With a chance to administer a knockout punch, Royals falter

Before Friday night at Citi Field, 23 teams had taken three-games-to-none World Series leads.

All 23 went on to win the World Series.

The intoxicating scenario of leading 3-0 wouldn’t have ensured the Royals their second world championship and first in 30 years, and becoming pioneers wouldn’t have been impossible for the New York Mets.

But the advantage would have been somewhere between impregnable and, oh, infinite for the Royals.

And the context would have been fraught with hazards for the Mets if they couldn’t apply a tourniquet to the Royals’ 2-0 advantage in Game 3.

Or as Mets manager Terry Collins bluntly put it before the game: “You’ve got to win four anyway. Start now.”

So the Mets did, at least the “start now” part, clobbering the Royals 9-3 by exposing the prevailing volatility of Kansas City starter Yordano Ventura (five runs in 3 1/3 innings) and pouncing on reliever Franklin Morales for four runs in the sixth inning.

Ventura “just wasn’t sharp,” manager Ned Yost said.

The Mets also did it by muzzling the Royals at the plate after a second-inning uprising threatened to banish Mets starter Noah Syndergaard back to Asgard, or wherever the pitcher nicknamed Thor is from.

“If you’re going to get a really good pitcher,” Yost said, “you better get him early.”

The game had an ugly start in the eyes of the Royals, who believed Syndergaard threw at Escobar’s head on the first pitch of the game to make good on his vow he had a trick up his sleeve to counter Escobar’s tendency to swing at the first pitch.

Outfielder Alex Rios called it a “weak” move, with little doubt it was intentional, and first baseman Eric Hosmer said, “Any time a guy throws at one of your teammates, it’s not going to go over very easy. Of course we’re going to be mad. Of course, we’re going to be upset.

“But we’ll find a way to get back at him.”

Syndergaard, for his part, might as well have said, “Yeah … so what?” acknowledging that he was trying to make Escobar uncomfortable and that he’d accomplished that.

The result engaged the reset button on the series.

It’s still a fine advantage for the Royals, yes, and 55 of 82 teams that led 2-1 in the World Series went on to win.

But that’s a door pried wide open compared to what it would have been at 3-0 — and even how it looked at 2-0.

Entering a game commenced by Billy Joel singing the national anthem, the fragile New York state of mind was keenly represented on the Friday cover of the self-proclaimed “hometown newspaper,” the New York Daily News:

“Mr. Fret” was the sensational headline over a rendering of a distressed Mr. Met, who was plopped on a couch spilling to a therapist prompting him to talk about his mother.

The more upbeat subheadline declared: “Even shrinks say, ‘Ya still gotta believe!’ ”

If actual belief was a lot to ask Mets fans before the game, they managed to forage for and cling to vestiges of hope wherever they could find it.

On social media and among themselves, including my New York-raised, Mets-brainwashed brother, many Mets fans were relegated to the consolation of nostalgia that they hoped stood as precedents.

When the Mets won the World Series in 1969, after all, it began with Hall of Famer Tom Seaver serving up a home run to Baltimore’s first batter, Don Buford.

Never mind that it was on Seaver’s second pitch, not the first one, as the Royals’ Alcides Escobar smacked for an inside-the-park homer off Matt Harvey in Game 1 on Tuesday.

When the Mets won the World Series against Boston in 1986, they not only did so after losing the first two games but by losing the first two games by the exact same margins — one and six runs.

As it happens, the Mets won Game 3 of that World Series by … six runs.

But the flimsy fodder for wishful thinking briefly looked like it would further erode on Friday.

The Royals amassed six hits in the first two innings to take a 3-2 lead, but in the third inning the Mets’ Curtis Granderson hit the second homer of the game off Ventura.

In his last World Series outing, Game 6 in 2014, Ventura had pitched seven scoreless innings to help the Royals avert elimination days after his friend Oscar Taveras had died in a car accident.

It was a profound effort under intense duress that helped him earn an opening day start and a five-year, $23 million deal.

But Ventura’s season has been pocked by inconsistencies and emotional oddities and lapses that have rendered his outings more of a variable than anyone would have expected.

That showed up an inning later, when he was removed from the game after three successive hits, the last of which was enabled by his inexplicable failure to cover first base.

“You could tell he was starting to get a little flustered,” said Yost, who pulled Ventura for Danny Duffy at that point.

The inning ended with the Mets holding a 5-3 lead, and that was all they’d need with the Royals managing just one more hit after the second.

There was little reason to think the Royals would sweep this series, of course, and the reversal of fortune on Friday may yet prove to be a blip.

But the Royals’ chances of winning have receded from the prospect of a virtually sure thing back to a matter of suspense now because the Mets created something tangible to work with just as they were staring at what essentially would have been the end.

This story was originally published October 30, 2015 at 11:07 PM with the headline "With a chance to administer a knockout punch, Royals falter."