The Royals are not dead, the World Series has just started
“Narrative” is the way the World Series is packaged for us, not the way it’s necessarily happening. Case in point: sometimes a Royals loss is just a loss, not a portent.
Royals fans booed the first pitch of Game 1 of the World Series, a fastball from James Shields that arrived at 93 miles per hour, slightly outside to Giants leadoff man Gregor Blanco, and was called a ball by home plate umpire Jerry Meals. They were not booing the pitch, but the call. And maybe not even the call -- the pitch was close, but the call was not wrong -- so much as the off-note it hit right there in the overture.
This was just the start of a baseball game, of course, but it was also the first World Series game played in Kansas City since Ronald Reagan was president, and the ninth game of what had otherwise been a giddy, great, and multiply perfect postseason for the Royals up to this point. They have been playing baseball re-imagined as an out-of-body experience; who was Meals to pinch Shields on the strike zone, or all those dreamers in the seats?
By the end of that first inning, the dreamers were awake and the Royals were down by three. They would never get closer than that in what wound up as a suspense-free Game 1, the Giants winning 7-1 behind the stellar pitching of Madison Bumgarner and timely hitting from Hunter Pence and Pablo Sandoval. This was the end of the Royals' eight-game postseason winning streak. It was not necessarily anything but that.
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Shields threw 32 pitches in that first inning, one of which was a fastball over the gooey center of the plate that Pence hit out to the deepest part of the ballpark. He looked rusty and touch-less, unable to locate and without much in the way of subtlety or craft to his signature change-up, which he wound up jettisoning fairly quickly. Shields screamed into his glove as he stalked off the mound in the first inning, which was about as loud as Kauffman Stadium got on Tuesday night.
In the bottom half of the first, Nori Aoki smoked a ball back up the middle that Bumgarner snared almost disdainfully. Bumgarner didn't wing the ball around the infield, or even respond much at all. He just turned his back on the plate and wandered purposefully about the mound, turning the ball over in his hand as if inspecting it for blemishes or bruises, until Lorenzo Cain was ready. When Eric Hosmer ripped a ball to deep center and Gregor Blanco took a boomeranging route to make a fine running catch and end the inning, there was the sense of... well, not yet.
The bottom of the first, Game 1 (Christopher Hanewinckel-USA TODAY Sports).
Not yet was there the sense of Kansas City awakening all the way from this long, loud dream of an October and into a baseball game that was not going very well for them. Not quite in the bottom of the third, either, when the Royals put runners on second and third with no outs and Bumgarner punched his way out of what evolved into a bases-loaded jam. Not even when the Giants finally chased Shields three batters into the fourth, after Mike Morse's RBI single brought home Hunter Pence. Maybe not quite when Danny Duffy, on in relief and initially badly off balance, walked Gregor Blanco to bring in the Giants' fifth run two batters later.
This thing creeping up, the feeling that something was concluding just as the Series began was, strictly speaking, not a thing that needs sensing or feeling at all -- because this was, finally, a single game, and one with its own seamless and familiar internal logic.
The Giants did not waste opportunities at the plate; Madison Bumgarner did not provide them to his hosts. A bit wobbly at the start and loudly labored a little later, Bumgarner settled in so smoothly and so naturally that it was almost surprising to start hearing his name turn up in the same sentences as Christy Mathewson’s as the game wore on.
Christy Mathewson, Big Six, 1907 (Getty Images). It is difficult to imagine what Christy Mathewson looked like at his best. Those brilliant seasons unfolded in another world, and Mathewson's best seasons happened closer to the end of the Civil War than they did to Bumgarner's first birthday. It is difficult to imagine that Mathewson could possibly have looked any more dominant than Bumgarner did in Game 1, throwing parabolic curveballs that blooped and dodged at 67 miles per hour, then contrasting them with grunt-aided low-90s heat. Bumgarner's streak of scoreless World Series innings ended at 22 2/3 in the bottom of the seventh on a Salvador Perez home run, but he was never anything less than inexorable and in command. He was great, but great in a way that felt as familiar as it was awe-ing. Bumgarner's dominance insured that Game 1 was a very specific type of baseball game. It is one we've seen in recent Octobers as authored by pitchers like Jon Lester and Roy Halladay and Justin Verlander and Cliff Lee.
There is -- because of how improbable their October transcendence has been, and because that transcendence has involved the team suddenly and stunningly playing like one very different than the one they’d been for a good part of the season -- a sense that a loss is more than a loss for the Royals. Some of this is because it has been so long since we’ve seen this team lose. Most of this sense, almost all of it, is silly.
Even bearing in mind that the Royals have been roughly this good in roughly this way since the All-Star break, the uncanniness of their recent invincibility invites the tendency to slather superstition and significance on every bit of breaks-of-the-game happenstance. Part of this is just what fandom does, the way it forces on us a goofball cosmology we wouldn’t give the time of day anywhere else in our lives -- these significant-seeming inklings of destiny and fortune, the omens and signs, the glib but long-shadowed retroactive inevitability. Another part of it is baseball selling itself as something this big. All of it is ridiculous, and you already know that.
But the temptation is there, all the same. When things happen exactly as they should, over and over again, it is easy to suspect that some sort of cosmic fix is in. When they stop happening that way, as suddenly and decisively as they did for the Royals in Game 1, it was easy to feel that this bulging clown-car full of baseball divinities is finally getting pulled over.
Pablo Sandoval strokes an RBI double in the first inning of World Series Game 1 (Peter G. Aiken-USA TODAY Sports).
But of course, that is not what this is. A loss, this one or any other, is not spillover from some battle in baseball heaven. The Royals’ October-long trance was a thing of beauty, but it was also just baseball being baseball, both in the sense of a baseball team doing everything it could, and in the roiling ungovernable randomness of the game doing the rest. This is that, too.
And everything else we see, however much of this strange and wonderful October we have left, will be that, as well. The supernatural will always seep and loom at this time of year, and broadcasters will help with that, and will never forget to remind us of the Head And Shoulders For Men Notably Beneficial Team Meetings and Cialis Rise To The Occasion Turning Points handed down to them. The former is our tendency as people who make ourselves stupid for love of baseball, the latter is just poor Joe Buck’s doofy-ass job. But it would be a shame to lose sight of the ball in all this glare and noise.
It would be a shame because we don’t need it. This was just a game, and this is just baseball in October, and that is a lot. There will be nothing quite like baseball, and nothing nearly as good, for some months once this is done playing out. We don’t need the fog machine or the rumbles of destiny. This is enough, and it is enough to just follow it where it leads, until all of our luck runs out.
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