The man sidled down the crowded bus aisle, his gaze sliding over the passengers. He looked to be about in his late middle age – perhaps 50’s, maybe early ’60s. His face was lined, and grave, in the manner of older Korean men everywhere. He wore a denim jacket and jeans, over a modest white dress shirt. The man paused, evaluating, glancing over the few available seats. At last, he settled on one of the only empty sets left, and made his slow way back to lower himself down. Right next to me.
There was no surprise, in this, of course. In my 2 months of dwelling here I have become quite the old salt on the busses of Gwangju. I know the rules.
If you get on early enough – which, living in the boonies as I do, is always – you can score a seat. If that seat is too convenient, though, you’ll need to give it up to an older person as soon as the bus fills up (which it will, especially as we pass through the crowded Unam district on our way downtown). Sit in the back, however, and towards the side, and you won’t be noticed.* I like to do this, and then I am usually left undisturbed – sitting next to the foreigner is most people’s last resort.
The man sat quietly next to me for a while, once or twice glancing at the pages of my book as they flashed by, in English, of course.** Eventually, though, I finished, and slid my Kindle away. At that point, the man leaned over.
“Where…where you from?”
I was started, momentarily. His voice was low, rough, and uncertain. It was also one of the only voices on the bus – Koreans don’t speak on public transport. Most bus rides are silent apart from the noise of the engine and the cheerful computer woman announcing each stop. If they do talk, they certainly don’t talk to foreigners.
But this man did.
“Miguk saram imnida,” I stumbled back out. I am an American.
And so I made a friend.
His daughter lived in the United States, I found. A long way away – Maryland. Did I know Maryland? No, she didn’t work there – she married a guy. You know how it goes. He had traveled to see her a few times, but not as often as he’d like. It was just so far to go, and so expensive! But her husband made her happy, and that was what was important.
Yes, his English was pretty good, wasn’t it? Maybe the two of us could practice together, eh? English, Korean – we’ll both learn. I was an English teacher? That’s wonderful – he loves English literature, but reading it is hard.
Where did I live? Missouri…somewhere in the middle? He was sure it was very beautiful. Gwangju was beautiful too, of course.
Soon, though, it was my stop. Time to go.
“It was good to meet you,” the man said as I stood to leave. “I would like us to be friends,” he added.
“I’d like that, too,” I replied.
He grinned and stuck out his hand. “My name is Myong. it means Dragon.”
Pleased to meet you, Myong.
*Just like college.
**Anyone surprised by me reading a book on the bus – have you met me? It’s like an hour long ride! That’s two hours a day (round trip) of potential reading time!
I’ll try to keep this short, since I do a terrible job of updating. There’s so many distractions here! Mostly because I’ve gotten sucked back into R. Scott Bakker’s The Second Apocalypse series, tearing through The Judging Eye and The White-Luck Warrior the last couple of weeks. So when I should be writing, I’m actually reading.
Or watching the Scary Snowman scare people on Youtube.
And that’s what I want to talk about tonight. See, I think the Scary Snowman is actually able to reveal something profound about human nature. Indeed, I quite literally think he’s doing God’s work. Don’t go away! I’m not crazy! Here, I’ll explain.
“Freaky the Snowman,” the star of the Scary Snowman videos.
I started watching the videos as I was gathering material to teach a class on Halloween to my students. I thought it would be fun to show a video of people being pranked as like a warm-up. Now, the video I found was fully 31 minutes long, but, I thought, I might be able to grab a few clips from it. So, I went ahead and started my viewing.
The Scary Snowman is a very simple formula. The fellow behind it dons his costume and locates a suitable street corner, where he sits, utterly motionless. Passersby mistake him for merely a slightly creepy statue – aided by the snowman’s hostile expression. Then, at an opportune moment, he suddenly swivels his head to glare at them or starts forward as if he was charging them. Cue shrieks of surprise.
I found myself drawn in. In fact, I couldn’t tear my eyes away. Far from gathering a few clips, I watched all 31 minutes of it – and didn’t begrudge a single second.
See, the Scary Snowman filled my heart with a warm glow, one I hadn’t felt in a long time, I think: pure, unadulterated joy.
Not from the laughter at people being startled, although I did laugh, a lot. No, it was from something else. It was joy from watching what people did after they got over their initial fear.
Everyone’s first reaction was to scream, or start in surprise (or, in one case, to punch him in the head).
Best part is him taking the little girl in the background down with him.
But after they get over their fear, every single person’s response is to laugh. Any friends they have with them, laugh even harder.
And that’s what I love.
As normally-socialized humans, we follow certain rules in our every day lives. We carefully control ourselves, careful never to display too much emotion in front of strangers. We wall ourselves off from the world behind layers and layers of deceit and pretense. The street is mostly a place to be endured on the way to our next destination, yet another trial we must suffer through in life.
But when we’re afraid – even for just a heartbeat – those walls drop. The pretense doesn’t matter. “What will others think?” doesn’t matter. All that matters is our lizard-brain seizing the helm, initiating our fight-or-flight reflex, while we focus on survival from the unexpected threat.
THen that threat is revealed to be gone. But something remarkable happens then.
The walls don’t go back up. People – friends, strangers, idiots like me watching on Youtube years later – smile, and laugh. For a few minutes, we’re all bonded together. People’s whole faces light up in delight and, yes, joy. The dismal winter’s day walk in the street suddenly becomes a treasured thing, a moment you share with people who were before total strangers, one you’ll enjoy telling to your friends and family afterwards.* You don’t have to be anything other than what you are. No more deceptions – for a few brief moments, everyone is totally honest.
That’s what swelled my heart, watching the Scary Snowman. Person after person after person – hundreds of them. A moment of fear, followed by many more moments of laughter and joy. And so the Snowman is literally bringing joy to people’s lives. He is taking them out of the mundane – just for a little bit – and giving them a better day than they had. Their world is better because they crossed paths with a prankster in a snowman costume. And I think that’s the type of work God would approve of: making the world a more joyful place.
It was a good way to spend 31 minutes. In case you’d like to do the same, here’s the video:
*Maybe. Some people might prefer it never be mentioned again.
Not all my friends are foreigners. While Gwangju has a pretty good ex-pat community (certainly better than the provinces), it’s important to also make friends with the locals when you live in a place, right? Imagine an immigrant coming to the United States and making no effort at all to integrate, just hanging with his own people all the time, speaking his own language, living in his own community. May as well not come have all, right?
Thankfully, I’m working on that. My coteachers – Euna, Sabyeol, Hwang, and Chiyun are all very kind people and give me plenty of conversation at work. And I made friends with another teacher,* whose class I taught a few weeks ago: Jeong Ji-yeong.
Ji-Yeong is a Korean English teacher at a local girl’s high school, who also runs the after school English club. Her English is passable – good enough to teach it to high schoolers, but she’d never pass for a native. But she tries hard and she is open and friendly.
