Upstart Royals, Giants take similar roads to Series
Teams are hot, going 16-2 in post-season
A hard-luck American League wild-card team wins a longawaited pennant at home in the late afternoon. The next night, the wild-card San Francisco Giants beat the St. Louis Cardinals with a game-ending hit to clinch a pennant of their own. A four-day layoff follows before the World Series starts in the AL city.
It sounds like 2014. It also sounds precisely like 2002, the last time two wild-card teams met in the World Series. This time the Kansas City Royals represent the AL. Back then, the Angels were the AL champions, and they went on to win a seven-game thriller against the Giants.
The similarities end there. The 2002 World Series was the last before Major League Baseball began testing for performance-enhancing drugs, and it was a slugfest centred on the Giants’ Barry Bonds, who hit four home runs and drew seven intentional walks. Baseball has changed a lot since then.
It is hard to divine any truths from short series, and last year’s champions, the Boston Red Sox, ranked first in the majors in runs scored and slugging percentage. Before we herald the supremacy of small ball, it should be noted that three of the bottom four teams in stolen bases this season — St. Louis, San Francisco and Baltimore — made up three-quarters of the field in the league championship series.
But the success of the Royals, who ranked first in steals, and the Giants does underscore the trend throughout baseball toward lower-scoring games. Only one player on either roster (the Giants’ Buster Posey) had more than 20 homers or 75 runs batted in. Even Posey’s numbers were modest for a star: 22 homers, 89 RBI.
Both teams come in hot, with a combined 16-2 record in the post-season and with roughly the same time off before Game 1 on Tuesday in Kansas City. Both offences have been opportunistic, taking advantage of errors to score critical runs, but both also have used power.
San Francisco went six games without a homer in the playoffs, then ripped three in Game 5 of the National League Championship Series, winning the pennant on a ninth-inning blast by Travis Ishikawa. Kansas City hit four extra-inning homers on its undefeated joy ride through the AL playoffs.
In the end, though, the Royals finished off the Orioles with consecutive 2-1 victories, games more suited to their style. They are conditioned to bunt, no matter how well they are swinging — Lorenzo Cain, the ALCS most valuable player, bunted on his own in the first inning of Game 4 — because the object is simply to get a lead through six innings.
The Giants’ bullpen has allowed seven earned runs in 351/3 innings this post-season; the Royals’ bullpen has had nearly identical numbers, allowing seven earned runs while recording one fewer out. But Kansas City’s late-inning group of Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis and Greg Holland has been nearly unhittable, and ever-present. The three have combined for 23 appearances in eight games, with a 1.05 earned run average.
“Offensively and defensively, we’ve got weapons for lategame situations, especially if it’s a tie game,” the Royals’ Eric Hosmer said after Game 3.
“It seems like lately, all the games we’ve been playing have been like that.”
Ned Yost, the Royals manager, rarely pinch-hits but has two pinch-runners he deploys regularly, Jarrod Dyson and Terrance Gore. Alex Gordon, Dyson and Cain form the lateinning outfield alignment, and both ballparks in this series have plenty of room to roam.
The Giants, who won titles in 2010 and 2012, will try to become the first NL team to win three World Series in a five-year span since the Cardinals in the 1940s. The Giants do not feel like a dynasty, failing to even reach the playoffs in the odd-numbered seasons during their recent stretch of success. But rings are rings, and San Francisco’s presence in the World Series — even though the team squeaked into the post-season as the NL’s second wild card — should not be too surprising.
The Royals, of course, are the party crashers, and not just because of their 29-year gap between post-season appearances. The Oakland Athletics and the Detroit Tigers, with their stables of pitching aces and bold in-season trades, were the favourites at midsummer. Neither won a game in the post-season, while the Royals have not lost.
“Oakland got Jon Lester to put them over the top, and Detroit got David Price to put them over the top,” said Art Stewart, the venerable Royals scout, who has been with the team since 1970.
“They’re all on the sidelines — and here we are.”