ALCS Game One: The Royals Power Up
The story lines have been the same all week. The Orioles hit home runs and the Royals steal bases. Both teams have deep, lock-down bullpens. One manager is sly as a fox and the other is a tactical error waiting to happen. That pretty much covers it.
Actually, one other notable theme crept in: According to FanGraphs odds, the Royals came in with a 63 percent chance of winning the ALCS. Meanwhile, the betting line in Las Vegas favored the Orioles. Baltimore reliever Darren O’Day had a great take on the contradiction.
“My wife told me something about our odds to win the World Series,” O’Day said prior to the game. “But the four teams who had the best odds [coming into the playoffs] are now at home, so I don’t know that the odds mean much.”
Odds were that tonight’s game wouldn’t go as scripted – it seems they rarely do in the postseason – and to say it didn’t would be stating the obvious. Any script it may have followed was implausible. This was an unpredictable baseball game, which lends credence to O’Day’s words.
Another thing the Baltimore sidewinder said about the series stands out, and it ended up being irony in its highest form.
“Juxtaposed are the speed and the power,” said O’Day. “It will be exciting to see how we control the running game and how they keep our guys in the park. Two different styles.”
The Royals adapted their opponent’s style and won – the final was 8-6 in 10 innings – not because of their running game, but because the Orioles couldn’t keep them in the park. That didn’t fit the supposed story line, but it was less surprising than one might think. The Kansas City lineup is by no means power-packed, but Camden Yards isn’t Kauffman Stadium. It’s a veritable launching pad.
“People say they’re not a home-run-hitting team, but that’s because they play in a huge ballpark,” said Orioles first baseman Steve Pearce. “We probably wouldn’t be a huge home-run-hitting team if we played there either. They’re fast, but they can also play a little bit. They can hit.”
Hit they did. In the top of the third, Alcides Escobar homered. Later in the inning, Alex Gordon cleared the bases with a double. In the 10th, Gordon took O’Day out of the yard to give the Royals the lead. Three batters later, Mike Moustakas went deep as well.
“This is a park that’s a lot more conducive to hitting home runs than our ballpark is,” Kansas City manager Ned Yost said after the game. “If you put our club in this ballpark, we’d hit a lot more home runs than we ended up hitting. It showed tonight.”
Buck Showalter was also asked about Kansas City’s power surge, and likewise offered little sign of surprise. He did show some matter-of-fact disappointment regarding the outcome, as well as appreciation for great theater.
“They’ve been hitting home runs lately,” said the Orioles skipper. “It is what it is. It was a good ballgame, except the Orioles didn’t win. It was entertaining.”
David Laurila grew up in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and now writes about baseball from his home in Cambridge, Mass. He authored the Prospectus Q&A series at Baseball Prospectus from December 2006-May 2011 before being claimed off waivers by FanGraphs. He can be followed on Twitter @DavidLaurilaQA.
Congratulations to Park EfX: finally acknowledged in the Show of Shows.
I remember a presser from couple of years back, where a reporter asked the Commissioner’s Office — really, the owners’ CEO & rep — what if anything would handicap the added wild-card teams against the sky-falling awfulness of the “inevitable” WC-vs-WC World Series; & the MLB spokesman responded essentially that 1) it was misleading to use the word “inevitable”, and 2) they’d been assured by the squints that such would be at most a “once in a thousand years event”.
Coming up: San Francisco G’nats versus Kansas Citroyals …
I think you mean 63% for the Royals chances of winning. Pretty big difference when it comes to making odds.
Corrected to match the link. Classic 1:00 a.m. typo. Thanks for the heads up.
Gordon’s early hit was a triple; the most dying quail triple I’ve ever seen, but, there it went! (I was a little surprised how far off the line Markakis was playing).
Was scored a double with an error on Scope missing the throw in.
I mean Schoop. Well, better than mispronouncing his name.
According to what I heard from 6 different media ‘presenters’ last night, it’s “Schoop” as in ‘scope’. I could rather accept either ‘shuhp’ or ‘shahp’, each being short vowel sounds common in German surnames or American-ized surnames derived from a German surnames, but ‘scope’ I don’t get.
He’s from Curaçao. It’s a Dutch name.
Perhaps that’s because it’s not German. Schoop is from Curacao, so I presume the origin of his name is Dutch. (In Dutch any double vowel is “long” and the sch is like putting s before the clearing-your-throat-ch in loch, which of course is also in German, so for American speakers “scope” is probably as close as you can expect.)
Not exactly a good example of power hitting either way since it was routine fly distance off a broken bat.