She learned it in the United States. See, a couple of decades ago, before EPIK, the Korean government had in mind to send its own people out into the English world, where they would learn the language, then come back and teach their children. Ji-yeong was one such. She packed her bags and headed off to the United States for 6 months on the government’s dime, ready for an adventure.
‘course, the Korean government didn’t send her to someplace like San Francisco or New York. They’re not made of money! No, instead they saved the good taxpayers of Korea’s money by sending her to Powell, Wyoming, population 6,000.
Not a Korean speaker for a hundred miles around. An embassy? Forget about it. And this, of course, was in the days before ubiquitous smartphones and translation apps.
She told me that she knew the name of every bartender in town inside of 2 months.
She also told me it wasn’t hard – there were only 4 of them. The town only had the two bars.
Nevertheless, Ji-yeong survived and returned to her old neighborhood in Gwangju, where 20 years later she met me while she was looking for a native English speaker to help her. (I wrote about that class a few weeks ago).
As a reward, she took me to the Gwangju festival downtown last week.
It was a rainy night, but no one seemed to mind. The evening was warm, the rain was gentle, and there was music filling the air from a dozen stages. I met Ji-yeong and her best friend downtown amidst the sea of people. She had warned me her friend was a bit younger than either of us. Turns out it was because it was her 13-year old daughter. Her daughter mostly tagged along in sullen silence most of the evening, resisting my efforts to draw her into conversation as only a teenage girl can.**
No matter. There was plenty to see and do. The festival had dozens of tents set up, selling the usual tourist trinkets and knickknacks, games, and food. Every kind of food – kebabs, fish cake, hot dogs (sorta), funnel cake (kinda), fried cheese (literally cheese that was fried. It was like heaven), Korean pancakes, soups, pastries, drinks.
Nearby was a traditional Korean village – traditional, as in from the 70’s. Maybe a retro village? There were tiny comic book stores, a police station (complete with signs instructing everyone to report any suspected Northern spies and posters proclaiming Death to Communism, Protect Our Democracy!!), even a small school. We wandered up and down, taking in the sights. We went into the little school and saw the classroom as it would have looked 50 years ago.
I had my picture taken in traditional school uniform. I think I clean up pretty well:
Elsewhere at the festival there were sculptures, art, games, stages blasting K-pop into the night sky. Ji-yeong took me to dinner at a traditional Korean barbecue restaurant – ironically the same that I had eaten at for my birthday a few weeks before (“that’s not what irony means, Brad.” Shut up). Sizzling, popping meat plopped down on the grill before your very eyes, the juices running down and cooking the vegetables around it, plates upon plates of side dishes and sauces – it was glorious. Korean barbecue is Korea’s greatest cultural achievement, undoubtedly.
We ate and talked for hours. Her daughter even cracked a smile at one point, although she tried to deny it. Ji-yeong is very funny and a bit cynical, with a certain blunt sensibility around her – she aims to tell the world exactly what she thinks, and be damned to anyone who objects. At the same time, she was a bit nervous to ensure that I was having a good time, which I very much was.
After a few good hours of meat, drink, and conversation, we took a walk to help ourselves digest. We wandered down through a sculpture garden.
The rain had come back by now. It was also getting kind of late, so I made my way home.
Getting to the bus stop was an ordeal. All of downtown’s streets had been swallowed up in the sea of tents, and there were tens of thousands of people crowding the streets. Every block found a new sight, a new sound, a new smell of something delicious wafting by. I passed a band blasting modern versions of Native American music, a nice little slice of home here on the far side of the world.
Eventually I was able to work my through the crowds and home. But I hadn’t seen the last of Ji-yeong – she invited me to chaperone a field trip the next Sunday up the coast, to a national park.
So I know my next adventure.
*All my friends are teachers. This is mostly true of my American friends as well.
**She spoke English – better than her mother. She’d often translate when her mom got lost by something I said.
Part of the fun of living here is the new people that you get to meet. Especially Westerners.
It gets lonely, sometimes – days at a time roll by and everyone around me is very much the same race, speaking the same language. I talk to myself a fair amount purely for the pleasure of listening to English outside the classroom (happily, I am an excellent conversation partner – I share all the same interests as myself! What a happy coincidence). So, imagine my joy when, a few weeks ago, walking home from school, while waiting for the light to change so I could cross the street, I saw a pair of Western men standing outside the Japanese steakhouse.
They were both very young – late teens or early twenties – and very well dressed. They wore dark slacks, white button-down shirts with ties, and a nametag each. And, significantly, they were a pair. The light changed and they started across the street towards me, as I started towards them. As our paths crossed, I asked them, “Mormons?”
And so I met Elder Meeks and Elder Hanks.
Elder Meeks and Elder Hanks are two Mormon* missionaries living in Gwangju – old hands in Korea, but new to the city. Now, it is well-known that Mormon men, when they come of age, are highly encouraged to do two years of missionary work in the service of God, spreading the Good Word, teaching, and generally doing good works in His name. Meeks and Hanks were good Salt Lake City boys doing their bit to make the world safe for the Latter Day Saints.
We drew aside to the sidewalk and had a good talk there on a random Gwangju street corner. Their church is very near my apartment – in fact, I’ve inadvertently posted pictures of it before – and they operate all over my area. They were impressed with my knowledge of their faith – which, believe me, is no great shakes, but I know more than the average layman – and I was eager for friends I could speak English to. So, we made a dinner date.
I met Elder Hanks a few weeks later at a pretty nice pork cutlet restaurant just a block or two from my apartment. Elder Meeks had by then moved on to other pastures, but in his place was Elder Han, a young Korean man from Seoul just starting the first month of his new missionary journey. There are about 30,000 practicing Mormon Koreans, it turns out. Han had okay English and a charming habit of starting every utterance with the phrase “Actually…”
“Actually I’ve studied English for about four years now…” “Actually you know quite a bit about Mormonism…” “Actually, what do you think of the food?”
The food, for the record, was delicious. Pork, chicken, and fish cutlets, all manner of noodles, pasta, salad, and, weirdly enough, pizza – including pizza made using a fried chicken cutlet as the crust! Wonderfully decadent, I can’t believe that little innovation hasn’t made it over to the States yet.
Good as the dinner was, the conversation was better. We talked about religion, about how we came to believe in God, about history and Alexander the Great and Jesus of Nazareth. I learned about Hans’ life, about what it’s like to be a Mormon missionary.
I think there are still some groups that people unconsciously feel totally fine with being prejudiced or bigoted towards. People from the South. People who live on farms. And, largely, Mormons.
I mean, I get it. They’re pretty much all squares – clean cut, conservatively dressed, decent living, no drinking, no smoking, no swearing. They hold true to their traditions, which are often out of step with the quickly changing fashions of the wider world. And they’re determined to save as many souls as they can by spreading their faith as widely as they can, which many find obnoxious.
But I always have a soft spot for people who live true to their principles, and I have a soft spot for Mormons, too. In truth, while I don’t find Joe Smith’s archaeology convincing at all, I admire them.
