Royals Back to the Grind

Kansas City finds themselves 1-5 over the last 6 games. Hey, Mamma’ said there’d be days like this…

While not exactly a confidence builder, the fact of the matter is teams go through bad stretches. It happens. Good teams and their fanbases look at the bad times, identify a problem that caused a slide and move on. The Royals and their fanbase identify a problem….over the course of 3 decades….and cringe every time the one team with palpable hope begins to slip.

This team is the closest thing to a winner that the Royals organization has delivered to its fans since probably 1994. This team is not built on the premise of rebuilding, or next year, or hope or….

For ten glorious games, fans were treated to the best this team has to offer. They hit, they pitched, they played defense. Two of those have been mainstays for the better part of a season and a half now, while offense continues to be an Achilles heel for a team primed to break through. Its not as though they need to become a group of mashers to win games, they simply need to find a way to score a few runs here and there. Much has been made about ways to mitigate some of the shortcomings, but for fear of beating a dead horse, I will leave that alone. The bottom line, this problem is the same one we all saw before the winning streak, and one we will continue to utter groans about in the future. This team struggles to score runs.

Pitching and defense continue to keep the club afloat, and for the past 6, cannot be given as a reason for the Royals losing. Danny Duffy is somewhat quietly making his case for being the most consistent starter on the staff, and last night against the Dodgers provided one of his more impressive games where he did not have his best stuff, yet was capable of providing his team a chance to win by going 6 innings and only allowing 1 run. In the last 7 games, the Royals pitching staff as a whole has allowed 19 runs and 5 of those are from James Shields, who has suddenly become the worrisome member of the starting rotation (this is a GOOD thing, as he still isn’t a “horrible” pitcher even during the rough stretch). In 4 of the last 5 losses, the opposing team has only scored 2 runs. Its going to be tough to win games if you keep losing when the other team scores 2.

So the question remains, what is this team?

Its the same one we have been watching all year. And honestly….its good enough to make the playoffs if it can have a couple more stretches of scoring runs like it did for those couple of glorious weeks. If they can find a way to scratch a few across during the “normal” times and keep their head above water, then the hot stretches will be more than enough to push them over the edge. The caveat of course is if they decide to go into hibernation mode at the plate as they have done for a week now. If that ends up happening more…than the hot stretches will be nothing more than enough to keep us around .500. Lets hope Sveum has a few more tricks up his sleeve.

Photo by: Keith Allison

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