Ned Yost, the Royals’ manager, tries simply to find a way to get a lead through six. Then he can turn the game over to Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis and Greg Holland, perhaps the most dominant postseason bullpen in a generation.

It was a winning formula again in Game 3, after Jason Frasor started the perfect four-inning relay with a 1-2-3 sixth. Holland, baseball’s most reliable closer since his very first save, in August 2011, finished it off with a broken-bat grounder to second. Naturally, he dodged the shard of Steve Pearce’s lumber headed his way.

“We take pride in expecting to win if the game is tied when we go to the bullpen,” Holland said later. “We kind of take it as a challenge, our bullpen versus their bullpen. I know we’re facing their hitters — that’s the biggest thing — but if it gets to a battle of a bullpen, we take pride in coming out on top.”

The Royals joined the 1976 Cincinnati Reds and the 2007 Colorado Rockies as the only teams to start the postseason with seven consecutive victories. (The Reds needed only those seven games to capture a championship.) Maybe the Royals are peaking too soon, but they will take their chances.

Their power, which showed up against the Angels in their division series, followed them to Baltimore, where they mixed in four home runs with their usual collection of infield singles and broken-bat bloopers. They make their own luck with their speed, and they have robbed the Orioles of hits in the infield, the outfield — and even the dugout suite, where Mike Moustakas crowd-surfed for a catch in the sixth inning Tuesday.

Dayton Moore, the Royals’ general manager since 2006, understood all along that he could not afford most free-agent sluggers, and played in a cavernous home park, anyway. It was more cost-effective, and made more sense on the field, to cultivate athleticism, to find players who could field and run and hit, if usually not for much power.

“For us, it’s just the way we all set out to do it,” Moore said. “We just felt it was the most important way to do it for our ballpark and our market, speed and defense. Speed is an offensive trait that will show up every day, and certainly aids the defense part of it.”