By every measure, Mormons are one of the most successful religious minorities in the United States. It’s been a while since I looked at the statistics specifically, but in general Mormons have higher rates of education than the public at large. Lower rates of poverty. Lower rates of divorce. Lower rates of substance abuse. Lower rates of suicide. Lower rates of mental disorders, including depression and anxiety. Mormons are a disproportionate amount of our successful intellectual class – famous authors like Orson Scott Card, Brandon Sanderson, and Stephanie Meyer, whose books have sold millions of copies. Many of our most prominent elected officials – Mitt Romney and Harry Reid, for example. At Harvard Business School, female students note ruefully that attractive male classmates are invariably associated with one of the “three Ms”: the military, the management consultancy McKinsey or Mormonism. People who reach the tops of their professions are often Mormons – Stephen Covey, the author of 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, for example, or Andy Reid, head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs and probably the second best coach in the entire NFL (behind Belicheck, of course).
Look, I’m not trying to convert anyone to Mormonism here. I’m not a Mormon myself. But I do find them genuinely kind and decent people, and I really enjoyed my dinner with Hanks and Han. They live nearby and we’ll do it again. They only get one day off a week (Monday), so I won’t see them too much, but their primary amusement is playing board games, so I have that in common. We’ll do a board game night soon. In the meantime, I look forward to sharing more good meals and good conversation with them.
“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
– JRR Tolkien
*They prefer their church be referred to as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints; however, that is quite a mouthful to type and the demonym is quite difficult to wrap my head around. Purely for sake of brevity and clarity to my audience, I shall continue to use Mormon, with the understanding that this term is for convenience only and reflects no judgment on the truth of anyone’s religious claims whatsoever.
So, why spend 4 days in my ostensibly Korean blog talking about baseball? I know from the traffic stats that the vast majority of you don’t really care about any of this. I get that. I do. But it’s important to me. Now I’m going to tell you why.
What follows below is a copy of a reddit post I made back in October, 2015. It explains the reasons I love baseball, and why I will always be a Royals fan. It’s not about the winning, for me (although it’s nice when it happens). No, for me, it’s about honoring the memory of those I love.
Back to Korea tomorrow, I promise.
Bit of a long story here, but honestly, it was more important that I write this than you read it. I’ll try to remember to throw in a tl;dr at the end out of courtesy.
Anyway, I’m a Kansas City native, born and raised. However, I have never, ever, ever, before last season, been a Royals fan. I only started liking them around the same time that they got good. It all started with my grandfather. He’d been a fan of the team ever since it was founded. Attended at least one game every year of his life, frequent season ticket holder, and, eventually, the mentor of his eldest grandchild – me. My parents and grandparents, in the misplaced hope that I could be taught to be a baseball fan, dragged me to game after game. I was loaded down with Monarchs and Royals paraphernalia. All my older relatives were baseball fans, and so I, as the first child of my generation in the family, would be too, dammit.
But I wouldn’t budge. The Royals were, frankly, terrible. Every game was a slow torture of dashed expectations, brief bursts of hope being met ultimately with disappointment. Around the same time I started bringing paperbacks to games, my family stopped dragging me along.
Until last year.
September of last year found me away from home, finishing my Master’s degree, and slightly homesick. My grandfather had been ill for weeks, and was about to undergo a dangerous surgery that promised to fix the problem. The Royals were hot ever since the All-Star break, but I couldn’t be bothered about that – it had been more than a decade since I had watched a Royals game. I was more concerned about Papa.
He and I were close, despite the baseball thing. He was one of the kindest, wittiest men I had ever known. I had never seen him lose his temper, never seen him treat any human being with anything but the utmost respect. He was still deeply in love with my grandma, took obvious delight in his large cohort of grandchildren, and in every way was the heart and soul of our clan – a true patriarch.
He was relatively young, only barely into his 70’s, and this surgery could give him potentially another twenty years. But, it was high risk – a 10% chance that he wouldn’t survive the operation, doctors estimated.
So, Tuesday, September 30 rolled around. Grandpa went in for his surgery. And the Royals, meanwhile, were going into their first postseason since 1985 – the first time ever in my lifetime. I was overwhelmed with worry for Papa, and then something odd happened. Of all things, I thought of his lifelong love of the Royals. I remembered suddenly all the discussion of their newfound ability, of Kansas City’s joy in having a team make the post-season for the first time in years.
And so I watched what we all remember was one of the best wildcard games, ever.
I was swept up in the magic and excitement of it. I replayed Perez’s game winning hit again, and again, listening to the deafening roar that swept the stadium as the crowd realized what had happened. It was electric. And, for one, brief, shining moment, I understood why my grandfather loved baseball.
Well, the Royals’ success on the field was not matched by success off it. My grandfather was one of the unlucky 10%. The best man I had ever known was gone.
But, the Royals weren’t. They crashed into the Angels, and before the best team in baseball knew what had hit them they were swept out of hte post-season. The Royals roared onwards, to Baltimore, and the most exciting series yet – and another victory.
By now the entire country was talking about the Cinderella team from Kansas City, /my/ Royals, the team I had watched as a kid with my grandpa. Every baseball fan in the nation was watching them.
And so was I, right alongside them. When the Royals were playing, it was like Papa wasn’t gone – I knew he was cheering himself hoarse right along with me, watching the team he had so faithfully followed for 40 years suddenly find success. I stopped hurting, a little bit, with every game.
It was like the games were a talisman, holding off and numbing my grief. And with every victory, the magic lasted a tiny bit longer, and the hurt got a little bit less, and I grew to love the Royals a little bit more.
Ultimately the ride ended, but not before we had given the Giants such a run for their money that nothing short of a superhuman performance by Madison Bumgarner could have stopped us. And when the 9th inning closed in Game 7, I felt something that I hadn’t since before Papa’s illness: contentment.
My grandfather might have been gone, but his beloved team wasn’t, and I still had the memories of those childhood games at his side. And now I would make new ones, watching with his spirit alongside me, and so preserve his memory a bit longer. I was a Royals fan for life, in my grandfather’s memory.
And so this season comes to an end. At the start the conventional wisdom said we couldn’t do it again, that last year was a fluke, that we were bound to regress back to somnambulant mediocrity. Well, here we are. So much for the conventional wisdom.
My grandpa’s team is respected again. No one laughs at us anymore (although some hate us – I guess I can live with that). And I’m onboard, every step of the way.
So, am I a bandwagon fan? You bet I am. I was not onboard this train before it left the station last September. But, now I’m on it, to the end. Because Papa never gave up on them, and in the end, they proved him right – so I won’t give up on them either. Call me a bandwagon fan if you like, but I’m a fan for life now. Thanks for listening.
Good luck tomorrow, and give ’em hell.
The Royals went on to win the World Series that year. The Royals won, Papa. You always believed.
Today is the last day I’m talking about the Wild Card Game. Even if you haven’t been following along, thanks for letting me take the time here (of course you had to let me, it’s my blog!) Even if you think baseball is boring and incomprehensible – you might just surprise yourself. I also thought baseball was boring and incomprehensible, but now I have been enlightened.
