Royals can shrug off injuries now

Ninety minutes or so before game time Saturday at Kauffman Stadium, the kerfuffle between the Royals and A’s over Brett Lawrie’s reckless slide into Alcides Escobar on Friday had disintegrated into this:

Sleuthing around each guy’s cellphone to try to discern the truth about whether the A’s’ Lawrie had indeed texted an explanation to the Royals’ Escobar (who said he never heard from him) and whether Escobar had, in fact, responded in Spanish, “That’s stupid, you did it on purpose.”

Never mind that this all might have gone smoother if Lawrie had, say, sought out Escobar in person, and that the intriguing question remains … who did send back that text Lawrie showed a San Francisco reporter?

The juvenile nonsense — and the looming question of when Yordano Ventura would nail Lawrie with a pitch Saturday — was an amusing distraction from the essence of the matter before the Royals’ 0-5 loss to Oakland on Saturday.

Although Escobar was fortunate to suffer merely a strained knee expected to keep him out only days, the Royals were relegated to starting someone else (Christian Colon) at shortstop Saturday for the first time in 188 games.

This, on the same day the Royals had to place All-Star closer Greg Holland on the 15-day disabled list with a strained right pectoral muscle that may or may not signal more trouble ahead.

All of which came days after starting right fielder Alex Rios was consigned to the 15-day DL with a broken left hand and as All-Star left fielder Alex Gordon still is regaining his form from wrist surgery.

But what once would have seemed signs of the apocalypse largely elicited a collective ho-hum — or certainly less buzz than the soap opera surrounding Lawrie and Escobar.

There’s a good reason for that.

The Royals have engendered faith and credibility after their romp to game seven of the World Series in 2014 and 7-0 start this season, and they have cultivated the depth to stay afloat.

“Before, two years ago, something like this would have really, really hurt us,” manager Ned Yost said. “But we think now that we’re covered in just about every area that we need to be covered in, and (general manager Dayton Moore made) sure that if somebody does get hurt, we don’t miss a beat.”

Not missing a beat is stretching it some.

Escobar is a remarkable shortstop, among the best in the game, who seems to have found a comfort zone in the leadoff spot. Colon is a more natural second or third baseman, somewhat out of position at short, and only had 49 big-league at-bats entering the game Saturday.

Rios entered the season with 165 home runs and 762 RBIs and showed signs he had put an injury-riddled 2014 performance behind him with a homer, eight RBIs and a .321 average in seven games.

His replacements are a platoon of 29-year-old rookie Paulo Orlando and Jarrod Dyson, who had played in right once in 354 games before Wednesday.

Holland has 97 saves over the last two-plus seasons; his stand-ins are the imposing Wade Davis and Kelvin Herrera, who nonetheless have combined for nine career saves.

And capable as they are, minus Holland makes for one less cog in the devastating H-D-H formula that made the Royals all but invincible after the sixth inning in 2014.

Just the same, this rash isn’t the cause for panic it would have been as recently as last year at this time.

Way back then, the Royals still were in the clutches of uncertainty and development after a 28-year-plus playoff drought, and they were still groping for definition and identity.

They got all that and more in their playoff run, which largely was furnished by a ripening young nucleus, stupefying defense and the berserk bullpen, and they seem only to have enhanced themselves since.

That once-emerging core (among others, Eric Hosmer, Sal Perez, Lorenzo Cain, Mike Moustakas, Ventura, Danny Duffy and … Escobar) now stands front-and-center.

The departed Billy Butler and Nori Aoki have been outplayed early, anyway, by Kendrys Morales and Rios, as the Royals overall have unfurled a more explosive attack symbolized by 11 home runs in their first 10 games after hitting 95 in 162 in 2014.

How sustainable that all is remains a matter of conjecture, of course, and it’s also too early to know whether the starting pitching can match that of 2014.

After all, the next time Edinson Volquez pitches 200 innings will be the first, so there’s no way to assume he’ll be able to furnish the same sorts of innings that James Shields did.

But Volquez has had a promising first two starts (15.2 innings, four earned runs) that help reinforce the belief that the Royals still can lean on what most distinguishes them: score enough runs and stop enough to get to the late innings with a lead that then will become iron-clad.

At least for a few weeks, that figures to hold true even without Holland, whose injury is exactly why the Royals in the offseason needed to keep the back-end group together … and ultimately reinforce it with the return of Luke Hochevar.

Davis and Herrera can buoy this until Holland returns, and that means that all involved figure to treat Holland’s injury with all due caution instead of succumbing to temptation to rush him back.

“I don’t expect it to be a whole long time,” Yost said. “Hopefully not too much longer after the 15 days.”

Not so long ago, even that would have been a crushing issue for a fragile, thin team, especially combined with an anticipated monthlong loss of Rios and the presumably brief loss of Escobar.

Now it’s manageable, and an opportunity to get Colon, Orlando and Dyson needed playing time and further develop Davis and Herrera in more intensified roles.

This is not a trend the Royals can afford to continue contributing to, of course, but it’s also one they’ll withstand because of how they’ve been bolstered all around — rendering it a subplot to the Lawrie-Escobar spectacle.

This story was originally published April 18, 2015 at 9:40 PM with the headline "Royals can shrug off injuries now."