Royals’ magical victory over the Indians makes it feel like 2015 again

The comparisons have often turned to questions which have sometimes turned to indictments that most any younger sibling can relate to.

Why can’t these Royals be more like those Royals?

These Royals are the hanging-around-.500, fringes-of-the-playoff-race, reaching-for-magic-and-only-grabbing-dirt bunch that in many years would be the toast of Kansas City.

Those Royals were the jerseys-on-fire, lapping-the-division, brawling-every-Tuesday World Series champions who changed baseball here for a generation of fans.

And, well, after nearly four months and 92 games, these Royals may have, possibly, maybe, don’t-say-it-too-loudly-just-yet had their 2015 moment.

“This team, man, it’s just so clutch,” Christian Colon says. “Clutchest group of guys I’ve ever been a part of. You give a little, and we run with it.”

The Royals beat the Indians 7-3, all of their runs coming in a wild eighth inning, the whole thing playing out in front of 38,042 people here on Monday. They had been shutout for seven innings, and then scored seven runs in around 20 minutes. Much of the crowd stayed late, after the last out, to see another Gatorade bath. Two, actually.

They have been waiting for a moment like this. Believing a moment like this was coming. They don’t have to think too far back to remember a time when moments like this seemed to happen every night.

You remember that too, right?

The Royals were done. Shut out for seven innings by Cleveland’s starter, the talented Corey Kluber. He left before the eighth inning started with cramps, and the Royals have never needed much of an opening to create something wild.

The first two runners reach base. Christian Colon comes on as a pinch hitter, and he is told to bunt. But the first two pitches miss, so Colon swings at the third, and drives it past the outfielders. Tie game.

A few batters later, Paulo Orlando shoots a curveball into left field and another run scores. Royals lead.

Then, two batters later, Jarrod Dyson hits the first pitch he sees into the right field seats for the first grand slam of his career. In 1,227 at bats, Dyson had homered just six times. That’s one for every 205 times up. One of the homers was inside-the-park. With the bases loaded, he was just 4-for-19, a .211 average, with no extra base hits.

They say the best part of coming to the ballpark is that you’ll see something you’ve never seen before, but it’s usually not quite this obvious.

Your chance of blindly guessing a stranger’s birthday in two tries is greater than your chance of seeing Dyson hit a ball over the fence.

Of course, there is a 100 percent chance that if Dyson does hit a home run, he will complete something like seven different celebrations once he gets back to the dugout.

“Those don’t happen to be that often, so I have to take advantage of that,” he says.

The inning took so long and changed so much that Chris Young began it warming up as a sort of white flag to finish a loss, and ended it coming on in a blowout win.

The whole thing had this strange air of familiarity. This is how the Royals won so many of those games last year, both during the regular season and playoffs. They turned losses into wins, heartbreak into party, and they did it so often you became surprised when it didn’t happen.

On Monday, the rally started on a nothing, 70-foot, infield single by Alcides Escobar. You can see harder hit balls off a Little Tikes t-ball set.

“When Esky got that hit,” manager Ned Yost says, “I turned to (assistant coaches) and said, ’This is how it starts, right here.’ Something like that, that’s how these things start for us. Especially at home.”

Yost has always been the Royals’ biggest believer. Over the season’s first 91 games, it had become increasingly easy for fans to lose that same belief. Much of this is earned, the Royals bringing on themselves. They entered Monday 14th among 15 American League teams in runs, and 12th in starters’ ERA.

Injuries have been particularly brutal. Lorenzo Cain, their most dynamic player. Alex Gordon, their most respected. Mike Moustakas, the Royals’ best power threat at the time of his knee injury and in many ways the personification of their resilience. On and on.

The Royals are flawed, but they were flawed last year, too. Not as flawed as they are now — particularly when accounting for this year’s injuries and last year’s trades — but still. The story the Royals told about themselves, and the story that was largely told about them, was one of belief and resiliency and energy.

They could make up for their lack of power by putting the ball in play and running like hell. They could make up for an average rotation by shutting down the late innings and believing that even a four-run deficit in the eighth inning of an elimination game in Houston is no big deal.

But this group does carry the same pride from a year ago. The same stubbornness. Those things don’t leave. This is a group that largely joined a franchise used to losing, and turned it into one where missing the playoffs would be a disappointment.

They are used to hearing doubts, and they are used to overcoming them. They have faced worse than what they see in front of them now. They have slain bigger monsters, and executed greater escapes.

This particular escape comes at an important time. At the moment, the Royals are seven games behind the Indians in the AL Central, and four games out of the wild card. The trade deadline is 12 games and 13 days away, and club officials do not yet know if they will be buyers or sellers.

This stretch here will determine so much. Make up ground, and a front office that tends toward the aggressive is more likely to bring in help. Fall back, and the temptations from what many in baseball are calling an extreme seller’s market could take hold.

So much of this season has been about the Royals trying to recapture that old feeling. This is just one game, of course, and the Royals will have the same flaws against the Indians on Tuesday that have dragged them all season.

But one game is how it always starts, and these next 13 days are when the Royals really need it to start.

This story was originally published July 18, 2016 at 11:59 PM with the headline "Royals’ magical victory over the Indians makes it feel like 2015 again."