I have one more post to come about why all this is so important to me, and then we’re back to Korea. Thanks for your indulgence.
———–
“Once Roberts got to Boston, he mostly sat. And sat. The manager kept an eye on him but didn’t call his name very often. It was as if Roberts had changed from a ballplayer into some kind of glass-front box with the words break in case of need for stolen base stenciled on the front. But Epstein’s orthodoxy, reinforced by special adviser, Bill James, the creator of the whole analytical business that had debunked stolen bases in the first place, held that if you built the right kind of team, Roberts’s skills set would be largely extraneous. Except – and this was the key part of it, the flexible part of it that most people didn’t get – except when it was necessary.
And so here Roberts was, glass broken, standing on first base with Bill Mueller at the plate, the only potential run of the year that mattered anymore. It was a desperate moment, but nonetheless a moment that had been planned for. That was the difference between this time around and 1949, 1978, 2003, and all the other disappointments of the last century. God was in the details, and so were playoff victories. And the Red Sox were finally looking after the details.
Rivera threw over to first. Once. Twice. Roberts got back to the bag. Every problem is a lock looking for a key. The Red Sox had spent decades half-asleep, oblivious to the locks, never mind looking for the keys.
Rivera returned his focus to the man at the plate. Roberts took his lead – not an inch shorter than before, maybe half an inch longer now. Rivera got set in the stretch, looked once more at Roberts, then committed to home plate with a barely perceptible transfer of weight to his right foot, his left foot now rising off the mound.
But Roberts was already gone, digging toward second, erasing the past with every step.”
– from the prologue to Mind Game: How the Boston Red Sox Got Smart, Won a World Series, and Created a New Blueprint for Winning.
“I remember Maury Wills on the backfield in Vero Beach,” said Roberts. “He said, ‘DR, one of these days you’re going to have to steal an important base when everyone in the ballpark knows you’re gonna steal, but you’ve got to steal that base and you can’t be afraid to steal that base.’ So, just kind of trotting out on to the field that night, I was thinking about him. So he was on one side telling me ‘this was your opportunity’. And the other side of my brain is saying, ‘You’re going to get thrown out, don’t get thrown out.’ Fortunately Maury’s voice won out in my head.”
Dave Roberts’ steal against Mariano Rivera in Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS, with the Red Sox down a run in the 9th inning and 3 games to 0 in the series, is unquestionably the greatest steal in baseball history.
But what’s the second-greatest steal in baseball history?
Maybe it came in the 9th inning that night, September 30th, 2014.
The Royals, fighting for their lives, had in a single inning closed a 7-3 gap to a single run. But they were down to the last three outs of their season, with Sean Doolittle, Oakland’s powerful closing pitcher, taking the mound. Due up to hit was Mike Moustakas, the third baseman of the Process who had struggled all year. Moustakas hit only .172/.241/.313 against lefties like Doolittle.
Now, baseball typically presents batting statistics in three numbers – your slashline. The first number is the hitter’s batting average – how often does he actually get a hit, per at bat? Moustakas successfully hit only 17% of the time, a wretched number when the league average is closer to 25%. The second number is the most important – your On Base Percentage, or how often do you reach base safely per at bat? This includes walks, and can be thought of as your probability of not making an out. Moustakas only reached safely 24 times out of a hundred – so he has a 76% chance of giving away one of the Royals’ precious three final outs. Finally, the last number is your slugging percentage – how many bases do you typically gain per at bat? Home runs are worth 4, triples 3, etc. Moustakas was only gaining roughly a third of a base per at bat – in a league where the top players, like Mike Trout, can have numbers above 1.
So Ned Yost needed another option. Sitting on his bench was that option: Josh Willingham, a recent acquisition, a veteran player who was in his first postseason ever. Yost activated Willingham and sent him in to pitch hit.
Willingham hadn’t had a base hit since September 10. Doolittle was allowing opposing batters only a paltry .169/.197/.262 off him. When Willingham fell behind in the count 1-2, it looked like the curtain was starting to fall on the Royals.
But then Doolittle left a 94-mile fastball just a hair too far over the plate – and Willingham was swinging – the bat caught the ball and sent it to right – and the A’s outfield was shaded just a little too far to the left, meaning that Reddick wouldn’t reach the ball in time – and suddenly the tying run was on first base again. And the Royals had one more pinch running weapon in their holster. Terrance Gore, the Fastest Man in Baseball, had already been spent. But Jarrod Dyson was quite possibly the Second Fastest Man in baseball, and he was even now trotting out of the dugout ot replace Willingham.
Between innings, with Lester out of the game, the Royals coaches met in the dugout to discuss whether to keep running now that Lester was out of the game. Outs were precious, so perhaps the team should try to slow down and look for the long ball. “Heck no!” the Royals’ improbably named first base coach, Rusty Kuntz, shouted. “We’ve got to go.” The formula remained the same: Put the ball in play. Get on base. Run like hell.
But it’s hard to run on lefties like Sean Doolittle. The lefthanded pitcher faces toward first base as he winds up for his pitch – so he knows exactly where the runner is. If the runner takes too great a lead, the leftie can easily pick him off. Too small a lead, and he can’t beat the catcher’s throw to second. Dyson couldn’t run.
So instead, Alcides Escobar sacrificed him over. He dropped a bunt perfectly, the ball slowly rolling towards the pitcher while Escobar took off for first. Doolittle scooped it up and fired to first, easily bagging Escobar – but Dyson was safe at second. Now, Doolittle couldn’t keep an eye on him. Now, he could steal the base that everyone in the ballpark knew he had come in the game to steal.
Doolittle and Dyson engaged in a battle of wits. Doolittle lifted his leg to throw home – then spun to face second. Dyson was already there, not having bought the ruse. Dyson played possum, his posture slack, his whole attitude conveying relaxation. He carefully studied the A’s pitcher as he threw a ball past Nori Aoki, the batter. Another fake pickoff, again Dyson already safe at the base.
But Dyson had Doolittle’s tell. It would be picked up after the game, but when Doolittle turned towards home and lifted his leg at the same time, he was going home, not going to second. Doolittle turned and lifted – and Dyson was gone.
Norris scooped up the low fastball and fired to third in a heartbeat – but no catcher alive could have caught Jarrod Dyson that night. The Royals’ baserunner was sliding safely across the base even as A’s third baseman Josh Donaldson fielded the ball. The tying run was 90 feet away – and Nori Aoki, the man with the lowest strikeout rate on the team, was at the plate.
“If you want a single image to sum up the never-say-die attitude of the 2014-2015 Kansas City Royals, that’s the one. The Royals were still two outs away from elimination – and Dyson is revving the engines at third base, with complete confidence in himself and without an ounce of fear for the situation. It was if he was saying, “Nervous? Why would we be nervous?” We were losing our minds in the stands, but out on the field, Dyson didn’t have a care in the world. He was a 50th-round pick, a guy who was drafted despite not really knowing how to hit a baseball, who by sheer force of self-confidence and his God-given tools surpassed far more heralded prospects through the farm system, reached the major leagues when he was 26 years old, and has been one of the game’s best fourth outfielders ever since. That’s what speed – and a relentless belief in yourself – do.”
