By ALEX HORTON
Sports Editor
Every year before the season starts ESPN baseball analyst make their preseason picks for the playoffs. Four of baseball’s expert analyst’s choose the Kansas City Royals to make the playoffs, only two of which choose them to win their division. Basically, as the same team that forced seven games against the San Francisco Giants, who needed Madison Bumgarner to backpack to win, and the same team minus James Shields, which at the beginning of this season was a huge minus along with long time designated hitter Billy Butler, the Royals just were not on anybodys radar.
Without Big Game James at the helm, that left the job up to the young Yordano Ventura, who had a good rookie campaign at 14-10 with a 3.20 ERA was electric throughout the entire postseason. Even though he had a good year last year, it was Ventura’s first full season in the league and he was still unproven as so far he has left a lot of question marks after posting his 4.41 ERA and his first half struggles.
The Royals then have Edinson Volquez, an aging veteran who has thrown as well as he can up to this point posting 15 wins and a ERA of 3.27. After those two however, the rotations talent seems to be a little thin with mediocre performances this season from Danny Duffy, Chris Young and Jeremy Guthrie. The bullpen was still the same, so why were the Kansas City Royals so far off the radar this year?
Well, the Tigers resigned David Price and picked up Yoenis Cespedes in the offseason. The Cleveland Indians were a far clear favorite because of their pitching staff that was by far over valued. And as for the wild card spots that the Royals would have made, nobody expected the New York Yankees to perform as well as they had as well as well as the Houston Astros who currently have the red hot Texas Rangers and slumping Angels fighting for the last spot.
But what does this have to do with the Royals? The Royals currently have a 13 game lead in the Central with both the Cleveland Indians and Detroit Tigers trailing the Minnesota Twins. This is because the coe of this Royals team is just about the same as the team that went to the World Series last year. Plug in Kendrys Morales for Billy Butler and the newly acquired ace Johnny Cueto for James Shields.
The Royals traded for ex-Cincinnati ace Cueto at the trade deadline and it immediately started paying dividends. His first two starts at Kauffman Stadium he threw a complete game four hit shutout and then proceeded to go eight innings only giving up one earned run. It’s not just all about starting pitching however,
The Kansas City Royals are the most complete team in baseball. They play fundamentally sound baseball, they make the right plays at the right times, they get timely hits, they don’t strike out, they walk, they steal bases. They just flat out play better baseball than any other team excluding the St. Louis Cardinals, who are just as good of a baseball team as the Royals. You won’t find the Royals in the top five in homeruns, you won’t even find them in the top 25, because they just don’t hit very many, but when they do hit them they are timely and usually swing the momentum back their way. They do however rank in the top 10 in batting average, hits, runs and on base percentage.
This team flew under the radar of very many analysts when they should have been far and away the clear favorites to win the American League Central. When you have players like Eric Hosmer, Lorenzo Cain, Ben Zobrist who has been one of the hottest hitters since being traded to Kansas City, Mike Moustakas and Alex Gordon day in and day out contributing to helping this team’s wins there is no stopping them if they get on a roll. This one of the most complete and best teams Major League Baseball has seen in a very long time. If Kansas City isn’t on your radar now, well, just hope you aren’t standing on the tracks when the trains coming through.
