Article by Alexandro H. Zatarain and Manuel Alcala
In 1985, Billboard’s Hot-100 Song was “Careless Whisper” by Wham! Dan Marino and Joe Montana faced each other in Super Bowl XIX, the 49ers being the eventual champs. MLB champions? The Kansas City Royals. It also happened to be the last year the franchise had made it to the playoffs.
It’s been 29 years since the Royals reached the postseason. 29 long years. Years in which a large portion of their fanbase either didn’t know what baseball was or weren’t even born! All of the excitement summed up to this moment when the Royals faced the Oakland Athletics in the AL Wild Card game.
What appeared would be a low scoring game because of the pitching match-up became a high scoring affair that went back and forth all game long.
When Brandon Moss hit his second home run of the night it seemed that hope was over for the Royals, the sixth inning ended with a 7-3 score in favor of the A’s.
But Kansas City never gave up, they were able to rally for 3 runs in the 8th inning make it a one run game. They still had to face Sean Doolittle though, Oakland’s closer who owns a 10:1 strikeout to walk ratio. But after Josh Willingham got a lead-off hit, the Royals just never stopped running. In the game they totaled 7 stolen bases.
Geovany Soto got the start over Derek Norris to try and cut down the Royals running game, but had an injury early in the game and forced coach Bob Melvin to put Norris in at catcher.
After Kansas City tied the game in the 9th inning with a sac fly by Nori Aoki, the Athletics struck one more in the top of the 12th inning to take an 8-7 lead, but then more magic occurred for the Royals.
After Dan Otero had gotten the first out in the bottom of the 12th inning, first baseman Eric Hosmer hit a ball deep into left center field that just kept carrying and hit high of the fence for a triple. Hosmer would then later score on a high chop base hit by Christian Colon.
With two outs in the inning and a score of 8-8, Colon took second base on a steal which would prove to be huge because Royals catcher Salvador Perez got the game winning hit, a sharp ground ball down the third base line that was just out of the reach of Josh Donaldson.
Royals fans were in the game the whole night and now the Royals will travel very motivated to Anaheim to face the Angels in the ALDS.
Meanwhile, the A’s plan of going “all in” to win the world series this year has fallen short. Jon Lester, Luke Gregerson and many others are set to become free agents in the off-season and it appears that Oakland will have to go through another rebuilding process very soon.
Huge props to both teams who really left it all on the field and congrats to the Kansas City Royals and their fan base. It was worth the wait and will continue to party and hope that this year will be like 1985.
Photo Credit: USA TODAY