Quote:
On the next pitch, Aoki lifted a high fly ball to right field. Reddick was there to make the catch – but Jarrod Dyson, the Second Fastest Man in Baseball, had tagged at third base and was already on his way home. The Royals had gone to the glass box, “break in need of stolen base,” and there, ready to answer the call, was Jarrod Dyson.
It was the bottom of the 9th inning. The Royals had one out left – and the score was 7-7.
======
Brandon Finnegan had come a long way in four months. He was a young man, only 21, sporting a scruffy beard in a vain attempt to make himself look less boyish. He was slightly stocky, with long brown hair curling out from under his cap as he sat in the Royals’ bullpen, watching the team carry out one of the largest comebacks in baseball history. Four months earlier, he had been a senior at TCU, pitching for his team in the College World Series. The Royals had drafted him that June – at #17, not even in the top half – and then Finnegan had caught fire, quickly working his way through the minor leagues. In September, the Royals had called him up.
“How the f*** do I know what I’m going to do with Finnegan if we make the playoffs?” Yost had commented at the time, when reporters pressed. Now, it was the 10th inning of the wild card game, and Yost needed a pitcher. Shields was done. Ventura was done. Herrera had pitched 2 innings already, Davis had covered the 8th, and Holland had covered the 9th, but not before using 23 pitches and loading the bases before escaping. Yost was almost out of pitchers. He knew now how he’d use Finnegan.
There have been easier assignments. Finnegan was up against the A’s explosive offense, which had already chastened James Shields, Yordano Ventura, and Kelvin Herrera with 7 runs – all pitchers with supposedly more talent and a lot more experience than the kid. Now, it was extra innings, and Finnegan had to be essentially flawless – any run the A’s scored could be the winning run.
And flawless he was.
In the 10th, he got Freiman to fly out. He put away Norris with a weak grounder on the first pitch. And then, getting ahead of Punto 1-2, he scorched a 96 mph fastball by him. Finnegan pounded his fist in his glove like a madman as he walked off the mound after the 1-2-3 inning.
In the 11th, after the Royals squandered a leadoff hit in the bottom of the 10th, Finnegan did it again. He struck out Coco Crisp. Sam Fuld tried to bunt his way on, but Finnegan fielded the bunt himself – a tricky play for a young pitcher, without fielding instincts yet – and cut him down at first. Josh Donaldson – who would be the AL MVP the following season – singled, bringing up Brandon Moss, who had already homered twice, with 5 RBI, in the game. The 21-year old faced down the man who had been killing the Royals all night, working the count to 2-2 – then fired a fastball just through the outside corner. Moss was fooled and struck out looking. Finnegan couldn’t resist a mini-fist pump as he walked off the mound.
In the 12th, though, the young pitcher’s stamina started to falter. He walked Reddick on 5 pitches, then Lowrie bunted him over to second to put the go-ahead run in scoring position. Yost came out to pull Finnegan, but the damage was done – Jason Frasor, the last pitcher the Royals had, threw a wild pitch to put the runner on third, and then yielded a single to Alberto Callaspo that let Reddick dart home. It was 8-7 Oakland in the 12th, and Finnegan’s heroic effort was destined ot end in a loss.
The Royals had already come back twice in this game, from being down 2 runs and down 4 runs – now they would need to do it a third time, down only a single run this time, but with only a single inning to do it in. 3 outs to go.
Which quickly became 2 outs as Lorenzo Cain grounded out weakly. He walked back to the dugout dejectedly, convinced the game was over, passing Eric Hosmer on the way.
The Royals’ win expectancy now stood at 11% – stratospherically higher than the 3% they had had in the bottom of the 8th, but still not great. 9 out of 10 teams in the same situation would lose.
A year later, Hosmer would review the at-bat:
Eric Hosmer sidled into the dugout at Fenway Park one day this past August. He peered down at an iPad screen replaying his last at-bat from that night. He did not require much visual aid. He watched this encounter countless times during the winter.
Hosmer had hit only nine homers during the regular season, but he wanted what all power hitters desire in these situations: a fastball up in the zone to drive out of the ballpark. The duel with Otero lasted six pitches. As he watched himself 11 months later, Hosmer pinpointed the fourth pitch as the most critical one. Hosmer had just fouled off two fastballs and was furious about missing them. Then Otero threw a slider in the dirt.
“After that slider, you can tell,” Hosmer said. “He threw that, and didn’t feel too comfortable about it. From that point there, after fouling off two heaters, especially in hitter’s counts, you’ve got a good feeling that a fastball’s coming.”
Hosmer sprayed another fastball foul. He planned to cheat on the next pitch, starting his swing early to generate as much power as possible. As the 2-2 fastball approached, Hosmer leaned his face closer to the iPad’s screen.
“There it is!” he shouted.
Quote:
The ball leapt off Hosmer’s bat, speeding for the gap in left-center field. Every head in the ballpark turned to watch it. Rany Jayazerli put his arms around both his neighbor’s shoulders, chanting, “It’s not going out, it’s not going out…” to keep from getting his hopes up. Outfielders Jonny Gomes and Sam Fuld were both racing towards the wall as the ball hung suspended in the air. The bar where Taylor Fritz and his dad were watching was dead silent, as everyone watched.
Gomes reached the wall, leapt to catch the fly – and Fuld was there too, also lunging desperately – and the ball was bouncing off the wall, back towards the infield – the two outfielders had hit the ground in a tangle, and now here came Gomes pushing himself to his feet and dashing after the ball – Hosmer was around second – and when the dust had lifted, Hosmer was standing safe at third, exuberant. There were only two outs to go (again), but the Royals were still alive. They were still in the game.
COming to the plate was yet another young player, Christian Colon. Billy Butler, recall, had been batting behind Hosmer, but he was lifted in the 8th for pinch-runner Terrance Gore. One thing the Fastest Man in Baseball is NOT, however, is a good hitter, and so Colon was put in Gore’s place to hit. He came to the plate needing to get the ball out of the infield to score Hosmer.
A’s pitcher Dan Otero got unlucky. He tried to blow a 92-mph fastball by Colon, with a nasty late sink to it that SHOULD have seen it smoothly dart past Colon’s bat. But instead, Colon desperately clipped the top of the ball. The ball shot straight down in front him – bounced off home plate – and into the infield. Colon took off for first – and down the third base line came Hosmer. Put the ball in play. Run like hell.
“High chopper!” the broadcaster, Ron Darling, exclaimed. “They’ll never get him! Tie game!”
Otero got Gordon to pop out for the second out of hte inning, then was lifted for the A’s final pitcher, Jason Hammel. Coming to the plate was Salvador Perez, the young Venezuelan with a gigantic smile, who had been signed for $65,000 as a kid in 2006. Perez was a notoriously impatient hitter, offering at pitches nowhere near the Zone. Hammel quickly got him to 2 strikes.
