BALTIMORE — It’s been a long road back to the postseason for the Kansas City Royals, but they’ve picked up right where they left off in 2015. Technically speaking, the Royals haven’t lost a postseason game in nine years.
But as much as that championship team was an egalitarian enterprise, a team effort by a group of good players, it didn’t really have star power. Not so the next generation. The heroes of the Royals’ 1-0 win over the Orioles in Baltimore were exactly who you’d expect: The best pitcher and position player, respectively, in a series that has plenty of both.
Cole Ragans threw six dominant scoreless innings before being lifted with cramping in his left calf. Because of his efforts, an RBI single by Bobby Witt Jr. was all the run support he needed.
In advance of every playoff series, there are press conferences, both the day before and the morning of Game 1. These tend to be unfocused clearinghouses for sound bites, where as many as a dozen reporters per session might trawl for quotes to back up whatever story they’re writing.
Me? I was preparing to write about the Royals as a historical anachronism, a team buoyed by a superb starting rotation in an age of 18-batter starts and bullpen games. (And who knows, if Seth Lugo shoves tomorrow and the Royals close out the series, you might see that article in full.)
I asked Lugo, during his turn at the podium before Game 1, what he thought it’d take to pitch effectively deep into playoff games in this day and age.
Lugo, who said, “I think that’s how the game is supposed to be played,” had the following advice: “It really comes down to being the aggressor, throwing strikes, quality strikes, and not giving in to hitters.”
The last time I was in Baltimore, it was for last year’s ALDS against Texas, and basically nobody was doing as Lugo said. Each team walked five batters in Game 1, and the Orioles issued another 11 free passes in Game 2. Corey Seager, recipient of five of those walks, was visibly irritated by the end of the game at the lack of competitive pitches. “We’ll walk you so much you’ll get sick of walking,” in so many words.
Ragans and Orioles starter Corbin Burnes went right after it. Ragans threw 80 pitches in his six innings of work, 60 of them strikes, and threw a first-pitch strike to 14 of the 22 batters he faced.
“I felt really good when I saw those first two fastballs be 97, 98, and in the zone,” said Royals manager Matt Quatraro after the game.
But it was Ragans’ three secondary pitches — changeup, slider, knuckle-curve — that took him from efficient and precise to imperious. Ragans threw 28 offspeed and breaking pitches, of which Orioles hitters swung at 18 and whiffed at nine. Those nine whiffs included the decisive pitch on six of Ragans’ eight strikeouts in the game.
Quatraro had said during his Monday press conference that he had no intention of pulling (my words, absolutely not his) any of that five-and-dive nonsense. His starters would go until they got tired or got hit. So it was a surprise to see Ragans get lifted after just six innings and 80 pitches with a zero on the board. The announcement came quickly afterward — this was not a tactical decision, but the product of cramps in Ragans’ left calf.
“[Ragans] was walking by me and he said something, but I couldn’t tell what he said. And so I just said, ‘You’re good,’ like, kind of joking with him. Like, he’s definitely going back out there,” Quatraro said. “And he called me back down in the tunnel and he said, ‘Last couple hitters, my leg was cramping.’ We’ve been through this before. It doesn’t usually just all of a sudden stop happening. So we needed to make a move there, and so we got [Sam Long] ready as quick as we could.”
Ragans appeared in the clubhouse wearing medical tape on his right bicep, the kind of bandage you get after receiving an IV. But neither the pitcher nor his manager expects any issues going forward.
“I want to be healthy. I plan on having quite a few more starts,” said Ragans. “So I just didn’t want to push it to where it ends up, you know, being something more serious than it needs to be.”
Ragans got the headlines and the win, but Burnes was arguably even more effective. He was definitely more efficient, working through 27 batters in just 84 pitches. That ratio — 3.11 pitches per batter faced — is the lowest of any appearance in his entire career, regular season or postseason, as a starter or reliever.
As you might expect from such a compact effort, Burnes ran only one three-ball count all afternoon. Unfortunately, that at-bat was decisive.
Maikel Garcia, the Royals’ no. 9 hitter, he of the 69 wRC+ and 6.7% walk rate this year, came to the plate with one out in the top of the sixth. He got ahead in the count 3-1, then fouled off two 3-2 pitches — a cutter and a sweeper — right on the outside corner before drawing a walk. Garcia doesn’t get on base much, but when he does, he’s dangerous, with 37 steals in 39 opportunities this season.
