KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Wait. Which is the inexperienced team here?
We’ve got a tied World Series, much to the relief of Major League Baseball officials, thanks to the Royals’ 7-2 thumping of the Giants in Game 2 Wednesday night at Kauffman Stadium. And if the result of this one didn’t necessarily stun, the path to the final score surprised.
For the contest turned wholly on the bottom of the sixth inning when the Royals exploded for five runs against five San Francisco pitchers. And Giants manager Bruce Bochy, attempting to win his team’s third title in five years, saw his decisions backfire as if he were a doomed teenager in a horror film.
“Those are the matchups we were trying to get,” a placid Bochy said afterward. “It just didn’t work out.”
The sixth-inning snowball attained its full mass when San Francisco rookie right-hander Hunter Strickland gave up a two-run homer to Royals second baseman Omar Infante — the fifth homer Strickland has surrendered in this postseason — to account for the game’s final score and then chirped at Kansas City catcher Salvador Perez as Perez trotted home from second base. The teams’ benches reluctantly cleared as Bochy lifted Strickland for veteran lefty Jeremy Affeldt.
“My emotions got the best of me,” Strickland said. “I’m not too proud of that, but it is what it is. You can’t take it back.”
Bochy is supposed to be the sage skipper who has been through the battles and his Royals counterpart Ned Yost the overmatched goofball; Yost raised eyebrows in the sixth when he pinch ran for the en fuego Billy Butler, who had just singled home the go-ahead run, with Terrance Gore. That move turned moot within minutes, though, as Bochy pulled levers that opened only trap doors.
You could start with the start of the sixth — wondering whether Giants starting pitcher Jake Peavy should even have been allowed to stay in the game once he allowed Lorenzo Cain’s leadoff single with the game tied at 2-2. The right-handed Peavy followed by walking the lefty-swinging cleanup man Eric Hosmer, and that’s when Bochy opted to lift Peavy for right-hander Jean Machi to go after Butler, who already had delivered a game-tying single in the first inning against Peavy.
“Jake was throwing the ball well,” Bochy said. “[He] gave up a bloop single [to Cain] there, and he was throwing the ball well. Once he lost Hosmer, I just wanted to give Butler a little different look.”
Machi fell behind on Butler, 2-and-0, and offered a 93 mph fastball Butler ripped into left field to bring home Cain with the tiebreaking run and send Hosmer to second. After southpaw Javier Lopez retired Alex Gordon on a flyout, Bochy turned to the hard-throwing Strickland, who has drawn attention this postseason for both lighting up the radar gun and getting lit up by major-league hitters.
Ahead 0-and-2 on Perez, Strickland spiked a slider that evaded his catcher Buster Posey and allowed Dyson and Hosmer to advance to second and third. Then Perez drilled the next pitch, a 97 mph fastball, to center field for a two-run double, giving the Royals a 5-2 advantage, and then Infante went yard and then Strickland and Perez jawed at each other, inflaming the tensions.
Finally, Strickland, seemingly chastened, left the ballgame and left the rest of us wondering if Bochy could possibly put him in an important situation again this series.
“You know, he’s a really intense kid,” Bochy said. “I mean, that’s probably an area [where] he’s going to have to keep his poise. … These are things we’ll talk to him about.”
“I hope he’ll call on me,” Strickland said of his manager. “I’d given up four previous homers and he was still calling on me.”
The Giants now head home Friday for Game 3 at AT&T Park, where they haven’t lost a World Series game since they began their even-numbered-year run in 2010; they’re 4-0 in that stretch.
For sure, Bochy and his players are comfortable there; they put up a 45-36 home record in the 2014 regular season and are 4-1 at AT&T in the postseason. The Royals must win at least one out of three games there to bring it back to The K for a Game 6.
Kansas City looked up to that challenge Wednesday. It looked like the seasoned bunch. The Royals must elevate that look as they go to the belly of the beast. Then again, they haven’t let down their audience much this month, and they pulled off quite the rare feat as they left their home: They made the respected Bochy look like the novice.
