Bob Lutz: The Royals have become baseball’s sure thing

In some ways, the Kansas City Royals have taken the unpredictability of baseball and bounced it on its head. After all, who could have predicted this?

The Royals won their seventh straight postseason game of 2014 Tuesday night, beating another bewildered team, the Baltimore Orioles, 2-1 at Kaufman Stadium to take a 3-0 lead in the American League Championship Series.

But back to the predictability thing for a moment.

While this amazing run by Kansas City would have been deemed highly improbable before it started, now that we’re in the midst of this there’s nothing really that shocking.

The Royals are simply better than the teams they’re playing. They continued their amazing display of defense in Game 3 with Mike Moustakas making a ridiculously incredible catch of a foul pop while tipping over the railing near the Baltimore dugout in a camera well.

And how is it that KC makes a one-run lead late in a game feel like such a fait accompli?

It’s because Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis and Greg Holland carry nail guns in from the bullpen.

Baltimore had back-to-back doubles by Steve Pearce and J.J. Hardy in the second inning to take a 1-0 lead against Kansas City starter Jeremy Guthrie. But that was it; the Orioles had just one hit the rest of the way.

Powerful Baltimore had one hit over the last 7 2/3 innings.

Herrera, Davis and Holland combined to pitch in 206 games during the 2014 regular season. They collectively allowed runs in 33 of them.

They gave up 11 runs in April, three in May, eight in June, one in July, five in August and five in September. Each has allowed one run in the postseason in 19 combined appearances.

Bullpens, by their nature, are supposed to cause ulcers for their manager and for a team’s fan base. But when the Royals get to the seventh with a lead, everybody who loves this baseball team stretches out in a Barcalounger with a fruity beach drink.

There’s no more debating the right and wrong decisions being made by Ned Yost. He just needs to make sure those three guys in the bullpen can get in the gates of the stadium before the game and the rest takes care of itself.

“It’s real comfortable,” Yost said of his late-inning demeanor.

The Royals took a 2-1 lead in the sixth after hits by Nori Aoki and Eric Hosmer. Billy Butler’s one-out sacrifice fly drove in pinch-runner Jarrod Dyson.

“My mindset there,” Yost said, “was for Billy to find a way to get a ball in the air. Then the odds of us winning were going to be great.”

The Orioles went nine up and nine down against Herrera, Davis and Holland. And they went down 1-2-3 in the sixth against Jason Frasor, who relieved starter Jeremy Guthrie in a tie game to face Baltimore’s 3-4-5 hitters.

Frasor doesn’t have the street cred of his three bullpen teammates so there was some tension about what might happen. Yost admitted he had a quick hook ready for Frasor, with Herrera ready to come in to get an out or two if needed.

But Frasor went through the Orioles as if they were butter. He was helped by Moustakas’ sensational play on Adam Jones’ foul pop, then retired Nelson Cruz and Steve Pearce on fly balls.

“This team doesn’t panic,” Moustakas said. “For some reason, we always feel confident knowing we’re going to be able to score a run, or multiple runs. And then our bullpen comes in and does what our bullpen does. It’s fun to watch.”

So a team that was down 7-3 to Oakland in the sixth inning of the wild card game a couple of weeks ago is on the cusp of the World Series for the first time in 29 years.

Nobody predicted this.

But is anybody predicting now that it won’t happen?

“That wild-card game, that’s all the experience we needed,” Yost said of a team that has five players who have played postseason baseball before this season. “You could tell in that game that something clicked for them and all the sudden they were playoff veterans and they’re playing like it.”

The Royals have found something, no doubt about it. They never look rattled even in all of the tight games they’ve been playing. They do what they have to do to win games, whether it’s running, catching, throwing or hitting.

This is baseball, folks. This is what it looks like when it’s played right. The Royals are putting on a clinic, making the difficult looking easy and becoming unpredictably predictable.

Nobody expected Kansas City to play like this. Now nobody expects anything but.

This story was originally published October 14, 2014 at 11:10 PM with the headline "Bob Lutz: The Royals have become baseball’s sure thing."