Bob Lutz: Royals turning innings into parades at the plate

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — I don’t want to say this World Series is over, but… no, I’m not going to say it.

The Kansas City Royals are in a rare zone. It’s invincibility, really, and if you think the New York Mets are going to win four of the next five to win this Series, well, you’re seeing something the rest of us aren’t seeing and you might want to get that checked.

Behind Jekyll-and-Hyde Johnny Cueto, the Royals thumped New York 7-1 on Wednesday night to go up 2-0 in this best-of-7. The series shifts to New York for Games 3, 4 and maybe 5 over the weekend. Perhaps home cooking will inspire the Mets after the Royals have served them their heads on a platter.

Someone seated next to me groaned Tuesday when Lucas Duda drove home David Murphy with a fourth-inning run to put the Mets on top 1-0. He was obviously pulling for the Royals, but it was just as obvious he hadn’t been paying attention.

Since when is falling behind a bad thing for Kansas City?

The Royals scored four runs in the fifth and tacked on three in the eighth. In their past 83 postseason innings, they’ve scored multiple runs in 16. They strike like a coiled rattler and the opposing team can never rest.

“When you make bad pitches against a team that can hit,” Mets manager Terry Collins said, “you’re going to get hurt.”

The Royals can hit. All of them and probably their kids, too.

The Mets’ Jacob deGrom, one of the best pitchers in baseball, took a one-hitter into the fifth inning but walked the world’s most over-qualified No. 8 hitter, Alex Gordon, to lead off. Then the Royals got on their singles merry-go-round. There were five of them — by Alex Rios, Alcides Escobar, Eric Hosmer, Kendrys Morales and Mike Moustakas.

The hits from Hosmer, Morales and Moustakes came with two outs and produced three of the runs. The rally included an interesting sequence from leadoff hitter Alcides Escobar, who attempted to bunt runners over from first and second base with no outs but did so in futility to get to two strikes.

But it doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter. Sure enough, Escobar gave up bunting and slapped a single into center field to score Gordon with the tying run.

The Mets’ decided edge in starting pitching has, so far, gone for naught.

deGrom and Game 1 starter Matt Harvey finished fourth and sixth among National League pitchers in strikeouts this season with 393 in 380 1/3 innings. Against the Royals, though, they’ve had four in 11 innings.

“We don’t swing and miss,” Royals manager Ned Yost said. “We put the ball in play and we just keep putting the ball in play until you find holes. We have guys on who just keep finding ways to find holes out there.”

Many of the Royals’ 10 hits Wednesday night barely eluded Mets defenders. It has to be maddening to play against Kansas City. Just when you have their queen cornered, they scream “Checkmate.”

“They’re real good,” Collins said. “You’ve got to make adjustments against them back to back and pitch to pitch, because they can really hunt the strike zone.”

Collins made it sound like it’s almost a bad idea to throw strikes to Kansas City’s hitters.

Now what?

Throwing strikes was not an issue for Cueto, who reached into his eccentric soul and pulled out another gem, ala his Game 5 ALDS performance against the Houston Astros, when he retired the final 19 hitters he faced during a 7-2 win.

He threw 70 strikes among his 122 pitches Wednesday night and became the first pitcher since Atlanta’s Greg Maddux in 1995 to throw a two-hitter in the World Series.

“Electric tonight,” the Royals’ Eric Hosmer said of Cueto. “He really just feeds off this crowd’s energy. All the boys in the dugout really wanted to see him go out there (in the ninth inning) and finish it.”

Sure enough, Cueto did. After the Royals made it 7-1 in the eighth, manager Ned Yost scrapped his plan to turn the game over to Wade Davis and told Cueto to get back out there.

The giddy Cueto pranced to the mound as a giddy crowd erupted. He jumped over the first-base line then did a Cueto dance in the grass before going back to work. His string of retiring 15 consecutive hitters ended with a two-out walk to David Murphy, but he got Yeonis Cespedes on a fly ball to wrap it up.

The Mets may have had a hangover from Tuesday night’s rough 5-4, 14-inning loss, but Cueto wasn’t offering up any aspirin. The only two New York hits were from first baseman Lucas Duda and neither was hit hard.

“He’s had one bad (postseason) start and two tremendous ones,” Yost said. “Tonight was everything we expected Johnny to be. He was on the attack. He kept the ball down. He changed speeds. It was just a spectacular performance by him.

“Johnny thrives in this environment, he’s comfortable in our park, he loves our fans and he feeds off their energy.”

It’s the kind of energy that can light up a city. Maybe even one as big as New York, where the Royals could wrap this up in short order.

This story was originally published October 28, 2015 at 11:04 PM with the headline "Bob Lutz: Royals turning innings into parades at the plate."