More than heart: Why the Royals are baseball’s most dangerous team when behind

The hallway outside the visitors clubhouse is quiet. Most of the reporters are in the clubhouse, but out here Royals coach Mike Jirschele is leaning against a wall in a quiet conversation. The Royals are here for a lot of reasons. Talent, timing, drive. But lately, there’s been a lot of focus on one reason in particular. The comebacks.

The other day, after the Royals came back twice (including the bottom of the ninth), the headline on a national website called the Game 1 win “epic.” But, this week, two Royals officials ranked it the fourth most exhilarating win of this postseason.

In Game 6 against the Blue Jays, Lorenzo Cain scored the winning run from first on a single and Wade Davis turned in one of the great relief appearances in recent baseball history. That was six days after a pop-up dropped against David Price and the Royals broke down the door with a five-run seventh.

And neither of those compare to being four runs down with six outs to go in an elimination game against Houston. The key play was a tricky groundball up the middle that could have been a double play, but instead bounced past Astros shortstop Carlos Correa, scoring two runs.

Back to Jirschele. He managed a lot of these guys in the minor leagues. They didn’t have as many comebacks then, mostly because they beat people so thoroughly, but he’s seen enough to not be surprised. Ask him if he thinks the Royals would have beaten the Astros without Correa’s error, and you get the smile and nod of a man who knows better.

“It’s almost like you’re waiting for it,” he said. “They’ve always felt that way. They’ve never given up.”

The Royals and Mets will play Game 3 of the World Series here at Citi Field on Friday, with the Royals holding a 2-0 lead they earned on the same small margins they exploited to get to baseball’s biggest stage.

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The Royals have won nine games in these playoffs. They have trailed in the fifth inning or later in all but three of them.

This is not a fluke as much as it is the amplification of a season-long trend. The Royals had 41 comeback wins in the regular season. No American League team had more.

Comebacks are stacking on top of comebacks, enough that Royals manager Ned Yost comes up blank when asked his most memorable comeback before last year’s Wild Card Game.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know. I can’t remember. Honestly, there’s nothing that sticks out in my mind, so it couldn’t have been much of a great comeback, right?”

That is changing now, and changing completely. And it is changing as much because of design as anything that would be set on top of string music in the movie.

When the men who make the Royals go are asked to explain all of their comebacks they often lean on the emotional. That’s a fun story line, too, and not without substance. The Royals do play hard, and they don’t give up, and those are important qualities for a team to come from behind.

But the Royals are, in very real ways, fundamentally built for comeback wins. The focus is usually on the intangible, but the tangible is a large chunk of the equation, too.

Perhaps the most important factor here is the Royals’ bullpen. The four most-used relievers of this postseason — Wade Davis, Kelvin Herrera, Luke Hochevar, and, actually, Chris Young — have given up two earned runs in 31  1/3 innings. That’s a 0.57 ERA. Comebacks are much easier when the opponent’s run total is a stationary target.

It also helps that the Royals make lots and lots of contact, and they have lots and lots of athletes. This means the defense is forced to make a lot of plays, and do it in important spots knowing one mistake can blow open a game.

Hosmer hit the single that scored Cain from first, and he hit it with two strikes. The Royals have the most hits and highest batting average with two strikes of any team in this postseason. They led baseball in two-strike hitting during the regular season, too.

“That’s our style,” Eric Hosmer said. “Aggressive in the box, aggressive on the bases.”

The other factor working in the Royals’ favor is that their lineup is one of the most balanced in baseball. They do not have a stretch of sluggers like the meat of Toronto’s order, for instance, but they do have Gordon, who figures to sign a contract worth $15 million to $20 million a year this offseason, batting eighth.

That means the rally can start anywhere in the lineup. Against the Blue Jays, you focus on getting Ryan Goins and Ben Revere out ahead of Josh Donaldson. Against the Mets, you do the math on when Daniel Murphy is due up next. Against the Royals, the run is always around the next corner.

To prove the point, hitting coach Dale Sveum mentions that Alex Rios — the No. 9 hitter — has been pivotal in each of the Royals’ defining rallies. Against Houston, he led off the eighth with a single (and, actually, walked again later in the inning). In Game 2 against Toronto, he drove in the insurance run with a single to center.

No comeback is completely manufactured by a team. You need some luck, or some mistakes by the other team, and on this point the Royals have had more than their fair share. Not just Correa’s error, or the ball dropping between Goins and Jose Bautista. The Royals have faced pitchers who’ve put too many pitches over the middle of the plate (hello, Jacob deGrom), teams that’ve made strategic blunders (good to see you, Toronto), and benefited from some borderline calls (though others have gone against them).

But in baseball as in life, those lucky breaks don’t mean anything if you don’t take advantage. The Royals, beyond all of the talk about their determination or heart, are fundamentally built in a way that makes them baseball’s most prolific team in taking advantage.

This story was originally published October 29, 2015 at 8:26 PM with the headline "More than heart: Why the Royals are baseball’s most dangerous team when behind."