Gotta Be Ready for Bobby and Freddy

The Royals escaped Oakland with one win and it was a grind just for that.

For the fifth time this season (and fourth time in June), the Royals went into the finale of a series needing a win to avoid a sweep. For the fifth time this season (and fourth time in June), they avoided the sweep. I’m not entirely sure the first games of a series only to prevail in the final game is a recipe to make the postseason, but it’s a good formula for avoiding the long losing streak that this Royals team has so deftly side-stepped this season. There’s something valuable to that. And yesterday’s game looked a lot like what we saw from this club in April - a good start, just enough runs and a scoreless, if stressful, outing from the bullpen.

We haven’t seen enough of that lately. Whether the start isn’t good or the offense gets shut down or the bullpen can’t work around trouble, the Royals are losing games because they’re just not firing on all cylinders, and often not firing on any of them. Yesterday was far from perfect. They blew a two-run lead that they only had because of their backup catcher hitting two home runs (I’ll get to that!). Then the bullpen had to work around so much trouble. but they worked around it and in the end, the Royals won 3-2 and snapped another losing streak at three.