Over at first base, Rusty Kuntz (heh) had told Colon that if Perez got to 2 strikes, Colon had to run. Unfortunately for Colon, the A’s knew he was going to run, too. On the next pitch, Colon took off – and the A’s pitched out.
A pitch-out is when the pitcher and catcher mutually agree to throw a ball far outside the strike zone. The pitcher will get it to the catcher as fast as he can, and the catcher can catch the ball already coming to his feet and firing to second base. It’s a play designed to foil steal attempts, and it’s almost never done – the A’s had pitched out only 16 times in 162 regular season games in 2014. But now they pitched out in the 12th inning of a tied double-elimination game – and they guessed right. Colon was dead to rights.
Except…
Except Derek Norris is not Gary Soto. He’s a fantastic bat, but a poor defender. His eyes were on Colon, not on the ball coming in – and it clipped off his glove. He missed the catch and the ball fell harmlessly to the dirt while Colon skidded safely into second.
Over at third base, Josh Donaldson shaded over towards second to help protect outfielder Jonny Gomes’s arm.
On the next pitch, Hammel through a slider. It wasn’t a great slider, but it was 6 inches outside. It was the 385th pitch of the game, and the time was 11:52 – 8 minutes to October. Perez lunged desperately for it. There were 2 strikes – if he missed, the inning was over and the game was going 13 innings, with the Royals pitching running on fumes.
But he did not miss.
The ball skipped down the third base line. Josh Donaldson hurled himself towards the ball, diving to stop it. He got close:
One inch from preventing history.
But Donaldson did not catch it. The ball skipped past – and Perez was running to second – and here came Colon around third and the crowd was erupting.
9-8, Royals.
“The noise felt volcanic. The stadium shook. In the stands, strangers embraced. Fans jumped on their seats. Beer and water rained down upon them. Inside Moore’s suite, George Brett, the legend who predicted victory when the situation seemed most dire, clasped his hands on his forehead and shouted. A mosh pit formed around Perez. The group somehow stayed upright, their momentum propelling them into center field. The stadium blared Archie Eversole’s “We Ready,” the song that became the team’s anthem en route to the World Series. After the celebration, Hosmer received a request from a team official to do a television interview on the field. “I literally told him I had to wait two minutes,” Hosmer said. “Because I felt like I was going to throw up.”
Inside the broadcast booth, Darling shook hands with Ripken and Johnson after they went off the air. Darling knew, already, it was one of the greatest games he had ever called. “My reaction, after the game, is unprintable,” Darling said. “It was ‘Holy (expletive). Can you believe what we just saw?’ I wish I could have said that on the air.” He walked back into the parking lot, which teemed with fans. To Darling, the group looked ecstatic. And exhausted. “It was almost like ‘The Walking Dead,’ ” Darling said. “The fans were walking around, zombie-like. Like they were kids who had too much sugar. Or adults who had too much coffee.”
Abby Elmer and her parents struggled to reach their car because of the crowd surrounding Joel Goldberg and Jeff Montgomery’s stage for Fox Sports Kansas City’s postgame show. For the drive back across the state, Seth Atkins listened to Josh Vernier on 610 Sports Radio. He lost the signal near Columbia, so he put the show on his phone. At his home in Overland Park, Kent Swanson watched highlights until 3 a.m. When he heard Ryan Lefevbre’s radio call of the final hit, as the night baseball returned to Kansas City drifted toward the morning, he burst into tears.”
– From The Night KC Baseball Came Back To Life
Three times, the Royals had trailed. Three times, they had come back. They had overcome the largest deficit of any team in an elimination game in history. They gotten lucky, skated on the edge of disaster, they had been brilliant – and in the end, they had won. The most important game in Kansas City in 29 years ahd also turned into the best game in 29 years. The celebration throughout the city was universal.
“You can’t sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You’ve got to throw the ball over the damn plate and give the other man his chance. That’s why baseball is the greatest game of them all.” – Earl Weaver
To recap, the Royals were playing their first playoff game in 29 years, the same night my grandpa, a huge fan, underwent a risky surgical procedure. In the 6th inning, the Royals’ pitching had collapsed and the A’s had surged to a 7-3 lead – a deficit no playoff team had ever come back from. To win, the Royals would need to score at least 8 runs – and they had scored 8 runs in a single game only a few times all year. Their playoff appearance was all but dead.
In the bottom of the 8th inning, with 6 outs to go, Alcides Escobar singled.
Now, there’s been a lot of math done by the stats nerds on when it’s appropriate to steal a base. Stealing a base does one thing for you: It raises your odds of scoring that single run, as it gets easier for you to reach home from third or second than it would from second or first. However, if you get caught stealing, you erase a base runner and give up your team’s most precious resource: outs (remember, each team only gets 27 total). So in the 8th inning of this wild card game, Royals fans were horrified to see Escobar do one thing: He took off from first to steal second. Down 4 runnings, they didn’t need higher odds of a single run – they needed a big inning to have a prayer, and if Escobar had been caught, it would have basically ended the Royals’ chances then and there.
But he was not caught. Jon Lester had thrown nearly 100 pitches, he was exhausted. And catcher Derek Norris is not a great defender. Escobar was safe and in scoring position.
In the stands, spectator Chris Kamler was ecstatic. “It’s time to run on Lester!” he howled to his companion, Rany Jayazerli (who would write up this incident), then pointed at his temple. “Get in their domes!” Of course, Kamler was certifiably insane (and possibly extremely drunk by this point), but there was something to be said for pressing the Royals’ speed advantage: Put the ball in play. Get on base. Run like hell.
Escobar’s steal loomed large, though, as Nori Aoki grounded sharply to second. If Esky had been on first, it would have been a double play, two outs. But he was not, and he was safe at third with only one out and Lorenzo Cain up to bat. And then…Cain came through, singling up the middle and scoring Escobar.
Throughout Kauffman stadium, there rippled an emotion that hadn’t been felt in Kansas City since the Reagan administration: hope.
Lester stayed on to face Hosmer, but his exhaustion and control betrayed him – he walked the first baseman. The Royals were at first and second, with only one out, and one run in. At last, Lester gave way to relief pitcher Luke Gregerson. His night was done. It was up to Gregorson to put out the fire and save the game for the A’s.
The hitter who Gregerson would face had been waiting for a moment like this, on a night like this, in this ballpark, for 10 years. The man who represented the tying run was Billy Ray Butler, the longest-tenured Royal. The stocky DH tended either to hit home runs or to ground into double plays, so either he would tie the game in a single blow, or end the rally and snuff out the Royals’ hopes. Eden or agony on one swing of the bat – this is what makes baseball a great sport.
Butler did not ground out, nor did he tie the game, but he did what – at his peak – he did as well as anyone: he stayed inside the pitch and took it the other way for an opposite field single. Lorenzo Cain scored, Eric Hosmer scrambled to third base, and the crowd…well, the crowd had never really been out of the game. Even down four runs with six outs to go, the stadium was still packed. But we hadn’t been particularly loud before the inning started. The volume started to build with the rally, and when Butler singled it hit a crescendo that was deafening. This was a ballgame again. This was definitely a ballgame.
