the time it would take from Crawford letting go of the ball and
Gordon touching home.
3) Crawford has a really, really good arm – he somehow
unseated Andrelton Simmons as the NL Gold Glove winner this year, which is a
little silly, but it speaks to how well his defense is considered. Wright, on
the other hand, has a weak arm at this point in his career. Not just that, but
he tends to throw sidearm, as he did on this play – and his sidearm motion made
it easier for Hosmer to time it and start running for home even before Wright
had let go of the ball. Duda’s arm is nothing special for a first baseman, even
before talking about his accuracy or lack thereof.
4) This last point, I think, is the one that doesn’t
get talked about enough: Crawford was throwing from left-center field, meaning
Posey could wait for the throw while being turned almost all the way towards
Gordon hurtling from third base. D’Arnaud, by contrast, had to face first base,
not only meaning that he couldn’t see where Hosmer was out of the corner of his
eye, but that after catching the ball, he would have to turn his body and swipe
his glove – again, without knowing where Hosmer was exactly. Four years ago, before
the rules changed, D’Arnaud could have set up just behind the plate, using his
foot to block Hosmer and allowing him to catch the ball and drop his glove
straight down. But now that catchers aren’t allowed to block the plate, it adds
a precious split second to the time it takes to get a tag down on a ball coming
from the right side of the field.
With all that, a perfect throw from Duda – one that
leads D’Arnaud to his left slightly and into the runner’s path – gets Hosmer
easily. A decent throw – one that hits D’Arnaud’s glove right at eye level –
and safe or out, the play is almost certainly going to review. The odds still
favored the Mets at the moment Wright threw the ball. But, as it did last year,
the odds would have favored the Mets had Hosmer held anyway. This time, the
Royals went for it. And that made all the difference.
- Bottom of the ninth, tie game: Kelvin Herrera
returns for a third inning of work. Flashback to the fourth inning of Game 7 of
last year’s World Series, when Jeremy Guthrie came out to pitch.
You might remember after Game 7 that my greatest
lament was that Ned Yost, knowing that there was no tomorrow, and with the
greatest bullpen trio in major league history having two full days of rest, let
Jeremy Guthrie start the fourth. He would go to Herrera anyway later in the inning,
after the Giants had men on first and third with only one out, and Michael
Morse fisted a blooper to right field with two strikes to score the last run of
the season. Herrera would go 2.2 innings, Wade Davis two, and Greg Holland one.
Afterwards, I wondered why, if Yost was prepared to go to Herrera in the fourth
inning anyway, he wasn’t prepared to start the inning with Herrera. If Herrera
could get eight outs, he could have gotten nine. I also wondered why, in the
final game of the season, on four days
of rest – Holland hadn’t pitched since Game 3 – Yost wouldn’t have planned for
Holland to throw two innings.
While the Royals have never addressed this
directly, we may have gotten an answer to that last question. Given that we now
know that Holland had a partial tear in his UCL dating back to August of 2014,
it’s possible that the Royals simply weren’t comfortable with him throwing two
innings, particularly since as the last pitcher in the chain, if he had tired
and gotten into trouble in his second inning, his backup would have been Jason
Frasor or someone of that ilk.
But that still left the possibility of getting
three innings from Herrera. Last year, Yost only committed to 2.2. This year,
even though Herrera was pitching on just one day’s rest, and even though there
were potentially two more games to go (albeit after a day of rest), Yost stuck
with Herrera for nine outs. It only took Herrera nine batters (a single was
erased by a double play) and 33 pitches to do so. It certainly helped that
Herrera had just struck out the 1-2-3 batters in the Mets’ lineup in order in
the eighth, and that Juan Lagares had replaced an ailing Yoenis Cespedes to
lead off the ninth. But still: in the final game of last season, Yost only
trusted Herrera to get eight outs, and the Royals lost. This year, he trusted
Herrera to get nine outs, and the Royals won.
- Luke Hochevar takes the mound to start the bottom
of the tenth: a flash back to Brandon Finnegan starting the tenth inning of the
Wild Card game. Of course.
Hochevar has to rank towards the very top of the
list of players who most appreciates what the Royals accomplished this season.
Eight years after he was drafted with the #1 overall pick in 2006, after five
of the worst years as a starting pitcher (a 5.45 ERA and a 78 ERA+ in 127
starts from 2008 to 2012), he had finally found success as a set-up man in
2013, with a 1.92 ERA in 70 innings, when his UCL blew out just in time to miss
the Royals’ first postseason in 29 years. It was probably the most success he
would ever have as a professional, and it occurred in a season in which he was
unable to make a contribution.
