What a glorious October morning today was. Made all the more glorious by the mighty Kansas City Royals sweeping Baltimore to advance to the ALDS against the evil New York Yankees. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s like the late 70s up in here!<\/p>\n
Two tense games in gloomy, Baltimore weather, which made the Wild Card series feel so much like the 2014 ALCS between these two teams. Poor Baltimore. That\u2019s six-straight losses to the Royals in the postseason, a healthy chunk of their 10 straight postseason losses. The Royals won those six games by a combined eight runs. Three times they won 2–1!!!<\/p>\n
To make things worse, aside from one bad misplay by MJ Melendez Tuesday, the Royals were flashing leather like it was 2014. Both Melendez and Tommy Pham had catches that would have made Lorenzo Cain proud. <\/p>\n
In the Wild Card era, baseball playoffs have consistently been the most volatile of the professional sports postseasons. Home field doesn\u2019t matter as much as in other sports. A couple good pitchers can make up for a huge disparity in total talent. And baseball is just the streakiest of sports. All that is amplified in the current system, which begins with the three-game Wild Card series. One bad inning can doom your entire postseason in a series that short. The Orioles gave up a couple hard singles to Bobby Witt and are now headed to Canc\u00fan or wherever.<\/p>\n
So while it\u2019s not a huge surprise the Royals got the Wild Card win, neither is it ridiculous to think they can keep things going against the #1 seed Yankees. Now, it would be nice if they could score more than a run or two per game. In fact, I\u2019m going to go out on an analytic limb and say the Royals must score more than that if they want any chance to upset the Yanks. Then again, the Royals pitchers were absolute nails in Baltimore. Who\u2019s to say that won\u2019t continue and a few well timed runners and hits will be enough?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s just a lot of fun that the Royals are still alive. Even more fun that they seem to be mimicking the \u201914–15 Royals by playing terrific defense, getting great pitching from the entire staff, and using their speed to create runs. They still feel a little flukey. I doubt they care what outsiders think.<\/p>\n
It is also worth mentioning that this week\u2019s games were far less stressful for me than those games in \u201914–15. I\u2019m sure a lot of that is because I\u2019ve not been as fully into this team as I was those. While I paid a lot more attention to them this year than in the past 3–4 years, my investment still wasn\u2019t nearly what it was before and during that championship run. It would have been a bummer if the Royals had lost both games in Baltimore, or split then lost the deciding game today. I would not have been crushed the way I was after game seven of the 2014 World Series, or would have been if the Royals had lost game four in Houston in 2015. <\/p>\n
In those two playoff runs I was locked in, every pitch a super-stressful moment. I missed parts of a few games because of work, family, and kid sports, but I was still following every moment of those games. This week I was able to often be splitting my attention elsewhere, which surely helped my blood pressure a bit.<\/p>\n
Anyway, it is October, the Royals are heading to New York for a playoff series, and it would not be completely ridiculous if they were still standing in 10 days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What a glorious October morning today was. Made all the more glorious by the mighty Kansas City Royals sweeping Baltimore to advance to the ALDS against the evil New York Yankees. It\u2019s like the late 70s up in here! Two tense games in gloomy, Baltimore weather, which made the Wild Card series feel so much like the 2014 ALCS between these two teams. Poor Baltimore. That\u2019s six-straight losses to the Royals in the postseason, a healthy chunk of their 10 straight postseason losses. The Royals won those six games by a combined eight runs. Three times they won 2–1!!! To make things worse, aside from one bad misplay by MJ Melendez Tuesday, the Royals were flashing leather like it was 2014. Both Melendez and Tommy Pham had catches that would have made Lorenzo Cain proud. In the Wild Card era, baseball playoffs have consistently been the most volatile of the professional sports postseasons. Home field doesn\u2019t matter as much as in other sports. A couple good pitchers can make up for a huge disparity in total talent. And baseball is just the streakiest of sports. All that is amplified in the current system, which begins with the three-game Wild Card series. One bad inning can doom your entire postseason in a series that short. The Orioles gave up a couple hard singles to Bobby Witt and are now headed to Canc\u00fan or wherever. So while it\u2019s not a huge surprise the Royals got the Wild Card win, neither is it ridiculous to think they can keep things going against the #1 seed Yankees. Now, it would be nice if they could score more than a run or two per game. In fact, I\u2019m going to go out on an analytic limb and say the Royals must score more than that if they want any chance to upset the Yanks. Then again, the Royals pitchers were absolute nails in Baltimore. Who\u2019s to say that won\u2019t continue and a few well timed runners and hits will be enough? It\u2019s just a lot of fun that the Royals are still alive. Even more fun that they seem to be mimicking the \u201914–15 Royals by playing terrific defense, getting great pitching from the entire staff, and using their speed to create runs. They still feel a little flukey. I doubt they care what outsiders think. It is also worth mentioning that this week\u2019s games were far less stressful for me than those games in \u201914–15. I\u2019m sure a lot of that is because I\u2019ve not been as fully into this team as I was those. While I paid a lot more attention to them this year than in the past 3–4 years, my investment still wasn\u2019t nearly what it was before and during that championship run. It would have been a bummer if the Royals had lost both games in Baltimore, or split then lost the deciding game today. I would not have been crushed the way I was after game seven of the 2014 World Series, or would have been if the Royals had lost game four in Houston in 2015. In those two playoff runs I was locked in, every pitch a super-stressful moment. I missed parts of a few games because of work, family, and kid sports, but I was still following every moment of those games. This week I was able to often be splitting my attention elsewhere, which surely helped my blood pressure a bit. Anyway, it is October, the Royals are heading to New York for a playoff series, and it would not be completely ridiculous if they were still standing in 10 days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[20,21],"class_list":["post-15769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-baseball","tag-kansas-city-royals"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15769"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15769\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15770,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15769\/revisions\/15770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}