He had barely touched the bag when Terrance Gore, who has a legitimate case to be called The Fastest Basestealer Ever, bounded out of the dugout to replace him. And suddenly, just like that, Terrance Gore was the tying run.
If you want to pinpoint the exact moment when 40,000-plus Royals fans at Kauffman Stadium all started to think, holy crap, we might actually pull this off, this is your moment. The Royals could tie the game without even the benefit of a hit. All Gore had to do was steal second base – and everyone in the ballpark knew that was what he was going to try to pull off. What we didn’t know was just how frickin’ easy he would make it look. I mean, we knew he was fast. We knew that he was almost impossible to throw out* even when the other team knew he was running.
But his stolen base still took our breath away. He took off on the very first pitch, and despite Derek Norris’ throw being right on the money, Gore was on the base before the ball hit Lowrie’s glove. It was breathtaking. It was like watching the unveiling of the B-2 Bomber: this mythical weapon that no one had ever seen before, that some doubted could even exist, and that only your side had. Put the ball in play. Get on base. Run. Like. Hell.
The panic was mounting in the A’s dugout as the impossible, improbable rally continued. Facing Alex Gordon, with the tying run on base behind him, the Fastest Man in Baseball, Gregerson floundered – and threw a pitch that dove into the dirt and skipped past Derek Norris. Norris scrambled after the ball, seized it, and whirled to throw to Gregerson, who had dashed for home as soon as he saw the wild pitch, all while Eric Hosmer came charging down the baseline. Hosmer slid home – safe. It was 7-6, Oakland, and the tying run was at third base.
The noise in Kauffman was deafening. At this point, the crowd had begun to believe: it was destiny. The Royals were not the Chiefs. This would not be a one-and-done playoff appearance. In the stands Seth Atkins allowed hope to reappear. “Maybe they do have a chance,” he told himself. Silent in the back rows of the upper deck since Moss’ homer in the sixth, Kent Swanson perked up when his friend received a text message at the top of the eighth inning. Two fans had vacated their seats closer to the third-base line. The duo navigated closer to the action as the comeback began. The shock lifted for Abby Elmer around the same time. Her optimism returned. She wondered if it was foolish to feel that way. But perhaps that was a good thing.
“I remember reading people saying that the Royals didn’t know that game was over, that they were supposed to lose it,” she said. “I feel like the fans were like that, too. They were like, ‘You know what? I’m over it. I’m going to be insanely loud. We’re going to win.’ Meanwhile, Taylor Fritz and his dad arrived at the bar and took a seat. They were still in their Royals gear, and set their tickets down on the bar. The bartender glanced at the tickets, then up at the two men. “Y’all were at the baseball game?” They nodded. “You left?” Nod. “Y’all are fuckin’ idiots.” He jerked his head at the TV behind him, showing the game.
But with Gore at third, the Royals faltered. Gregerson walked Gordon (who stole second, the Royals’ 4th stolen base of the inning- Escobar, Cain, and Gore had all stolen second), but steadied himself and struck out the young catcher Salvador Perez on 3 pitches and second baseman Omar Infante on four. The Royals had slayed Lester and trimmed the deficit to just one run. But they also squandered an opening. The tying run was 90 feet away with only one out, and they came up empty. Winter was not far away.
*The bullshit in the 7th inning at Houston the next year doesn’t count. He was safe.
Happy October 1st! It’s Halloweeeeeen season! 😀 But Halloween isn’t really a Korean holiday, sadly. Anyway, it’s also the start of baseball playoffs – tonight features the American League Wild Card, pitting the Tampa Bay Rays, one of the most innovative teams in the league, with perhaps the smallest payroll in baseball, against the equally innovative Oakland Athletics, made famous by the book & movie Moneyball. The Rays’ lone World Series appearance saw them lose to the Phillies in 2008, while the A’s made the World Series 3 times from 1988 to 1990, only winning in 1989 against the San Francisco Giants (the Bay Area Series, disrupted by the 1989 San Francisco earthquake). In celebration, I’m reposting some old baseball writing I did a while ago. Feel free to skip and come back when I start talking about Korea again in a few days.
EDIT: It has been made clear to me that tonight, is in fact, the NATIONAL League Wild Card game. That features the Brewers against the Nationals. The Brewers have appeared in the World Series, representing the American League in 1982, losing to the St. Louis Cardinals. They moved to the National League, where the most playoff success they had was reaching the NLCS in 2011 – where they again lost to the Cardinals, making them the only team in history to lose the Championship Series and the World Series to the same team. The Nationals, formerly the Montreal Expos, have never reached the World Series.
They’ve literally never won a clinching playoff game, ever.
SO history is not on their side, but on the whole they’re probably the stronger team tonight. I’d love to see the Brewers, with many former Royals on their roster, reach the World Series, though.
After the first inning of the Wild Card Game, the score stood 2-1 in favor of the visiting A’s, and the Royals had seemingly blundered away a chance to tie the game in the bottom of the first. If they wound up losing a one run game, that mistake would haunt them – but fortunately for their legacy the score didn’t last.
In the third inning, Mike “Moose” Moustakas, the Royals’ third baseman, one of the promised saviors of the team from the long 8 year Process, batted at the bottom of the order. Typically, your players at the bottom of a batting order will see the fewest at-bats per game – so you stick your worst hitters down there. Mike Moustakas was not a good hitter that year, showing none of the ability that had caused the Royals to draft him. Some even wondered if he should play in the wild card game, despite the Royals’ lack of real better options. He silenced the critics, though, blooping out a small hit off Jon Lester and scampering to first. Escobar sacrificed himself with a bunt, moving Moustakas to second, and then Nori Aoki grounded out to move him to third. This was not A’s baseball – no walks, no homers, just scratching and clawing their way around the diamond to bring a run home. Now, with 2 outs, Lorenzo Cain came through – he laced a clean double into left field, speeding into second as Moustakas reached home easily. The next batter, Eric Hosmer – another product of the Process – followed up, sending Cain home and giving the Royals a 3-2 lead.
The crowd was going wild. The Royals had a one-run lead in an elimination game – at home. They just needed James Shields to get through 3 more innings – 9 outs – and then he could give way to the elite bullpen trio of Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis, and Greg Holland. As it stood, Hosmer would be the last baserunner from either team until the fatal 6th inning.
The major league strike zone extends roughly from a batter’s elbows down to his knees and stretches 17 inches across the plate, and is the most important piece of real estate in the ballpark. The heart of the game of baseball is the battle between the pitcher and the batter for control of that zone. The pitcher attempts to deceive the hitter, as his pitches dive over the plate, or tail away from it, or suddenly cut towards the bat, carefully working the edges of the zone and never giving the hitter a solid pitch to clobber out of the park. The batter fights off close pitches and avoids swinging at pitches out of the zone, waiting for a pitch that he can smack to his liking. From the moment the pitcher releases the ball to the moment it crosses the plate is often as short as .4 seconds – and the hitter needs at least .25 seconds to see the pitch and react, giving him a tenth of a second to judge if a pitch will be in the zone and hittable (and thus he should swing) or out of the zone (and thus he should take the pitch). A pitch out of the zone that the hitter refuses to swing at is a ball. A pitch in the zone that the hitter misses is a strike. Four balls and the batter is awarded first base for free – a walk. Three strikes, though, and he’s out. It’s a tough job, but major league hitters are the best in the world at it, and they punish any error on the pitcher’s part mercilessly.