And then this year, after a slow and erratic start
in his return from Tommy John surgery, he threw 10.2 scoreless innings in the
playoffs. He got out of a bases-loaded, one-out jam in the sixth inning of ALCS
Game 2, setting the stage for the Royals to come back against David Price an
inning later. With the tying run at the plate, he got the final out of the
fifth inning in relief of Chris Young in Game 4, earning him the win. And now,
he would throw two scoreless innings – like Finnegan, he pitched a perfect
tenth, then gave up a harmless baserunner with two outs before closing the door
in the 11th – in the final game of the World Series. He would end up with the
most coveted win of the season: the last one.
- Salvador Perez, leading off the 12th: flashback
to his walk-off single in the Wild Card game. This time, he had to start the
rally instead of end it, and this time he cracked an opposite-field blooper
that just stayed inside the right field foul line instead of pulling a hard
ground ball just inside the left field foul line. But he ended this amazing
two-year playoff run the way he began it: with a 12th-inning single that
changed everything.
Perez, sadly if wisely, would get pulled from the
game for a pinch-runner, keeping him from catching the final out in a
postseason in which he was behind the dish for all but six innings. As
compensation, he would be awarded the World Series MVP award. Seems like a fair
trade.
- Perez departs for a pinch-runner as Jarrod Dyson
hops out of the dugout: flashback to Dyson pinch-running for Josh Willingham in
the ninth inning of the Wild Card game. That night, Dyson was bunted over to
second base because closer Sean Doolittle is left-handed and had a clear view
of him at first base. In Game 5, with Addison Reed, a right-hander, on the
mound, Dyson didn’t waste any time messing around: he stole second base on Reed’s
2-0 pitch to Alex Gordon, and was safe easily. The only thing that was missing
was his vroom-vroom move.
Gordon would then hit a groundball to the right
side, serving the same purpose as a bunt to put Dyson at third base with one
out, the same position he found himself in during the Wild Card game, bringing
up…
- Christian Colon, batting with a man on third and
one out in the 12th inning: flashback to, well, Christian Colon batting with a
man on third and one out in the 12th inning of the Wild Card game.
I don’t know what Colon is going to become. He has
a career batting line of .303/.361/.382 in the major leagues, albeit in just
168 plate appearances. He has a career line in Triple-A of .289/.350/.394, and
a .268/.339/.360 line in Double-A – he’s gotten incrementally better as he’s
moved up the chain. I do think he could become a poor man’s Placido Polanco, a
good defensive second baseman who makes enough contact to hit .280 in the
majors and be a valuable starter for the next five years. I don’t think he will
ever end up with as much success as Chris Sale, the man the Royals almost
drafted instead with the #4 pick in 2010, or as much success as Matt Harvey,
perhaps the man the Royals should
have drafted instead.
But I do know that none of that matters now. I know
that because Colon could literally not have a better postseason record than he
does. In his first postseason appearance, pinch-hitting for Terrence Gore in
the tenth inning of the Wild Card game, he was asked to put down a sacrifice
bunt, and he did so successfully. In his next plate appearance, batting in the
12th inning with the tying run at third base and one out, he chopped a single
to tie the game, stole second base, and scored the walk-off run on Perez’s
single.
He would not bat again in the postseason until this
moment, and only because the Royals were playing under NL rules – Colon was
pinch-hitting for Hochevar. He had not even appeared in a playoff game in 2015
yet, the last person on the roster to make an appearance – even Raul Mondesi
(!) had played before him. Once again, he batted in a situation that called for
contact. Once again, he came through, this time with two strikes, this time a
no-doubt line drive, this time to give the Royals the lead, this time to put
the Royals three outs away from nirvana.
They would get there 15 minutes later, after a
one-run lead had become a five-run lead, after Wade Davis was given the easiest
and most rewarding job of his life. The ending ensured that this would be one
of the most memorable, magical games in Royals history. The drama that began in
September, 2014 ended in November, 2015, and all the ups and downs along the
way, even the heartbreaking finale to Act I, all made sense in the end. Even
the failures served their purpose. All’s well that ends well, and few things in
baseball history have ended as well as this season did.
That’s another legacy of the 2015 Royals - they didn’t
just win it all, they won it all in a way that gave us something even better
than a dogpile at the end: closure.
