The 2014 Wild Card Game: details from that Royals win over Oakland remain magnificent
The 2014 American League Wild Card Game between the Oakland A’s and Kansas City Royals was recently replayed on TV. I watched it, of course, for at least two reasons:
I was in the Kauffman Stadium pressbox that night and never heard what the TV guys were saying, and ...
I’m bored out of damn mind.
So with the benefit of hindsight and a few things I learned after the game was played, here are some of the key moments from that wild, wild game.
Jon Lester and ‘the thing’
Once in a while a ballplayer gets the yips and has trouble making routine throws. It can end a career and is considered so serious and contagious that ballplayers just call it “the thing”: they treat it like an angry god that doesn’t like it when his or her name is said out loud.
The Royals’ coaching staff suspected Oakland A’s starting pitcher Jon Lester had “the thing” when it came to throwing the ball to a base.
Weird but true: Some pitchers can hit the outside corner from 60 feet, 6 inches but struggle to hit the broad side of a barn if they have to throw to first.
Coming into this particular game, Lester hadn’t picked off a batter in three years and the Royals were determined to make him throw the ball to a base or take advantage of his reluctance to do so.
The failed double steal
In the bottom of the first inning, with two outs, the score 2-1 A’s and an 0-2 count on Alex Gordon, the Royals decided to put pressure on Lester.
Billy Butler was on first base, Eric Hosmer was on third.
The timing made sense: That season, after Lester got hitters into an 0-2 count, those opposing batters hit just .137 off him. And Gordon did not have a history of hitting Lester well in any count, much less 0-2.
After the double-steal failed and Hosmer was thrown out at home, then-KC manager Ned Yost gave an in-game interview and said Butler left first base too soon.
After the game I heard a different story.
I was told the plan was for Billy to take off for second base while Lester still had the ball in his hand, forcing Lester to turn and make a throw under pressure from the mound to second base. Apparently the Royals thought the chances of Lester chucking the ball into center field were better than Gordon getting a hit down 0-2.
But Billy stopped running between bases, which allowed Lester to take his time, run closer to second and shorten his throw.
When Hosmer finally headed for home, it was too late: He collided with Oakland catcher Geovany Soto and the guys calling the game on TV buried the Royals for a attempting a bush-league play.
Soto’s thumb injury
In 2014, Geovany Soto played in just 24 games. But he threw out 43 percent of the runners who tried to steal a base, which is awesome. That same season, A’s catcher Derek Norris threw out 17 percent of the runners who tried to steal a base, which ain’t so hot.
After his collision with Hosmer, Soto took another at-bat and caught one more inning. But he could be seen on the telecast comparing his thumbs side-by-side; apparently he decided one of them was the wrong size and left the game.
Norris replaced Soto.
The TV guys thought that might actually help the A’s because Norris was Lester’s regular catcher, but after Norris came into the game the Royals stole six bases — one of those steals, by Christian Colon in the 12th inning, allowed him to score the winning run on a Salvador Perez single.
The “bush-league” double-steal knocked Soto out of the game, turned loose the Royals’ base-runners and was one of the reasons the Royals came back to win.
Speed equals pressure
The A’s were clearly worried about the Royals’ speed and made several defensive mistakes that night when they got in too big a hurry.
Shortstop Jed Lowrie missed a couple of grounders when he rushed the play, Norris failed to catch a pitchout and, when Lester was forced to field a bunt, his throw missed the Oakland first baseman.
Getting the ball in play and forcing the opponent to play defense was the game-plan the Royals would use to win the 2014 Wild Card Game and the 2015 World Series.
Yordano Ventura vs. Brandon Finnegan
In the sixth inning, Yost pulled starter James Shields (probably because there were no outs, two runners on and Oakland’s Brandon Moss was at the plate).
In his first AB, Moss homered; in his second, he hit a laser beam to Hosmer.
Yost went to Yordano Ventura in relief, and when Moss homered, the Royals skipper was criticized for putting a young pitcher in an unfamiliar situation.
But in the 10th inning, Yost put another young pitcher in an unfamiliar situation: Brandon Finnegan. The Royals rookie had a total of seven innings in the big leagues under his belt to that point and wound up pitching 2 1/3 innings of relief ... and because the Finnegan decision worked out, nobody said anything negative about Yost’s decision to insert him into such a high-leverage situation.
Willingham’s big hit
Think about Royals’ heroes in that Wild Card Game and you think about Hosmer, Lorenzo Cain, Perez and the rest of the gang, but who thinks about Josh Willingham?
Hey, I covered the Royals that night and totally forgot about Willingham’s big hit until I watched the replay.
With the Royals down by one in the ninth, Willingham led off the inning with a single and was immediately replaced by Jarrod Dyson, who eventually came around to score, tie the game and send it to extra innings.
Turns out that this was Willingham’s last hit in the big leagues. Man, he finished with a big one.
Perez: goat to hero
Everybody remembers Perez’ game-winning hit, so it’s easy to forget that up until that point he was having a lousy night at the plate.
In the eighth inning with one down and Terrance Gore on third, Perez flailed at three sliders — two out of the zone — and didn’t come close to connecting on any of them. With the tying run on third base, he failed to do the most important thing in that situation: get the ball in play.
Had the Royals lost there, we would’ve been complaining about missed opportunities and lousy plate discipline.
In the 12th inning Perez chased yet another slider, but this time he managed to hook it down the third-base line to win the game and proceed from goat to hero.
The aftermath
That wild-card game lived up to its ‘wild’ side: 12 innings, 13 pitchers and 17 runs in a contest that lasted a whopping 4 hours, 45 minutes.
In the clubhouse afterward, somebody asked me what headline I was going to put on my story and Jason Frasor, the winning pitcher that night, suggested I call it the best game I ever saw, which is pretty much what I said.
And you know what?
It wasn’t all that bad the second time I watched it, either.