Thus, major league pitchers have the hardest job on the diamond. They have more responsibility than any other player for the outcome of the game, and so they put their all into their pitches – hurling fastballs at over 100 miles per hour (that’s 160 kilometers an hour) over the plate, sometimes more than 100 in a night. The strain on the arm is severe. In more innocent days, pitchers would play the entire game, and would play multiple games in a row. As hitters got wiser, the competitive demands on pitchers grew, and their role gradually shrank. In modern times, the best pitchers – your starters- can make it through 6 or 7 innings of the 9 inning game, starting only one game every five days – and still pitching careers are often cut short by injury, as the human arm simply isn’t engineered to take the strain major league pitching puts on it. So, the managers of the game innovated. The days of pitching a complete game are, barring exceptional performances, in the past – now is the era of the relief pitcher.
The relief pitchers usually outnumber starters and gather in what is called a bullpen for reasons lost to history (or at least to me). They are specialists, without as many pitches in their arsenal as starters, and not nearly as much stamina. Typically they will work for only one or two innings. On most teams, the bullpen was an afterthought – a collection of guys who couldn’t hack it as starters, who were there simply to fill innings and try to bridge teh gap between the starter and the end of the game. The Royals, though, had built their team bass-ackwards. The Royals’ bullpen was filled with their best pitchers, their starters were only so-so. Herrera, Davis, and Holland had been unhittable in 2014, saving countless games for the Royals as they slammed the door shut on scoring. Herrera would pitch the 7th, Davis the 8th, and Greg Holland would close out the 9th.
But the 6th inning was a trouble spot.
The later into a game a starter goes, the less effective he becomes. The batters get more looks at him and are no longer fooled by his pitches. His arm, shaking from the strain of effort, starts to give out as exhaustion saps his strength. The speed of the ball falls, giving hitters more time to react, and the pitcher’s control fades, he misses his target more. James Shields ran into this as he worked into the 6th inning of the wild card. He was facing the Oakland order for the 3rd time, and he wasn’t fooling anyone. Sam Fuld opened with a single to right field. Then Shields walked Josh Donaldson. The tying run was at second, the go-ahead run was at first, and Brandon Moss – the man responsible for Oakland’s only 2 runs of the night – was stepping to the plate.
Ned Yost, the Royals’ manager, went to the bullpen.
But not to Herrera, his 7th inning guy. He wanted his elite relievers to work their assigned innings. Nor did Yost go to any of his other bullpen arms – veteran Luke Hochever, workmen Jason Frasor or Danny Duffy, or even rookie Brandon Finnegan.
No, he went with the Royals’ hottest new pitcher, Yordano Ventura.
Ventura was a product of the Royals’ renaissance, a 23-year old kid from the Dominican Republic. His fastball was ferocious, topping 100 mph, his talent was among the best anyone had ever seen, and his temper was fiery. But he was unpolished, and unused to pressure – and he was a starting pitcher, not a reliever. In theory that meant he could cut loose, give his all to a single inning, and not worry about saving the stamina for a long start. But it also threw off his routine – and it meant he was coming into a messy situation to face one of the most dangerous batters in the game.
Ventura was amped. His first fastball flashed past, high over the strike zone. Ball one. Sweat poured down the young man’s face. He steadied himself, drew a breath, and hurled again – high again. Ball two. Now he was in a fix. If he tried to skirt the zone again, his shaky control could cause him to throw ball 3, and then he was all but certain to walk Moss, loading the bases with no outs. He had almost no choice but to throw Moss a strike and hope it fooled him or blasted past him before he could react.
Ventura’s fastball did not fool Moss, nor did it surprise him. He was expecting it. His bat flashed out, and a heartbeat later the ball was flying over the outfield wall. 5-3, Oakland.
The crowd was stunned. Ned Yost hopped out of the dugout to come talk to Ventura – and the longest tenured manager in Royals’ history, the man who had led them back to the postseason in 29 years, was booed by the fans at his home stadium in his very first playoff game.
In the upper deck, Kent Swanson sat in silence, unable to speak for several innings. For solace, he scanned Twitter to read rage-filled posts about Yost. Seth Atkins assumed the game was over. As the night drifted away, Abby Elmer would begin to cry. But her initial reaction involved empathy. “Poor Ned Yost. That’s his career.” Taylor Fritz and his dad quietly walked out of the stadium and headed for a bar.
The Royals had scratched out three runs with five hits, a bunt, and a stolen base. The A’s had hit two balls into the seats with men on base, and had five runs to show for it. It was a microcosm of everything the teams do differently.
Ventura was still rattled, and the flurry of blows continued. He issued a walk, then promptly threw a wild pitch to move the runner to second. A flyout – the first out of the long, fatal inning – moved the runner to third. Yost finally waved the white flag and sent for Herrera to put out the fire – but too late. Herrera could not stop the run from scoring, nor could he prevent the A’s forcing a fifth across the plate. By the time the dust cleared, the score stood 7-3, A’s.
The Royals went quietly in the bottom of the 6th, and the bottom of the 7th. They had six outs left.
By the this point, the Royals’ first trip to the postseason in 29 years was effectively over, after only a few innings of play. Just another Kansas City disappointment, as the city had been experiencing for more than 20 years by that point. Jon Lester was cruising – only 94 pitches in 7 innings of work, a real chance at a complete game. The Royals’ win expectancy stood at less than 2%. That is, in the history of baseball, less than 2% of teams in similar situations had gone on to win the game. In the 111 years since the foundation of the World Series, there had been thousands of playoff games. In all those games, how many teams had come back from a 4-run deficit in the last 2 innings of an elimination game?
Not one.
That was the funereal atmosphere in Kauffman stadium as the game entered the bottom of the 8th inning, the top of the Royals’ order due to hit. Alcides Escobar came to the plate for the 4th time that night. On Lester’s third pitch, Escobar grounded a single up the middle. A good defender perhaps makes the play; Jed Lowrie is not a good defensive shortstop, and did not make the play, as the bounce he anticipated never materialized and the ball went under his glove. It was ruled an infield single, and Escobar might have beaten it out even if Lowrie had fielded it cleanly, but it says something that MLB.com’s highlight of this play lists the caption as “Escobar reaches on error”.
Watching in the stands, we hoped Escobar’s hit was the start of something. It turns out it was the start of everything.
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![[Image: Salvy%2Bsingle.JPG]](https://gwangjulikeit.home.blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/0c61b-salvy2bsingle.jpg)
Gwangju Dreaming 