Kansas City Royals’ Wild Win Reminds Us That Baseball Is Going Nowhere

Some games are so good, there’s no clear place to begin or end.

The MLB playoffs started with the AL Wild Card game on Tuesday night, with the Kansas City Royals making their first playoff appearance in a whopping 29 years.

The traveling team was the Oakland A’s, who at one point not so long ago were the best team in baseball, before Billy Beane gambled on Jon Lester for Yoennis Cespedes, the A’s stopped hitting, went 16-36 down the stretch, and squeaked into the draw with a win over Texas on the final day of the regular season.

Before it started, this game was all about starting pitching. James Shields against Lester – two pitches acquired in different ways at different times but for the exact same purpose: Win an elimination playoff game.

By the time it ended, Shields and Lester were as far away from the final narrative as George Brett and Reggie Jackson.

The Royals won on a walk-off single in the bottom of the twelfth inning. Catcher Salvador Perez got the hit. Before he reached out in front of Dan Otero’s 2-2 pitch and slapped it down the left field line, Perez was the owner of the two worst at bats of the night.

In the eighth inning, he struck out on three pitches with the game-tying run in scoring position. He ended the 10^th by grounding out on two pitches with Eric Hosmer standing 90 feet away from the ALDS.

Perez was 0-5. Worse than that, he looked so bad at the plate he was inducing pity.

Now, he’s immortal – a star in the Kansas City night.

We had it all. We had Ned Yost managing his team into the ground, flying in the face of all logic and almost sinking the Royals’ ship by throwing a starter, Yordano Ventura, into relief with runners on in the sixth inning amid a myriad of head-scratching decisions.

The A’s might not have any offense, but on this night they had journeyman Brandon Moss hitting two home runs and driving in five.

We had Kansas City down 7-3 with six outs to go in their season, Jon Lester in a groove on the mound and the Royals looking like they’d fade quietly into the night.

Instead, we got an eighth inning rally that scored three runs – the last of which was scored on a wild pitch. We got the most stolen bases in a single inning in playoff history, an umpiring controversy, and Perez leaving the Royals leaving one in the ninth.

So we had Jarrod Dyson stealing third in the bottom of the ninth inning, running so hard he almost went straight through the bag. He scored on a sacrifice fly moments later.

We had Yost call on a reliever who was pitching for TCU in the College World Series in June throw two and a third of brilliant baseball, saw the A’s take the lead again in the 12^th, only to have Eric Hosmer triple off the top of the wall in center field and score on a crazy infield single to tie the game.

Then we got Perez, and a priceless shot of Brett with his hands on his head in utter disbelief.

If you’re counting, the A’s are now 0-7 in elimination games under Billy Beane. 0-7. Beane has said the playoffs are a crapshoot, and if they really are, then they shouldn’t be this painful.

This Oakland collapse is the kind that cripples franchises. Hopefully it doesn’t cripple the A’s. But the numbers are starting to tell a fascinating version of history.

This was the best baseball game since the Freese game in the 2011 World Series. The A’s and Royals went back and forth, and forth and back, and the tension and the horror and the anticipation all reached those points where it’s uncomfortable to be watching.

If you were a fan of either team, you died three thousand deaths. If you weren’t a fan of either team, you were hardly spared. It was horrible. It was beautiful. It was baseball.

Fitting then, that October officially started in the late innings.

Baseball can give us these kinds of games. In no other sport is the minutia so important. In no other sport do the details, the individual battles, the pressure, the pace and the setting so perfectly conspire to create that unbearable drama.

All sports have great games. But few great games are as great as great baseball games.

So hate baseball all you want. Proclaim its death every October. Harp on TV ratings, and the pace of the game, and its status as an outdated pastoral throwback to 1950 that won’t have any place in the sporting landscape of 2050.

For the record, you’re almost right. Regular season baseball, unless you’re at the park, is boring for, at a minimum, 150 games. If you can get twelve meaningful, exciting games out of an MLB regular season, you’re golden.

National TV ratings for baseball are down, have been down, and will continue to be down. The stars of the game have almost no visibility, and the majority of fans are older than 45.

Life’s always speeding up. Games that are fast and thrilling and have big stars and bright lights are growing. Football is going nowhere. Basketball has grown tremendously in the last twenty years, and soccer will continue to grow tremendously in the next twenty.

It doesn’t look good for baseball. The sport had to have known that when it let the steroid era bloom, giving the game – artificially – the some of that appeal of a basketball or football.

But baseball isn’t dying. There’s more money in baseball than ever before. Rights for local television contracts are up. So is attendance. That’s why there haven’t been any drastic changes in the way the game is played.

People still love their baseball teams. What’s happening is baseball is making a transition from being a national pastime to a local cornerstone.

So throw yourself into a playoff series in the coming weeks. The more you watch, the more you want to watch. Baseball certainly requires attention – one of its problems in this day in age – but that’s not a vice.

In baseball – in each at bat, each inning, each game, each series, and each postseason – the drama is applied in layers. When you know what’s come before, you’re that much more eager to know what will happen next.

Baseball is going nowhere. Because of all those summer days and nights that go so perfectly with a ballgame, sure. But baseball is really safe because nothing else can give us nights like the one we just lived.