Manage Delivery
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — He is an All-Star, remember.
Billy Butler rescued the Royals from a dreadful loss Wednesday night by leading off the ninth inning with a walk-off home run for an 8-7 victory over the Seattle Mariners at Kauffman Stadium.
No, he wasn’t sure it was gone.
“Never at night here,” Butler said. “As the night goes on, it gets tougher and tougher to hit it out of here. The air gets thicker. Earlier in the game, I feel it would have gone a lot farther.
“I just knew I at least had a double, would have got to second and had a pinch-runner. I knew it was a minimum of that.”
Butler’s blast came on a 1-1 pitch from Josh Kinney and sailed an estimated 395 feet into the left-center seats. It enabled the Royals to win for just the fourth time in 16 games despite blowing leads of 3-1 and 7-3.
“I just got a good pitch to hit and didn’t miss it,” Butler said. “Hopefully, that gets us going. Things like that tonight tend to have a positive reaction on a team. That’s what we’re looking for. We’ve been struggling. Hopefully, we can turn it around a little bit.”
This victory came after the Royals benefited from a suspect call in the eighth inning that prevented the Mariners from breaking a 7-7 tie after Brendan Ryan’s one-out triple into the right-center gap against Kelvin Herrera.
Second baseman Chris Getz threw home after fielding Dustin Ackley’s grounder, and Jim Joyce ruled catcher Brayan Peña’s tag beat Ryan. Replays suggested the Royals caught a break.
The Royals had a chance later in the inning when Alex Gordon hustled his way to a two-out double, which brought Kinney in to replace Oliver Perez for a right-on-right matchup against Alcides Escobar.
A grounder to deep short turned into an infield single that moved Gordon to third, but Eric Hosmer ended the threat with a weak grounder to short.
Hosmer is batting .222 after going hitless in five at-bats and, manager Ned Yost announced after the game, will be dropped lower in the lineup.
Greg Holland (4-2) breezed through the Seattle ninth before Kinney (0-1) served up Butler’s game-winner on a 1-1 fastball.
“I know he’s their dangerous guy in the lineup,” Kinney said, “and we had a plan. I felt good out there. I had command of my pitches. I actually felt real good. But that’s what happens when you miss your spot to that guy. He did exactly what he’s supposed to do.”
Butler had a plan, too.
Take the first pitch, which he reasoned – correctly – would be a slider.
“I figured he wasn’t going to come after me with a fastball on the first pitch,” he said. “I saw the slider. That made me feel good because I saw the spin on it. It made me feel better about sitting on a fastball.”
Butler got the fastball.
“Billy’s not afraid to take a pitch or two just to see what the pitch is doing,” Yost said. “A lot of times he knows that the guy is going to throw him a first-pitch slider, but he wants to take and see what it’s doing.
“He’s a special guy that knows velocities, knows exactly what the ball’s doing. He studies that stuff real religiously.”
Consider this a prayer answered.
Butler provided the Royals with their first walk-off homer since he went deep on June 1, 2011 in a 2-0 victory over the Angels. It brought the Royals surging out of the dugout for a celebratory scrum at the plate.
“I was in the bathroom,” Gordon confessed. “I didn’t see what the pitch was. I just heard everybody yelling, so I buckled my pants and came out to join the celebration.”
Butler wheeled his batting helmet nearly to the mound as he rounded third and chugged toward the awaiting crowd.
“With walk-offs,” he said, “you’ve got some emotions going. You’re going to do some things. I had some good distance on that.”
It shouldn’t have been this tough.
The Royals clubbed Seattle veteran Kevin Millwood for seven runs and 10 hits in five innings but couldn’t pull away. The Mariners scored once in the second against Royals starter Bruce Chen and got two in the fourth and one in the sixth.
Seattle’s three-run seventh against José Mijares and Aaron Crow tied the game and left both starters with no-decisions. Crow’s ERA is up to 4.06 after allowing eight earned runs in 5 2/3 innings over his last six appearances.
“I feel fine,” he insisted. “I just haven’t been getting the job done. Everything is really inconsistent. Tonight, it ended up hurting me.”
The Mariners opened the scoring on Kyle Seager’s two-out homer in the second inning, but the Royals countered with three runs later in the inning.
Casper Wells’ two-run homer in the fourth made it 3-3, but the Royals got a two-run double from Gordon in their fourth and a two-run homer by Lorenzo Cain in the fifth for a 7-3 lead.
“Our offense has been clicking,” Chen said, “and I think it’s up to us, the starting rotation, to step it up and help our team out. Our offense is pretty solid right now.”
But it almost slipped away.
Almost.
“Putting up seven runs,” Butler said, “and getting a nice lead and having the lead late in the game…that would have been a real tough one to drop.”
