All Tied Up

All postseason games are important, but the Royals couldn't afford to go down 2-0. They did what they had to do.

The term “must win” is overused. The only true “must win” games are elimination games, whether it’s in the regular season and can eliminate a team from the playoffs or in the playoffs and can end a series. But there are games that are nearly must win, and that’s where the Royals stood last night heading into Game Two of the ALDS against the Yankees. Only eight teams ever have come back from a 2-0 deficit in a League Division Series in big league history. That’s out of 63 series to start 2-0 for one team. So, no, last night wasn’t a must-win, but doing something only 12.7 percent of teams have done would have been a tall task.

And let me tell you that the way the game started did not give me hope that I’d be writing about the Royals evening the series. The first inning from Carlos Rodon was one of the best-pitched/worst-batted innings I’ve seen in a long time. Rodon threw 12 pitches, 10 strikes and struck out the side. It started with Maikel Garcia taking a shot at right field on the first pitch and then watching two hittable strikes go by. Bobby Witt Jr. let Rodon get ahead 0-2 with two called strikes before eventually striking out swinging. Then Vinnie Pasquantino fouled off the first pitch, took the second for a ball and swung at two pitches way out of the zone to end the inning. Things looked bleak.

Then to make matters worse, Cole Ragans started his day as if he was a Royals reliever in the fifth inning on Saturday night. He walked both Gleyber Torres and Juan Soto, both on 3-2 pitches. He got Aaron Judge swinging with three straight whiffs and then got Austin Wells looking on the sixth pitch of his at bat before he was able to get a very weak groundout from Giancarlo Stanton. In the end, Rodon was brilliant on 12 pitches while Ragans was about as shaky as can be on 24 pitches. If I told you at that moment that Ragans would last longer than Rodon, you’d tell me I’m as crazy as the guy who told you that Yuli Gurriel would score four runs in the first two games of the ALDS.

But that’s exactly what happened. Ragans never really settled in and only ended up going four innings, but he did limit the damage. He walked four batters, but he struck out five and gave up just three hits. Eight base runners in four innings is nothing to write home about, but the fact that he was able to work with that kind of traffic was a different kind of impressive. I believe two things were happening. The first is that he just didn’t really know where the ball was going.