Crazy comeback against A’s in wild-card game sparked Royals’ World Series run
Any pressure the Royals might have felt in their first playoff experience — only three of the 25 players on the ALCS roster had ever played in postseason — evaporated after their inspired comeback against the A’s in the AL wild-card game .
Because, really, after this group of playoff newbies erased a four-run, eighth-inning deficit against an A’s team that had its ace on the mound and one of the best closers in the game rested and ready to go, what was there to fear?
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“I think that game definitely did a lot for us,” first baseman Eric Hosmer said after Kansas City’s Game 3 win against the Orioles in the ALCS. “It really broke us into postseason baseball. If anybody had nerves or anything going into that game, after that game it definitely helped out a lot.”
They were playing, to borrow a term, with house money. They weren’t supposed to be around at that point. They were supposed to be celebrating what had already been a memorable season that culminated in a pretty historical playoff berth, capped by a game played at a jewel of a stadium that hadn’t hosted an October game since 1985.
But these Royals came back in that wild-card game.
And it wasn’t just the eighth-inning rally. Remember, the A’s took a 2-0 lead off Royals ace James Shields just four batters into the game, on a Brandon Moss home run.
In the bottom of the first, though, Kansas City scored a run on a Billy Butler single and then the Royals took the lead with two runs, driven home by a double by Lorenzo Cain and a single from Hosmer.
But then things got much, much worse. Oakland scored five times in the sixth, with a managerial mistake by Ned Yost contributing to the outburst. Down by four with only a handful of outs left, the stories were already being written.
Of course, you know what happened next.
“That said a lot about our team,” Hosmer said. “Just being down 2-0 against Lester is tough enough, but we battled back, then went down again by four runs. It showed (the) no-quit in this team. there’s a lot of guys in here that believe we can do it, and no one’s going to quit until the end.”
Since that game, we’ve seen Kansas City at its very best. Hosmer is playing like the star the Royals expected him to be when they selected him No. 3 overall in the 2008 draft. Same thing for Mike Moustakas, who went No. 2 overall in the 2007 draft.
They’re not alone, of course. Everyone’s contributing. Though it hardly seems possible, it looks like this group of high-expectation, low-production (until this month, of course) players is playing pressure-free for the first time in their big-league Kansas City careers.
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“I don’t know what clicked for them, but something clicked and they were totally used to this atmosphere,” Yost said. “There was no pressure. They were loose. They were on the attack and very, very confident club.”
And after the epic comeback against the A’s, why wouldn’t they be confident?
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