How the Royals lost for the first time in the 2014 playoffs, and what comes next
KANSAS CITY, Mo. – For nearly a month, the Kansas City Royals forgot what the solemnity of a losing clubhouse felt like. No music straining through the speakers. No boisterous ceremony tabbing the player of the game. No smoke machine coughing out thick clouds of vapor. Just quiet and reflection and stunted voices trying to remind the Chicken Littles in the room that one loss does not a crisis make.
The Royals lost Tuesday. They lost bad, 7-1 in Game 1 of the World Series to the San Francisco Giants. They lost with their best starting pitcher, James Shields, allowing three runs in the first and five over three innings while watching his ERA this postseason balloon to a most inconvenient 7.11. They lost in front of a crowd of 40,459 at Kauffman Stadium that deflated following that first inning and, despite efforts to the contrary, never found any of the energy that permeated in four previous home playoff games. They lost to Madison Bumgarner, a pitcher who better embodies the Big Game nickname affixed in front of Shields' first name.
That the Royals lost is news because they hadn't in 23 days, dating back to the regular season, back before they carried themselves with the sort of invincibility of a group that marauded through the American League playoffs. The regular-season Royals backdoored themselves into the playoffs. The postseason Royals bullied their way to the World Series with a record eight straight wins. No matter the percentages or the likelihood of regression, to see the October Royals revert to April-through-September form in a game of great magnitude carried an air of unfamiliarity. Never mind the Giants extending their own postseason surge to 16 wins in 18 games. The Royals were tempting perfection.
[World Series: Five key moments from Giants' 7-1 win over Royals]
"We didn't expect to come in here and sweep the San Francisco Giants," Royals manager Ned Yost said. "We knew that this was a series that was going to go deep. We know how tough they are."
Inside the Royals' clubhouse, the ever-nebulous character trait – toughness – matters more than most. Three times in his postgame exegesis Shields repeated the same phrase: "We have a lot of character in this clubhouse," which means a lot of toughness, which means a lot of resiliency, which means a lot of grit, which, at its essence, means the ability to perform at crucial times, which the Royals most certainly did not in Game 1.
The tack-sharp Royals dulled their edge all night, from Shields surrendering a two-run Hunter Pence home run in the first to replacement Danny Duffy walking in a run to Nori Aoki's awful route on a run-scoring Joe Panik triple to a pair of wild pitches to Mike Moustakas booting a ground ball. Over and over it happened, the team that in the first three rounds got all the breaks breaking.
Temporarily, they promise, because the game inures players to losses, even blowouts in the playoffs, and the Royals chuckled at the idea of failing to show up in Game 2 because they spit the bit in Game 1. It is true. The world did not end when the Royals finished a game without listening to "We Ready" on loop. Armageddon is not Bumgarner loading the bases in the third inning and escaping unscathed on the way to another brilliant World Series start in a career full of them.
"The only difference," Shields opined, "is we faced a good pitcher."
The Giants, on the other hand, did not. Shields' fastball missed all over the place in the first inning, including the plate-bisecting, belt-high, come-on-and-hit-me-super-far cookie he gifted Pence. Nor the double he allowed Pence three innings later, the RBI single from Michael Morse or any of the ugly moments in a Shields postseason teeming with them.
[Photos: Best of World Series Game 1 - Giants at Royals]
Now, Shields could have used the kidney stone he passed this week as an excuse for his troubles, and every man who has birthed a rock would nod in agreement, but he chose not to go there. Generating excuses did nobody any good, because, Shields said plainly, "I didn't do my job."
No he didn't. Three innings, seven hits, five runs, one strikeout. It was Shields' shortest outing of the year by a full two innings, a workhorse come up lame at the most inopportune time. His stuff was flat, his command nonexistent, and whether it was because of the residual pain or the moment or whatever brings out the pun doctors to riff on Shields' nickname – Big Lame James or Big Shame James or, as Tim Kawakami said rather brilliantly, Three Frame James – he stunk when the Royals needed otherwise.
"Everyone has days like that," Duffy said. "Trust me, I've had plenty in my career. He's going to go back out there. We're going to give him another chance to take the ball. And you know what he's going to do with it next time."
Considering what Shields has done so far, or hasn't done, Duffy and his teammates may be alone in that assessment. The sentiment reflected the Royals' postgame tenor.
"You don't want to go down 2-0 heading to San Francisco," first baseman Eric Hosmer said.
"Even if that happens," left fielder Alex Gordon said, "the series isn't over."
The Royals stand at that very intersection heading into Game 2, keenly aware that losing is not an option and yet unwilling to acknowledge the trouble a loss would create. It is not unprecedented for a team to lose the first two games of the World Series at home and win the championship. The last Kansas City Royals team to make the playoffs, in 1985, did just that.
After Tuesday's game, near the home-plate exit at Kauffman Stadium, the star of that team slinked toward the door, ran into a friend and blurted out a question.
"What the hell happened out there?" George Brett asked.
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The answer was simple. Baseball happened. Reality happened. Bumgarner is really good, and Shields right now isn't, and the Giants put up crooked numbers in three innings, and all the Royals could muster was a Salvador Perez solo home run, which snapped Bumgarner's World Series scoreless streak at 22 2/3 innings.
And you know what? The Royals are going to wake up Wednesday morning. They're going to hit Starbucks, grab an espresso. They're going to drive to the stadium, hang out with 40,000 of their closest friends. And then they're going to try to start a new winning streak. It's not time to panic, not with Yordano Ventura primed to hit 100 on the gun, not with Kelvin Herrera and Wade Davis and Greg Holland rested, not with everything the Royals spent the past 23 days showing off still there.
This was not the high of a booze-spraying celebration, the euphoria of another win, the things to which they'd grown accustomed. Those Royals were spoiled. These Royals now know better, know that with perfection out of the way comes their truest challenge yet: keeping that sky from actually falling.
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