Watching the Kansas City Royals, Who Take the Long Way Home

On August 23, the Kansas City Royals were well clear of the pack in the American League Central, keeping a casual eye on a twelve-game lead. That afternoon in Boston, they trailed by two runs entering the ninth, where Red Sox reliever Junichi Tazawa waited, with the bottom of the order due up. When Royals second baseman Omar Infante started the inning by getting thrown out at home trying to stretch a triple into a pointless inside-the-parker, the game seemed deservedly lost. It appeared it might be useful only as a reminder that sloppy nonchalance can curse even runaway division winners.

Then the Royals started hitting. There is really no other way to put it. Backup catcher Drew Butera singled to right. Alcides Escobar sent a base hit mimicking the path of Butera's. Ben Zobrist lined out to short, and then Lorenzo Cain put a grounder between the first and second basemen. The bases were loaded for Eric Hosmer, who reached at a pitch off the plate and flicked it into left, plating two. A Kendrys Morales walk later, Mike Moustakes pulled a fastball to right, doubling in two more runs and giving the Royals an 8-6 lead that would hold as the final score.

That game in August was about as meaningless as any game involving an eventual postseason participant can be, a drowsy obligation on a cloudy New England afternoon between a team in first place and another entrenched in last. It came to mind on Monday, though, as the Royals singled their way out of ruin, scoring five station-to-station runs in the eighth inning to stave off elimination and even their ALDS matchup against the Houston Astros.

The stakes could not have been more different, but the methodology was nearly the same. This is the type of baseball these Royals play, in summer and fall: thrifty, incremental, and sometimes sublime. It calls for greater endurance than the contemporary homer-heavy rally but yields more readily savored results. Watching it is like walking somewhere you usually only drive.

Here's how it went on Monday: the Royals, trailing by one run, had given up two seventh-inning Houston homers, to Colby "Mall Beltran" Rasmus and future MVP Carlos Correa, that ballooned the lead to four. Minute Maid Park shook; the social media team of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who is ordinarily a staunch conservative, boldly tweeted congratulations while the team still had six outs left to get.

Then, in the top of the eighth, the Royals started hitting. Alex Rios singled. Ditto Escobar and Zobrist. Cain singled in the inning's first run, and Hosmer matched him by stretching across the plate as he had that day in Boston and wristing another single to left. Two more runs scored when a double-play ground ball from Morales skipped over Correa's glove, and an Alex Gordon groundout drove in Hosmer and gave the Royals the lead. Five runs in total, all without making a Houston outfielder so much as turn his back. Hosmer's two-run homer in the ninth was only insurance, a thought unfathomable a couple innings prior.

This time of year, analysts and fans alike resume the annual pursuit of the postseason panacea, the that plays in October. The Royals make for handy evidence in conversations concerning this topic, as their unlikely run to the World Series last season featured an immediately and consistently discernable style: gap power, few strikeouts, and aggressive baserunning. Those traits have mostly carried over this season, and so, too, has the tendency among commentators to position the team as corroboration of some small-ball theorem. A.J. Pierzynski, providing analysis during Monday's game for Fox Sports 1, spent much of the climactic half-inning alluding to Kansas City's avoidance of the strikeout as an almost moral investment, the virtue of which would save them in times of trouble.

I don't know if there's anything to the idea that cutting down on Ks and putting balls in play is more advantageous in October than, say, launching 450-foot moonscrapers. I don't much care. I do know that stretches like the half-hour, piecemeal eighth on Monday afternoon are scarce and lovely events, convergences of the game's equally important strains of chance and self-determinism.

Also, they're cool to watch. Those hits laid end to end were more fun, I can say with some certainty, than a grand slam. The end result felt somehow both cumulative and individually distinct, a collectively maintained spell—or a run of luck or a numerical anomaly; these are all the same thing when you are down four runs with the season on the line—that could nevertheless be broken down into its components. There was relief in knowing, during the comeback's early stages, that even if it did not come to fruition, some minor successes had already been banked.

Had the Royals ended up losing on Monday, I think I'd still recall Rios shaking off damn near literal cobwebs to sweep the inning's first hit prettily into left, and Zobrist waiting on a curveball with the wary cool of a deep sea diver before whisking it over second base. Cain and Hosmer's variations on the established theme—elastic arms and bunched muscle, respectively—would have stuck in the memory. And even if Morales' grounder had not scooted into center but settled into the pocket of Correa's glove, breaking the pattern, I'd remember the jolt of the half-second of the ball in play, because there had been a pattern to break to begin with. Passing the baton, to borrow the phrase central to Pierzynski's spiel, may not be much of a strategy, but it makes for a captivating show.

If the Royals win Wednesday night, you'll hear plenty about the effectiveness of their slap-hitting style. If the Astros win, someone will surely step forward to announce that the home run has replaced the inside-out swing as the preferred postseason utensil, probably with some canned sub-contention about the indomitability of youth. Whatever conclusion reigns will almost certainly be bullshit; the primary winner of October continues to be whichever sadistic deity gets a chuckle out of humans scrabbling to find enduring meaning in the flukiest tournament in sports.

So don't watch the Royals for any answer they've supposedly hit upon. Watch them instead for the sheer, slow-building good of it. Watch them for the same reason you stroll someplace on a fine fall day, even when a car would get you there faster.