Bad decisions and indecision cost the Royals Game 3 - MLB

NEW YORK — With one out, one in and runners on the corners in the bottom of the sixth, Royals reliever Franklin Morales fielded a comebacker off the bat of Curtis Granderson. Morales looked to second, looked home, looked to third and then, having thoroughly and excruciatingly assessed his many options, turned back to second and threw the damn ball away. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. A fielder’s choice in this case and now there were two runs in and the rout was on.

By that point it didn’t really matter. Morales was already wobbling like Michael Spinks in the Tyson fight, having given up an RBI single to a man who hadn’t swung a bat in a real game in over a month in Juan Uribe. Morales’ panicked indecision is the visual we’ll always remember from that inning, but the decision to have Morales in the game in the first place was probably more significant.

Morales is about as low on the Royals’ depth chart as an active guy can be and he had no business pitching in a 5-3 game. Not with Luke Hochevar having just pitched a nice fifth inning, striking out two and needing only 15 pitches to do it. Not with a Royals team behind him which has treated two-run deficits as tie games and one-run deficits as leads since October began. There were any number of things Ned Yost could have done in that situation, but the thing he chose to do — bringing in Morales — was about as far from a threatening move he had at his disposal.

Maybe Yost knew this game was different, though, and that the script of the movie we’ve been watching for the first two games [“Relentless” starring The Kansas City Royals!] had been torn up. Or at least replaced with new one for a night. One which featured the Mets hitting home runs again. Remember that from a couple of weeks ago? David Wright hit a two-run dinger in the first and Curtis Granderson hit a two-run shot in the third. There were dinks and doinks that fell in for the Mets and not the Royals this time. There were defensive miscues that befell the Royals and not the Mets. It was a very different night than the previous three we’ve seen: two with Royals wins, one off-night with lots of existential angst for Mets fans.

Also different here: the starting pitching. On Tuesday night Matt Harvey gave up 3 runs in 6 innings. Tonight Noah Syndergaard gave up 3 runs in 6 innings. But Harvey only struck out two and got eight swings-and-misses. Syndergaard, in contrast, struck out six and got 16 swings-and-misses. Even before Syndergaard settled down from his shaky start and retired 12 batters at one point, he felt more in control of the game than either Harvey or Jacob deGrom ever did in the first two games. He gave the Royals fewer chances to exploit the Mets defense and, in turn, the anxieties of the 44,781 fans in Citi Field.

After six innings Addison Reed took over for Syndergaard and breezed. Then Tyler Clippard did the same. By that time we had seen the Franklin Morales show, followed by some gratuitous Kelvin Herrera. Why was he pitching and not putative mopup man Kris Medlen? Maybe because Medlen could be needed to back up Chris Young tomorrow or provide an emergency start on Sunday in case Yordano Ventura doesn’t make it back? That’s plausible. Oh, wait, then Yost used Medlen anyway in the eighth. I have no idea. I’m not sure that Yost did either.

And I don’t know who’s going to win this World Series. It could be either team now. All I know is that if the Mets win it the sixth inning of Game 3 will be one Mets fans long remember and one that Royals fans are already trying to forget. I also know that if the Royals win it, their hitters and starting pitchers had best give Ned Yost as few chances to make decisions as possible.

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. – The first thing that Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman thinks about when he wakes up each morning is how the club, stuck in what seems like an interminable rebuild, will play on that particular day.

Not where they will play four or five years down the road.

Yet given the modest expectations for a team that lost nearly 100 games a year ago, it makes sense many Royals fans are just as interested – quite possibly more so – in the plans for a downtown ballpark than whether infielder Bobby Witt Jr. can double down on his brilliant rookie season or pitcher Brady Singer can truly become a staff ace.

That’s why Sherman’s second thought probably moves to the downtown ballpark, too.

“This is a huge decision, and I look at it as maybe the most important decision we’ll make as long as we have the privilege of stewarding this team,” Sherman said before the Royals held a final workout Wednesday ahead of opening day. “I’m probably as anxious as you to get moving on that, but it’s a complicated process.”

The Royals have called Kauffman Stadium home since the sister to Arrowhead Stadium, the home of the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs, opened 50 years ago next month.

And while most stadiums are replaced because they have become outdated, the unique, space-aged look of Kauffman Stadium – built during an era in which teams trended toward impersonal, multisport concrete donuts for their homes – remains beloved by Royals fans and visitors alike.

The problem is that despite numerous renovations over the years, the very concrete holding the ballpark together has begun to crumble in places. The cost simply to repair and maintain the ballpark has become prohibitive.

So with the decision essentially made for them to build an entirely new stadium, the Royals revealed plans to build an entire development in the same mold of The Battery Atlanta, where the Braves built Truist Park, and the Ballpark Village in St. Louis, where the new Busch Stadium is merely the centerpiece of a whole entertainment district.

No site has been secured, but several of the most promising are in downtown Kansas City, where the Power & Light District along with T-Mobile Center have spearheaded a successful era of urban renewal.

Sherman has said that private funds would cover the majority of the stadium cost and the entire village, each carrying a price tag of about $1 billion.

But if any public funding will be used, as it was to build and maintain Kauffman Stadium, then it would need to be voted upon, and the earliest that it could show up on a ballot would be August.

“You look at Atlanta, they took some raw ground – they started with 85 acres – and that has been a complete home run,” said Sherman, who purchased the Royals in August 2019, shortly before the pandemic wreaked havoc on team finances.

“This is one of the reasons we want to do this: That’s helped the Braves become more competitive,” Sherman said of the vast potential for increased revenue for one of the smallest-market teams in baseball. “They have locked up and extended the core of their future, and the Braves are in a great position from a baseball standpoint.”

So perhaps the first two thoughts Sherman has each day – about performance and the future – are one and the same.

When it comes to the team itself, the Royals were largely quiet throughout the winter, though that was by design.

Rather than spending heavily on free agents that might help them win a few more games, they decided to stay the course with a promising young roster in the hopes that the development of those players would yield better results.

In fact, Sherman said, the club has been discussing extensions for some of the Royals’ foundational pieces – presumably Witt, who was fourth in voting for AL rookie of the year, and Singer, who was 10-5 with a 3.23 ERA last season.

“We’re having conversations about that as we speak,” Sherman said. “We have a number of young players that we’re trying to evaluate and we’re talking to their representatives about what might work.”

Just because the Royals’ roster largely looks the same, that doesn’t mean nothing has changed. The Royals fired longtime general manager Dayton Moore in September and moved J.J. Picollo to the role, then fired manager Mike Matheny in October and replaced him with longtime Indians and Rays coach Matt Quatraro.

Sherman said the new voices created a palpable energy in spring training that he hopes carries into the regular season.

“When we acquired the team, we had three primary objectives,” Sherman said. “One was to win more games; we’re working on that. The second was to secure the future; that’s what (the stadium) is. And the third was to do good in the community.

“But the first priority,” he said, “is really the on-field product. That’s what really lifts everything else up.”