Royals’ season will be defined by October, not September

So your Royals abruptly went splat to lose nine of 14 games into mid-September. With that, a season of promise was punctured and doomed.

The losses were amassed in a variety of exasperating, worrisome ways, and woe and panic bubbled up in a fragile fan base because there was no way to put this all back together again.

In the middle of it all, turkey vultures literally were perched on team banners at Kauffman Stadium, figuratively boding the end.

But enough about the 2014 Royals …

Yep, that was the condemned skid the Royals were in at almost precisely this stage a year ago.

You know, right before they found themselves down the stretch to creep into the playoffs for the first time in 29 years and then reinvented themselves by rampaging to eight straight wins before falling to San Francisco in seven games in the World Series.

None of which necessarily has any application to how the Royals had been trudging along going into Saturday night, as losers of 10 of their last 14.

But all of which is a public-service reminder that what you might be agonizing over now has a time-honored way of becoming irrelevant once the postseason starts.

For all the stressing out about home-field advantage and top seeds, for instance, the 2014 postseason was major testimony to why it’s not particularly crucial.

In a World Series made up of two wild-card teams for the first time, the Royals’ journey alone was unfathomable.

All the more so a few hours into the American League Wild Card Game against Oakland.

The grim forensics when they trailed 7-3 after seven innings included a 4 percent chance of coming back merely to win that game, according to Baseball-Reference.com’s “win probability chart,” and no major-league team ever had come from farther behind that late to win a playoff game.

But for argument’s sake, let’s call that rally a fluke or a miracle and leave it out of the broader equation.

The simple truth is that how teams play in September, and where they finish in the overall standings, is only a negligible indicator of who will reach or win the World Series.

Since the advent of the wild-card in the 1995 playoffs, only 15 of the 40 teams with the best records in their leagues reached the World Series.

For that matter, only four of 20 teams that had the best regular-season record in baseball in that span have won the World Series (that doesn’t include the 2013 Cardinals, who shared that distinction with the World Series champion Red Sox).

Meanwhile, 12 wild-card teams have navigated their way to the World Series — and six have won it.

To review in neon lights, then:

In the wild-card era, more wild-card teams — the ones that barely made the playoffs — have won the World Series than teams that had the best records going into the playoffs.

More fun with numbers: Nine World Series-bound teams among the 40 in the last 20 years didn’t even have winning records in September.

And 22 of the 40 experienced funks in September semi-comparable to what the Royals have been going through now — trends that were crummy enough (six losses in seven games, five in a row, etc.) to leave fans wondering what was up.

Those included the 2014 Giants (a 4-9 September slump) and the Royals, who after rallying in the final weeks and surviving Oakland were going to get squashed by the Angels.

After all, the Angels were the presumptive favorite to win the World Series what with having the best record in baseball (98-64) and all.

Next thing you know, molasses-slow Billy Butler in game three of the AL Division Series is stealing second base and doing the vroom thing a la Jarrod Dyson to punctuate the Royals romp to a sweep.

Then, presto, The Dunce (Ned Yost) and his one-dimensional pieces swamp The Chessmaster (Baltimore’s Buck Showalter) and his … and it was on to the World Series.

Of course, as the saying goes, if you torture the numbers long enough, you can get them to confess to anything.

These ones provide a consoling context, yes.

But another set of numbers and another point of emphasis could make a different case.

And this isn’t at all to suggest a sequel is inevitable or even likely.

It’s just to say absolutely nothing can be known now.

Last season happened because of a unique confluence of circumstances, and every season every team takes on a fresh identity and forms its own chemistry even if there is great continuity like these Royals have.

Concerns about how — and why— they have dipped recently are legitimate.

That’s especially so when it comes to Johnny Cueto and the wobbly starting rotation and massaging the treasured back end of the bullpen amid the diminishment of closer Greg Holland.

This also all looks different because the standard has changed radically. In 2014, it was enough for the cuddly underdogs to get in the playoffs. Everything else was whipped cream.

Now the bar is winning the World Series, an expectation set by where last season ended and by the Royals for so long leading the American League in wins.

(Still true as of this writing, by the way, even though it was down to one game over Toronto entering Saturday’s games.).

With the prism turned this way, anything short of reaching the World Series will feel like a colossal failure now … as warped as that might seem after where this all stood a year ago.

Then again, this team is better and more proven in almost every way than last season’s team at this point.

The 2014 version at this stage was in desperation mode just to get to the playoffs and surely wouldn’t get far because of so few players with postseason experience.

A year later, you might make the case that the Royals’ biggest issue of late has been the first-world issue of how to manage a whopping double-digit divisional lead.

Meanwhile, the entire likely postseason 25-man roster will have had intense playoff experience.

Nearly half of them have been All-Stars, a substantial change from 2014 between players added from last season and the flock of Royals named to the 2015 AL team.

So there is a lot to like about this team yet, warts and all, and how you want to look at it between now and the playoff is in the eye of the beholder — a living, breathing, fluid Rorschach test.

So go fetal, rant and disavow the Royals if it helps you through the next couple weeks … though maybe you should come out from under your bunker to witness them clinch their first division title in 30 years sometime this week at Kauffman.

All of this is just a prelude, though.

The signature of their season isn’t being applied with this penciling now.

It will be etched indelibly in October, and perhaps even into November, after a postseason that is its own distinct season.

“Nobody knows what’s going to happen,” Yost took to saying as the Royals felt their way last year.

And that’s the one thing we do know now.

This story was originally published September 19, 2015 at 3:26 PM with the headline "Royals’ season will be defined by October, not September."