The game really hinged on two defensive plays. One, Escobar came out of nowhere to keep Nick Hundley’s grounder in the second on the infield, thereby saving a run. And two, Pearce couldn’t come up with JJ Hardy’s throw and that loaded the bases for Gordon. Who, according to the TBS broadcast zone, should have been struck out. Am anxious to check out the pitch fx data. Felt like the O’s were squeezed most of the night, except for O’Day’s first pitch in the 9th.
I’m an Orioles fan. Both teams got squeezed. The strike zone was consistent for the first 4-5 innings then became wildly inconsistent. The pitch to Gordon was a strike on 2-2, however he hadnt been calling that pitch a strike all night and didnt call it in subsequent at bats to Orioles players. The Royals got screwed on some inside calls later in teh game.
It’s hard to remove my bias. I do think the O’s being squeezed came at the absolute wrong times, but, then again, the Royals were able to do something with the gifts (Matusz had Moustakas struck out, bad call, then a dinger).
So, in my heart I think the O’s got the worse en of it, but in a like 53-47 percent variety and, ultimately, the Royals punished the O’s for their (or the umps mistakes) while the O’s didnt quite do that.
Agree about the strike zone. Cain and Butler got called out on pitches out of the zone in high leverage spots late. Not sure why the strike zone seemed to change about the 5th inning or so, but it did.
Could it be that the rain interfered with him seeing the ball? IDK.
I think the run that Escobar saved eventually scored, so it ended up not being as crucial a play as it first appeared. Gordon’s catch probably saved a run, however: that was big. Not getting those extra runs in the 6th when we tied the game was also big.
I think the real story of the game was the Orioles’ uncharacteristically poor pitching. Britton’s flameout in the 9th was alarming, and it meant that Buck’s hands were tied in terms of matchups in the 10th. You don’t want O’Day pitching to Gordon in that situation – O’Day had been giving up homers to lefty hitters lately – but there was not much Buck could do about it. Well, I suppose he could have brought in Matusz there, but Matusz-Perez is a worse matchup than O’Day-Gordon, probably, so…
Anyway, I hope Norris can give us 6 or 7 strong today, and we don’t get dominated by Ventura like we did in the regular season.
I thought Chen was pitching today? I thought I read that at like 1:30 am but admittedly I was delirious. I cant find any confirmation online anywhere.
Stand corrected. Just saw Norris posted.
Showalter said postgame that it would be Norris today.
I think I get what you mean with “alarming”, but whatever it was, it didn’t have the effect of an alarm waking up Showalter. I think that to appreciate what was happening in real time, it may well have helped to have little to no previous experience watching Britton pitch this season. Previously I’d seen a few MLB.com highlight summaries of him, plus watched him work over the Detroits in the first round, but I didn’t have enough exposure to have fallen into thrall or made overly anecdotally-based or even recency-biased assumptions about him. Watching Showalter during Britton’s meltdown last night, I got the impression that prior and recent experience with Britton had numbed him to what was unfolding.
As others have said, the strike zone was inconsistent for both teams. Even if the Orioles got the worst of it, which I don’t think is true, that was more than offset by the controversial calls of the game going in the Orioles favor. The umps had nothing to do with the O’s losing.
I’m an Orioles fan.
According to Brooks, all of the most egregious calls benefited the Orioles.
http://www.brooksbaseball.net/pfxVB/zoneTrack.php?month=10&day=10&year=2014&game=gid_2014_10_10_kcamlb_balmlb_1%2F&prevDate=1010
While I thought the strike zone was a little inconsistent, I certainly don’t think it was different from team to team. That sounds like a fan with sour grapes. The only post season game I noticed where it seemed to be a team thing was game 1 of the ALDS when I had to wonder if the umpire was an Angels fan, though the Royals ended up winning anyway.
The thing that I have noticed more than the umpiring is that the TBS pitchtrax thing is not set up correctly, and therefore is virtually useless to watch. If something like that seems to be off from side to side (which it also seems to be) I can blame my view on the camera angle and make an adjustment, but it is off on the up and down as well. In a couple of the games, pitches almost in the dirt have shown as one block up in the strike zone, while pitches in the heart of the strike zone have shown up as high. Some games it has seemed a little more accurate than others, but I have made a concerted effort to stop looking at it, because it is misleading. If you are going to use a tool like this for your TV broadcasts, you should probably make sure it is set up correctly to begin with.
8-6 not 8-5
I’m curios to see what will be called on the pickoff plays at first (with Pearce playing off the bag) when one of those throws inevitably takes Pearce into the runner’s path (before he actually catches the ball).
On one of the pickoffs with Dyson it was close – I wonder if the umps would call obstruction (or is in interference?) if he ends up in the path of the slide back before he receives the throw.
As long as he’s *in the act of receiving the throw*, I’m pretty confident it’s *not* obstruction to be blocking the bag.