The World Series between the Kansas City Royals and the San Francisco Giants begins tonight, Tuesday October 21, at 8 p.m. ET on Fox. World Series preview articles cover the internet like so many fallen red and yellow leaves. Two stood out to me as being of particular quality and interest.
Joe Posnanski’s Rule of Three focuses on the biggest tactical story line of the baseball playoffs so far. It’s not Kansas City’s love of the bunt, it’s another of their innovations – the use of three one inning relief pitchers to pitch the seventh, eighth, and ninth innings. All teams have a specialist pitcher, called a closer, who pitches the ninth inning when their team has the lead. Most teams have a designated “set-up man” who pitches just the eighth inning. The Royals have taken in one step farther, designating a pitcher to pitch the seventh inning too. So far, it’s been extraordinarily successful: the Royals have won 94% of their games this season (regular season an playoffs) when they had the lead after six innings compared to just 88% for all other teams. Will their success continue and if so, how will it reshape the game in the coming years?
Rule of Three
By Joe Posnanski for NBC SportsWorld
For more than one hundred years, baseball postseasons had been dominated by the starters, by Bob Gibson and Sandy Koufax, by Christy Mathewson and Curt Schilling, by Whitey Ford and Chris Carpenter. Everyone believed in it, from old-school thinkers like Detroit’s GM Dave Dombrowski to Moneyball mogul Billy Beane. You win in October with great starters, and so Detroit and Oakland went to get themselves great starters.
The Royals’ three-man closing law firm of Herrera, Davis and Holland has been the single dominant weapon of the postseason. In the wild-card game, while Lester and the A’s bullpen disintegrated, the Royals’ threesome kept the Athletics scoreless in the seventh, eighth and ninth. That allowed the Royals to come back. In the Angels series, the threesome kept the Angels scoreless in those pivotal three late innings, and the Royals took control with back-to-back extra-inning victories.
You know the old joke about the guy who prays daily to win the lottery and then finally hears a heavenly voice say: “Look, I’d like to help you, but you have to buy a lottery ticket first.” The Royals might have been lucky getting those three pitchers. But turning that trio into perhaps the greatest closing machine in baseball history is the Royals’ doing.
For a less tactical but much more emotional approach to the World Series, we go over to Grantland and life-long Royals fan Rany Jazayerli. He digs into how it feels to love a team that loses for twenty five years straight and then suddenly, almost without warning, is in the World Series.
One Away: The Total Improbability of the Royals’ World Series Run and the Agony of Potential Defeat
By Rany Jazayerli for Grantland
The team that couldn’t win anything for nearly three decades suddenly couldn’t lose. The Royals didn’t lose to the A’s, when by all rights they should have. They didn’t lose the ALDS to the Los Angeles Angels, who led the majors with 98 wins this season. They didn’t lose the ALCS to the Baltimore Orioles, who posted the second-best record in the American League. They haven’t lost once in eight playoff games, the first team in baseball history that could make that claim. They haven’t lost even though they’ve gone to extra innings four times, were tied in the ninth in a fifth game, and won two other contests by one run. They’ve literally won one game in the playoffs whose outcome wasn’t in doubt until the final pitch.
There’s also an element of survivor’s guilt, as with an infantryman who watched his friends get slaughtered at Ypres. Having dealt with failure for so long, it’s difficult to adjust to success, especially when it comes at the expense of A’s fans, who have watched their team lose seven elimination games in a row now, or Orioles fans, who had gone longer without seeing a World Series than Royals fans had. There’s a sense that if the Royals don’t finish off their dream season, the suffering of A’s and O’s fans will have been in vain — that it will be easier for fans in Oakland and Baltimore to accept defeat if they know that one of their comrades in lucklessness went on to defeat the entrenched powers that be, the San Francisco Giants, who have won two of the last four World Series.
Crazy as it sounds after the Royals have gone further than I ever dreamed they would, I’ll be more disappointed if they lose now than if they had lost three weeks ago against Oakland. Winning hasn’t diminished the fear of losing; it has only heightened it, and a championship is the only release.