High pressure helps make diamonds. For a baseball club like the Kansas City Royals, how it responds to tight games and pressure-packed situations can make or break a season.
By a twist of fate or just the whims of the baseball universe, the Royals have repeatedly found themselves sweating out the outcomes of games until the final out for the better part of the past two weeks. Intense games with slim margins of victory have quickly become their calling card.
Sunday’s walk-off win certainly provided a suspenseful excitement-filled finish, but it’s hardly been the exception lately.
Ten of the Royals last 12 games have been decided by two runs or fewer going into Tuesday’ s series opener in Tampa. The Royals have gone 4-6 in those 10 games with a pair of wins by a total of three runs on Saturday and Sunday giving them a series victory over the Detroit Tigers.
Royals manager Mike Matheny described his club as having a “comfortability” in tight games.
“It’s something that you can’t understand how important it is until you’ve gone through it,” Matheny said on Sunday. “Then you get into those situations and you feel what a team feels, and it feels like we’re right in this. And it’s not just this nice thing to say. But you do need days like this, for somebody to come up and do something big or a couple somebodies.”
Carlos Santana’s walk-off two-run home run capped the Royals’ rally after they’d been held scoreless through the first six innings. The 3-2 victory marked their first one-run win since April 26.
As Matheny alluded to “a couple of somebodies” coming through in key moments, the Royals pieced together their late inning rally on the strength of back-to-back singles by Andrew Benintendi and Salvador Perez followed by a pinch-hit sacrifice fly from Hanser Alberto to finally break the ice in the seventh.
Whit Merrifield’s infield single in the top of the ninth set the table for Santana’s two-run homer in the ninth.
“It becomes part of your DNA as a team. It just becomes part of your attitude and your expectation,” Matheny said. “All those are very good things to have.”
The Royals’ record in one-run games this season is 7-5. They’d won their first six such games as they sprinted out to the best record in MLB through April, and they lost their next five as they went into a tailspin to start May.
More than a quarter of the team’s games so far this season have been decided by just one run.
They’ve also already played in five games that end in walk-offs (three wins, two losses).
“We can obviously say we’d rather play in those easy games where you smell a win early and put good at-bats together,” infielder Nicky Lopez said. “But those close games, I think they’re going to pay dividends in the end. I think it’s going to make our team stronger.
“When you can pull out a win in a close game, I think it’s better for the team. I think the team becomes a little bit closer, timely hits, bunt execution, making a good pitch, making a good play, it brings a team together.”
Left fielder Andrew Benintendi played on a World Series championship team with Boston in 2018. His Red Sox championship club won their division by eight games, and they played 39 one-run games that season. In the playoffs, they played in another three.
Having already played so many games where one play could flip the outcome isn’t necessarily at the front of Benintendi’s mind now. However, he sees it as beneficial in the future.
“I think guys try not to think about it too much, but I guess down the road it can only help,” Benintendi said. “You get to big games where the pressure mounts. If you can look back and say we’ve been in a few of these situations before, it will kind of calm your nerves.”
Benintendi drew encouragement from the way the team has continued to tack on runs late in games because those often end up being the deciding runs in tight games.
Saturday’s win served as a perfect example because the Royals led by four going into the final inning, but reliever Josh Staumont gave up two runs in the ninth before closing out a 7-5 win and stranding the bases loaded.
“Sometimes those ones will (prove) in the end to help you out,” Benintendi said. “As long as you keep tacking them on, it puts more pressure on the other team to come back. You’re always trying to keep the pressure on the other team.”