Garcia said he knew opportunities to score off Burnes would be hard to come by, so he decided beforehand that he would steal at the first opportunity.
“As soon as I worked the walk, I was automatic,” he said. “I was just trying to go to second base.”
Sure enough, Garcia stole second, advanced to third on Michael Massey’s groundout, and was home when Witt — who else? — saw a first-pitch cutter on the outer half and wrenched it on the ground through the 5-6 hole to score the only run of the game. Both managers — Quatraro and Baltimore’s Brandon Hyde — were asked postgame whether Burnes should’ve walked the Royals’ best hitter with two outs and first base open. Both rejected the notion quickly, and Quatraro distilled the issue to its core.
“[Burnes] was incredible today,” Quatraro said. “That’s your best pitcher and our best hitter. That’s why you play this game, right? I would have been more surprised if he had walked him.”
One inning later, Ragans cramped up and had to be replaced. But Burnes, fully hydrated and calves functioning within normal parameters, held serve for two more frames. Hyde even sent him out to start the ninth inning, though Burnes threw just one pitch, which Garcia hit for a single. That was all for the Baltimore ace, who became the first starting pitcher in 19 years to work into the ninth inning of a playoff game and take the loss.
A performance like that is precisely why the Orioles traded for Burnes, and if they’d managed to scratch across even the meager run support the former Brewers ace got in his previous postseason starts, that trade would’ve led directly to Baltimore’s first playoff win since 2014.
“As Tommy Pham says, whenever you allow the other team to score zero runs, you have a 99.999% chance to win that game,” Witt said. “I like our odds whenever we do that.”
As good as Ragans was, the Orioles had chances. In the third inning, Cedric Mullins hit a double halfway up the 21-foot wall in straightaway right field. Neither Gunnar Henderson nor Jordan Westburg could drive him home. Westburg’s inning-ending fly out got swallowed by the Gleyber Torres Memorial Alcove in left field; it would’ve been a home run in 28 of the other 29 major league ballparks.
In the bottom of the fifth, just minutes before Garcia and Witt conjured the game’s only run, Ramón Urías hit a ball that went down in the play log as a double to left center. It should’ve been a routine out, but MJ Melendez inexplicably overran the ball and let it drop. Mullins followed with a single putting runners at the corners with one out, but Ragans slammed the door with back-to-back strikeouts.
The Orioles threatened again in each of the last two innings. With two outs in the eighth, Henderson worked a walk against reliever Kris Bubic, and — likely frustrated after making two key outs in earlier high-leverage at-bats — flipped his bat on the way to first. Westburg followed with a single, forcing Quatraro to call on his relief ace, Lucas Erceg, for a four-out save.
Erceg is a converted position player with just two seasons of major league experience. He’s been a high-leverage guy for only a few months and only joined the Royals at the deadline. When I spoke to him on Monday about working up to just this kind of pressure, he repeated a mantra he learned from a former coach.
“You get the ball, you get on the mound, you get the sign, you throw the pitch,” Erceg chanted. “It’s just boom, boom, boom, and there’s no real way for you to think outside of that.”
Erceg got the ball, he got on the mound, he got the sign, and he got Anthony Santander to ground out to end the inning.
But when he came out for the bottom of the ninth after a long wait in the top half, his rhythm was off. He walked pinch hitter Ryan O’Hearn. He got the ball, he got on the mound, he stepped off the rubber, he went to the back of the mound to dig the dirt out of his spikes, and he fell behind Adley Rutschman 2-0.
At this point, Salvador Perez decided it was time for a family meeting.
“Salvy does that frequently. He knows the right times,” Quatraro said. “He’s been doing this a long time. He understands his role on this team as a leader, and he doesn’t just go out there to go out there. He goes out there when he’s got something to say, and understands that he can make a difference.”
“He was basically checking me,” Erceg said, “He’s like, ‘Are you good? Let’s go! This is it!’ So he kind of locked me back in, got me in the zone.”
It worked. Erceg came back to strike out Rutschman. The 2-2 changeup that went for a called third strike seemed low, both to Statcast and to Rutschman himself. Still, you have to take the breaks when you can get them. The final two hitters of the game, Colton Cowser and pinch hitter Heston Kjerstad, saw just a single fastball over the nine combined pitches Erceg threw to them. Kjerstad chased the last pitch, a 90.7 mph changeup (it feels sacrilegious just to type that) well off the plate to end the game.
Pham’s Law holds. Hold your opponent to zero runs, and you’ll probably win.
