As Royals continue their flair for the dramatic, past failure becomes their fuel

BALTIMORE – Failure lives inside the Kansas City Royals' clubhouse, the 26th man on a team of 25. It isn't a ghost or goblin; it is a friend. It shows up at the oddest times, too, like in Game 1 of the American League Championship Series, with 47,124 people at Camden Yards screaming until their faces matched their orange shirts. The bases were loaded, and Alex Gordon stood inside the batter's box, and success today meant remembering the disappointment of many yesterdays.

"When the bases are loaded and the crowd is going crazy, I try to treat it like another at-bat," Gordon said. "And as hard as that might be, it seems to work sometimes. I've done a lot of failing. And I've learned from my mistakes."

Gordon cleared the bases with a broken-bat double he willed fair, and when the Royals failed to keep that lead, he pummeled a home run in the 10th inning to give Kansas City one it wouldn't relinquish, and in the afterglow of the Royals' 8-6 extra-innings victory over the Baltimore Orioles that stretched a postseason winning streak to eight games across 29 years, the failures of the past cast not a penumbra but a bright light on the triumph of the present.

It was Gordon, busted first-round pick, sent to Triple-A in 2010, convinced to learn a new position, who one at-bat after taking a 95-mph fastball off the back of his neck took an 87-mph Darren O’Day fastball deep to right field for a go-ahead home run. And it was Mike Moustakas, busted first-round pick, sent to Triple-A for two weeks this season, convinced to hit in the No. 9 hole, who followed with a two-run shot off Brian Matusz, his first off a left-handed pitcher in 2½ months.

And most of all it was the Kansas City Royals, the team that epitomized failure in baseball since its last playoff appearance in 1985, exhibiting the antithesis of it at a time when it's become almost reflexive to expect it.

Three decades of losing does the sort of number on a fan that can be undone only through intense psychological counseling or the sort of postseason the Royals have unleashed in 2014. The Royals have played five games this postseason and won all of them. Four have gone into extra innings, including Friday's game, which found itself tied 5-5 after a ninth inning in which Kansas City loaded the bases with no outs on three straight Zach Britton walks only to fritter away the opportunity with a force play at home and a Billy Butler double-play groundout.

This was so Royals, the sort of futility with which the franchise had become synonymous. The Royals know failure on an intimate level. They married it long ago. The relationship was one-sided. Kansas City tried to get rid of it, and it refused to leave, poisoning a generation and seeping into the circulatory system of the organization. Losing is endemic like that.

Whatever macro-level troubles existed manifested themselves in the micro, too. Gordon played his way back into the minor leagues, as did Billy Butler, his partner-in-tenure as the longest survivor of the Royals. They stayed for this moment, unsure whether it would come, because the organization had yet to use its history as fuel for its future.

Doing so meant an overhaul, not just at the top with general manager Dayton Moore but in how the Royals operated, like a team that deserved to respect itself instead of walking around with paltry amateur-talent budgets and other telltale signs of mismanagement. Moore stocked up on athletes, moving Gordon from third base to left field, trading for Lorenzo Cain and Nori Aoki, drafting Jarrod Dyson in the 50th round. They patrol the monstrous outfield at Kauffman Stadium as though GPS-guided and embody the Royals' pitch-and-catch culture.

This meant they wouldn't hit home runs, and the 2014 Royals became the first team since the 1988 Dodgers to earn a postseason berth with fewer than 100 home runs. Kansas City hit 95 in 6,058 plate appearances during the regular season, one every 63.8 times up to the plate. Including Gordon, Moustakas and Alcides Escobar's shot that staked the Royals a 1-0 lead in Game 1, the Royals now have seven in 219 postseason plate appearances, one every 31.3, a power surge of which the Royals seemed incapable.

"Everybody's doubting our power, but last time I checked in the postseason we've been hitting a lot of bombs," Dyson said. "We don't have to use our speed."

The Royals are bringing some boom to complement Dyson's zoom, some thunder to accentuate the lightning bolt shaved into the side of his head. They see themselves more as a victim of Kauffman Stadium, a home stadium that discourages home runs, than an indictment on their bats. "When we go on the road and play in good hitters' parks like here, we've got guys who can leave the yard," Eric Hosmer said, and he's correct: The Royals' on-base-plus-slugging this season ranks eighth in baseball on the road; at home, they were 25th.

The Royals don't abhor their stadium, or curse it, or ask for the fences to be brought in. They adjust, a tenet that works in plenty of other scenarios.

James Shields blows a 5-1 advantage? Deal with it. The bases-loaded mess? Whatever. Wade Davis (failed starter) and Kelvin Herrera (failed starter) going beyond their routine to pitch two innings apiece? Of course they would. The taste of Champagne is too recent to let thoughts of the alternative congregate on their palate.

For all of his teammates' perseverance, Moustakas perhaps best embodied Friday and what it meant. Toward the end of May, when the Royals sent him off to Triple-A Omaha, Moustakas was hitting .152/.223/.320. He returned, never hit higher than fifth and found himself eventually at the bottom of the lineup, an odd place for a power hitter on a team without any. He issued not a word of complaint, and now he’s got three postseason home runs, tied for the most this October.

"Because I realized when I got sent down how much I love playing Major League Baseball and how fun this is," Moustakas said. "Every time my name's in that lineup, I couldn't care less where I'm hitting. As long as I get to go out there and play baseball. Hitting in the nine-hole is working out for me. It's fun. I'm having a great time, actually, down there."

Everyone's having a great time in the Royals' clubhouse, from the Raul Ibanez (failed major leaguer until his 30th birthday) to Brandon Finnegan (failed relief appearance Friday, the worst of the brilliant start to the 21-year-old's career) and beyond. For seven years, since he debuted at the beginning of the 2007 season, Gordon has waited for this moment, for games like these, ones that suit themselves so well to the intensity he brings. The Royals' games have been studies in tension, and every time, Kansas City has found the right performance before its opponent.

"That's baseball," Gordon said. "You fail a lot in baseball, and when you don't…"

When you don't, this happens, this run that has taken a sledgehammer to baseball orthodoxy. It's all just an oxymoron, these past two weeks for the Royals. The productive failures. The powerful Punch-and-Judy hitters. And the greatest oddity, the unlikeliest occurrence, is best saved for last.

The winning Kansas City Royals.