Royals Come from Behind Again

The Royals’ 6-4 win against the Pirates last night was their third straight win, their fifth in their last seven games, and it guaranteed that they will win back-to-back series for the first time since last August. We’re winning ugly right now, in spite of committing too many errors and leaving too many pitches out over the plate.

We continue to get down early in games, but ever since that 16-12 come from behind victory against the Rangers a couple of weeks ago, we actually seem to believe we have the ability to come back when we get down early. What’s caused that? Who knows. Maybe the arrival of Dayton Moore has helped to boost the players’ confidence. He’s saying all the right things right now. He wants to leave guys in the minor leagues longer and fill in the gaps with veterans when possible. He’s looking for starting pitching. He’s unwilling to dump salary. And he certainly has shown that he doesn’t have any allegiances to unproductive high draft choices.

A couple of days before Moore took over, I asked Reggie Sanders what he thought about the mix of veterans and young guys on the team.  

“I think the mixture is good,” Sanders said. “I do believe that they’re going to have give up a lot more money to get some quality veteran pitching into this clubhouse—which is what we need. It’s important, so hopefully we can do that.”

Nearly every major league team is in the same quandary regarding starting pitching, but Moore has already made two attempts (Etherton and Duckworth) to improve our rotation and I’m guessing that he’s going to follow through and make many more attempts. Maybe the players have seen his actions so far and they are finding hope once again. Maybe they simply ran into an Astros team that hit a bump in the road and a bad Pirates team. It’s hard to say, but it’s fun to see them string a few wins together.

And it’s nice to see Mark Teahen turning on the ball like he did yesterday when he hit a two-run home run in the eighth inning. Going into the game yesterday he was hitting .315 since his recall from Omaha. He went down there for one purpose, to increase his bat speed on inside pitches. Opponents aren’t convinced yet that he can get to the inside pitch.

“I just tried to be aggressive,” he’s quoted as saying the Star this morning. “They’d been throwing me in all night. I got another pitch in, and I finally got to one.”

His home run bought him a reprieve after his otherwise poor performance. He made an error, bungled another play that should have been ruled an error, and he got picked off at second base by the catcher. Bell was complimentary of Teahen after the game saying that “a young kid with poor makeup doesn’t respond like that.”

So, all is well that ends well.

This afternoon, the Royals send Scott Elarton (2-8, 5.09) against Paul Maholm (2-5, 4.50) in what could be Joe Randa’s last game at Kauffman Stadium.

Berroa Walk Watch (the quest for double digits): 4 walks in 66 games.