Bright lights, small city: Royals return to relevance with sweep of big-market Angels
KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Kauffman Stadium sits hard by Interstate 70, the highway that serves as the vena cava for flyover country. Ten years ago, when the Kansas City Royals were in the midst of another 100-loss season, a bullet fired from I-70 entered the bus taking the Cleveland Indians away from a midweek sweep of the Royals. It struck a rookie pitcher named Kyle Denney in the leg. He was not seriously injured. As a part of rookie hazing, he was wearing a USC cheerleader getup, and trainers believed the long, white boots saved him from more than a grazing. Police never found the shooter.
In nearly two decades prior, and the decade since, cars and trucks have driven past the stadium without giving it an ounce of thought, similar to the regard with which all of baseball treated the Royals. They were easy to ignore. Even if Kauffman Stadium was one of baseball's great jewels, the on-field product encouraged a quick glance, followed by a firm push on the gas pedal.
At 8:49 p.m. CT on Sunday, as traffic buzzed by at its usual languid weekend pace, a big rig of unknown origin or destination, headed eastbound, reached the point of I-70 where the stadium opens up to the road. Its driver laid on the horn. Fans inside the stadium clapped and cheered, because with one toot, the driver captured everything a giddy crowd of 40,657 was feeling: whether it's via a long honk or a live video broadcast nationwide to a gobsmacked audience wondering who exactly these Kansas City Royals are and how exactly they are thumping the Los Angeles Angels again, this is a team worth recognizing.
And so this night went, wondrous for a Royals franchise that exulted for the third time in 10 days after 29 years of wretched baseball, miserable for an Angels team that finished the regular season with the best record in baseball, 98 victories and aspirations to win the World Series. Nights such as these, of course, are what make playoff baseball so wonderful: not just the Royals wrecking the Angels' season with an 8-3 victory that finished an American League Division Series sweep but doing so in such ignominious fashion, with every injury finding a corresponding insult.
There was the evening of Angels starter C.J. Wilson, their $77.5 million free agent, which ended before the first inning, with three runs in, two outs on the scoreboard and one lonely walk from the pitcher's mound to the dugout. Even worse was the series of Josh Hamilton, another of their pricey free agents, ending with a slash line of .000/.000/.000. He's due $89 million over the next three seasons. And with Mike Trout and Albert Pujols contributing little beyond solo home runs Sunday, the half-billion-dollar core of the Angels' lineup came up empty time after time.
Between the Angels and the Detroit Tigers, Sunday marked the reckoning for two high-payroll, star-studded AL teams ousted by upstarts who will take four-day breaks before kicking off Game 1 of the AL Championship Series at Camden Yards in Baltimore.
"We're not a big-market team," Royals outfielder Jarrod Dyson said. "Detroit: big-market team. Anaheim: big-market team. We just go out there and play our game. It's all about who steps up in the playoffs. It ain't about salary and all that. That don't play a factor over here in our clubhouse."
Dyson, the Royals' speedy fourth outfielder with ZOOM shaved into the right side of his head, danced and cackled amid another party inside the Royals' clubhouse. It wasn't quite the bash of the come-from-behind wild-card victory over Oakland that got the Royals into the ALDS, nor the unburdening of the win that clinched the wild card and Kansas City's first playoff berth since winning the World Series in 1985. This was the Royals' way of saying they expect more.
Which, considering how Game 3 unfolded Sunday, seems like an eminently reasonable expectation. Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas, the corner infielders expected to stock the middle of the lineup for at least a half decade, each hit their second home runs of the series. Center fielder Lorenzo Cain stole a pair of hits on back-to-back plays, the sort of glovework that warrants gilding. Best of all – and by best, this could fall in the annals of best thing ever, not just limited to the Royals or baseball but, like, human existence – Billy Butler stole a base.
Butler, one must understand, is a large human being. He endorses his own barbecue sauce. His nickname is Country Breakfast, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense and still manages to fit him perfectly. He does not run so much as plod. Butler last stole a base July 5, 2012. The Royals led 5-1 in Game 3 when on an 0-1 count, with the slow-to-the-plate Hector Santiago on the mound and Pujols not holding Butler on, he locked eyes with first-base coach Rusty Kuntz.
"Rusty looked over at me, and he said, 'You think you can get him?' " Butler said. "And I said, 'Oh, yeah.' "
For anyone wondering the level of the confidence with which the Royals were playing after scratching out extra-innings wins in their first three playoff games this season, the answer is: Confident enough that Billy Butler considered stealing second base a no-brainer.
"No one expected him to go," Dyson said. "He surprised everyone. Me especially. He surprised me. He surprised the crowd. He definitely surprised our dugout. I guess he got a little jealous of everyone stealing bases and he didn't have one."
The indignities piled up for the Angels, the tenor set in the first inning when Alex Gordon cleared the bases with the double that ran Wilson from the game, and ceasing to relent until Greg Holland struck out Trout swinging for the series' final out. Over four days, the Angels managed to render moot six months of success, to fritter away a third straight MVP-caliber season from Trout, to further close a window of success that hinges increasingly on aging, fragile players.
"It doesn't really matter what your record is during the season," Wilson said. "It doesn't matter at all. Because any team can win on a given day if they play better, and that's what happened. We got outplayed.
"It's bizarre," Wilson continued. "Nobody expected this in spring training, that we'd fail to get through the first round. We all felt like we had a really good World Series-type team."
Regular-season success can be a false idol, the sort of red herring that tricks teams into believing the correlation with October triumph is stronger than it really is. It takes so little to unravel. Detroit lost back-to-back games because of a conflagrant bullpen. In the regular season, that's a little more than 1 percent of the schedule; in the postseason, that's two-thirds of the way to a ticket home.
The baseball playoffs thrive on this chaos, on reducing a long season to a complete crapshoot. It makes for gonzo games, for increased scrutiny, for memorable stories. For Hosmer, the breakout performer of the postseason, telling tales about how every day 42-year-old Raul Ibanez goes to the indoor batting cage with the Royals' young core, the one that came up through the minor leagues and won championships there, and offers tips and tricks. For Hamilton, now 33, coming off an injury-riddled year, considering his future and positing: "Who knows? What do you think, I'm a fortune teller? All I can do is prepare every offseason ready to roll. That's what I do every offseason. I wish I could tell you I was going to go .330 with 130 and 40 every year, but it's just go out there and play day in and day out. You don't know. I'm not going to do anything different this offseason."
That was the contrast of winners and losers, of stories joyous and reflective, of clubhouses soaked and somber. Of a stadium that looked to burst at the seams, because the Royals – their Royals – were doing the unimaginable. And of a truck headed somewhere, anywhere, with a driver, maybe a guy, maybe a lady, paying homage to a team about which there are no longer any questions. The Royals are here, clear as a honk in the night.
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