Not too early for 3-0 Royals to take pride in fast start

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Inside the clubhouse that housed the team still seeking its first victory in the 2015 season, Chicago White Sox center fielder Adam Eaton spoke for the winless and small-sample advocates everywhere when he intoned: "Who gives a crap about the first three games?" And he was right. To get worked up over 1.85 percent of the season is like jamming to the opening riff of "Under Pressure" only to keep listening and realize it's "Ice Ice Baby."

Forgive the Kansas City Royals, then, for their tack following Thursday afternoon's 4-1 victory over Chicago, which pushed the defending American League champions to 3-0 while the overhauled White Sox, of the $150 million in spending and big-ticket trades, bore the wounds of a good beating. The Royals, it turns out, do give a crap about these three games, which count every bit as much as the ones in September do, even if the standings today mean nothing.

The crap they give has more to do with the confirmation of what they believe about themselves than what three wins in early April may or may not say. After last October, in which Kansas City ran roughshod over the AL and pushed eventual champion San Francisco to the edge of defeat in Game 7, the rap on the Royals sounded the same: It was a timely run, a great month, a fluke, essentially, and that the strong AL Central this season would not let happen again.

And it may yet be that, because the next 159 say plenty more than the first three, but damn if the Royals didn't do a wonderful imitation of their October selves against the White Sox on Thursday, much as they had Wednesday and Monday before. The peerless fielding and surprising power and adept baserunning and stellar starting pitching and dominant bullpen. Even with James Shields and Billy Butler and Nori Aoki gone, it all looked terribly familiar.

"It's the same team in terms of their athletic ability and what they can do on the field," Royals manager Ned Yost said. "It's a totally different team in terms of their swagger, their confidence, their ability to understand who they are and play winning baseball."

Measuring any tangible effect of such intangibles is impossible, which is why any swelling of expectations for the Royals warrants a good dose of anti-inflammatories. Much as the Royals were able to talk a good game after three of them, they'd be invoking October just the same had the White Sox swept the first three instead. The lessons would be about perseverance instead of the pixie dust of winning. This route is preferred, of course, and the heart does indeed dovetail with what we've come to know of Kansas City.

Like the defense. Twice center fielder Lorenzo Cain took on the chain-link fence in center field, and twice he escaped with the ball and without injury. His two running catches were classic Cain, the stuff of which Gold Gloves are made, and complementing them with a diving stop from third baseman Mike Moustakas and a Jose Abreu hot shot picked at second by Omar Infante epitomized the peerlessness of the Royals in the field.

Less certain is the starting pitching, particularly with Shields' replacement, Edinson Volquez, coming off the season of his career after showing all the consistency of a politician for his first nine years. Good Volquez showed up Thursday, twirling eight innings of one-run ball in an efficient 95 pitches. Only six times in Volquez's career had he gone at least eight innings. Never had he done so on fewer than 106 pitches. This wasn't exactly the sort of behavior worth expecting again.

Even more dubious is the power display the Royals put on, socking five home runs over three games. New arrival Alex Rios hit one. So did playoff heroes Eric Hosmer and Moustakas and Cain. And on Thursday came Salvador Perez with a two-run shot off White Sox starter John Danks, whom manager Robin Ventura left in for a batter too many after he entered the game 7-0 in 11 starts against Kansas City.

Last season, the Royals didn't homer "until, like, July," Eaton joked. Kansas City actually waited until its eighth game for its first home run in 2014 and needed 15 games to get the five it got this year in three games. And if these really are the 2015 Royals – if they can pair power with a serviceable rotation and a bullpen that adds Luke Hochevar back to the Greg Holland-Wade Davis-Kelvin Herrera monster – then whatever feelings they have about themselves will be entirely warranted.

"It's hard to faze us as a team," Hosmer said. "Everything just slows down for us. We know how good we can be. We know that if we play our game we're a tough team to beat. Other teams have gotten a lot better. We pretty much stayed the same."

And that's a good thing. For so long, the Royals found themselves in a constant state of flux, unable to keep the players worth keeping and surround those worth keeping with ones worth anything. And even though they've got no superstars, no Q ratings that register outside of Kansas City, they do have talent and do have the knowledge of what winning feels like. The former wins ballgames; the latter can't hurt.

Adam Eaton is right: If bad teams can start seasons 3-0 – see: Atlanta and Colorado – then 3-0, one series, a half-week, before injuries and trades and everything else that determines a season, means maybe a smidgen more than squat. And that smidgen is this: Even when "Ice Ice Baby" comes on the radio, it's OK to dance a little.