Eric Hosmer’s late heroics in World Series Game 1 give Royals a shot of confidence

He stood and watched as more than 40,000 people around him breathed in and hoped. The momentum of a violent swing took him a step back across the plate. Eric Hosmer noticed the Mets outfielder go backward and that’s when he knew.

He strutted toward first base, partly out of habit, partly because the energy had to go somewhere. His brown maple bat pointed toward his friends in the Royals dugout and then the sky.

When the ball was caught, he flipped the bat away, threw his helmet down, screamed, and then waited for the hugs because a run would score and the Royals had — finally — beaten New York 5-4 in 14 innings in Game 1 of the World Series at Kauffman Stadium.

Alex Gordon was the first to rush at Hosmer. Salvador Perez lifted him off the ground. Then Alcides Escobar. Mike Moustakas. They all came, there to celebrate not just the win, but their cleanup hitter going from goat to game-winner in the span of ... well, jeez, it was probably at least two hours between his error in the eighth and his walk-off RBI in the 14th.

This is one of an ever shrinking number of unquantified actions on a big-league field, but it is quite possible that in more than a hundred years of the sport, no man has bat-flipped and swaggered a sacrifice fly more than Hosmer in this moment. Hosmer, a prolific bat-flipper himself, certainly has not.

“No, no, no, no, no, never,” he said. “When it’s a World Series game, and you walk it off, I guess that’s when it calls for it.”

The Royals won this game because of course they did, because this is the kind of game the Royals always seem to win in the postseason. They should’ve scored more runs, and they made mistakes along the way, but then of course Gordon elevates a 97-mph sinker 438 feet over the center-field wall, and of course scheduled Game 4 starter Chris Young pitches three innings of scoreless relief, and of course Hosmer gets a chance to make up for his error more than 5 hours after the first pitch — no World Series game has ever gone longer.

Why would it have been any different?

Everywhere else in baseball, a win like this in Game 1 of the World Series is an amazing thing.

Here, in Kansas City, with this team? It is Tuesday. Well, actually, Wednesday — this one creeped into the early morning.

Gordon’s homer erased a nightmare eighth inning in which Hosmer, the Gold Glove first baseman, made an error that allowed the go-ahead run to score, and two of the Royals’ best hitters had awful at bats with the tying run in scoring position.

Baseball’s playoffs have a way of mass producing drama, but even by those standards, these Royals are on a different level. The Wild Card game. The eighth inning in Houston. Game 6 against Toronto. At this point, if Lorenzo Cain isn’t scoring from first on a single and Wade Davis isn’t shutting it down with one of the great clutch relief appearances in recent baseball history, it just doesn’t rate.

“It was a lot of crazy moments in this game,” Cain said. “The power outage is definitely at the bottom.”

Right. The power outage. It delayed the game for a few minutes, and a technical issue momentarily meant an alternative feed was broadcast, which meant a lot of people made jokes about Joe Buck and, well, maybe on a different night that would be worth talking more about.

Not here, though. Hosmer has been something like the face or voice of the Royals for most of the last two years, the one who invited everyone to McFadden’s last year, the one to speak for the Royals after the tragedy with the firefighters this month, and the one whose haircut has inspired moms all across the metro to cringe when their boys ask for the Hoz.

He has long been the Royals player in whom many rival evaluators have seen the greatest potential, but on this night he made what might be his greatest professional mistake.

You’ve surely seen the play, probably more than once, and Hosmer repeated over and over again that he should have fielded Wilmer Flores’ chopper cleanly and easily. It was a tougher play than it looks like on video, hit at an angle and trajectory that requires a split-second decision between moving back for the big hop or taking the in-between. Hosmer took the in-between, and couldn’t get over quick enough to be behind the ball.

Maybe there was some strange spin on it, too, because it seemed to scoot past Hosmer’s glove quicker than he anticipated. The Mets took the lead. The stadium silenced. Afterward, Hosmer said he had no particular prior experience with a mistake like this on which to lean.

“Just my teammates, man,” he said. “I come in the dugout, and they make it seem like it didn’t even happen. Those are the guys you want to play with.”

Hosmer’s mistake was erased on Gordon’s home run, the kind of achievement that’s more difficult the more you think about it — to get a hard sinker like that through the cold air in one of baseball’s biggest ballparks — and in the kind of moment that makes it unforgettable.

Gordon already has done enough that he will be inducted to the Royals Hall of Fame as soon as he’s eligible. But this was, by far, the biggest home run of his professional career.

“I had no words,” Hosmer said. “All I could tell him was, ‘I want to hug you right now.’ That’s why he’s my hero.”

A TV camera caught that moment between Hosmer and Gordon. His actual words were more to the point, and included an expletive. He’s an emotional player, anyway, but the path from feeling like you let in the game-winning run on an error to bat-flipping your walk-off RBI is a long one.

“These guys in here,” Hosmer said. “This is why we’re the best team in the world right here.”

The Royals still need three more wins to make those words true, but you can pardon Hosmer for the slip. History is kind to teams that win the first World Series game. A year ago, the Royals lost Game 1. Today, they feel much more confident. Well, they feel drained. Exhausted.

But also confident.

This story was originally published October 28, 2015 at 12:47 AM with the headline "Eric Hosmer’s late heroics in World Series Game 1 give Royals a shot of confidence."