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Jeff Passan, ESPNOct 2, 2024, 07:53 PM ET
- ESPN MLB insider
Author of “The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports”
BALTIMORE — Amid the celebration of an improbable turnaround from 106 losses to a wild-card round victory, Kansas City Royals shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. slipped on a T-shirt that read: “October Ready.”
Was he ever.
For the second consecutive day, Witt drove in the winning run as the Royals ousted the Baltimore Orioles from the playoffs with a 2-1 victory in front of 38,698 at Camden Yards. A 1-0 victory in Game 1 gave the Royals their first postseason win since capturing a World Series title in 2015, and they followed in Game 2 with another triumph that encapsulated their ascent from a 56-106 record in 2023 to an American League Division Series showdown against the New York Yankees.
“This group is special,” Witt said, “and we’re not done yet.”
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At 24, Witt is the centerpiece of a Royals team that was remade via free agency over the winter and reimagined with midseason trades and waiver claims. What came of it was too much for the Orioles, who a year after winning 101 games and being swept in the postseason by the Texas Rangers again didn’t win a game against a lower-seeded team.
While Baltimore received excellent pitching all series, Kansas City’s was even better — and the Royals had Witt, who joined Hall of Famer Jimmie Foxx as the only players 24 or younger with a winning RBI in each of their teams’ first two postseason games.
Both of Witt’s go-ahead hits came in the sixth inning. Wednesday’s came with runners on first and third and two outs, with Witt crushing a groundball up the middle. While Orioles second baseman Jordan Westburg snagged the ball after diving for it, Witt’s speed — he has been clocked as the fastest player in baseball running from home to first — allowed him to beat Westburg’s throw by a step.
“He’s got the power. He’s got the bat-to-ball skills. But he’s also got the speed that he gets infield hits,” Royals manager Matt Quatraro said. “He can do a lot of different things. He is literally the total package when it comes to physical ability on the field.”
Witt had help sandwiching him in the lineup. Second baseman Michael Massey led off the game with a double off Baltimore starter Zach Eflin, and first baseman Vinnie Pasquantino — playing in only his second game since breaking his right thumb Aug. 29 — singled him home to stake Kansas City a 1-0 lead.
It held up for four innings, as Royals starter Seth Lugo carved through Baltimore’s lineup. After a Cedric Mullins home run in the fifth inning, Baltimore loaded the bases with no outs against Lugo. He induced an Anthony Santander pop-up, and reliever Angel Zerpa struck out Colton Cowser — he swung at a pitch that hit him and broke his left hand — and induced a groundout from Adley Rutschman, emblematic of a night in which the Orioles went 0-for-6 with runners in scoring position.
“They did a great job of pitching out of trouble,” Orioles manager Brandon Hyde said. “I thought we gave everything we had. I thought we pitched really, really well. We pitched out of traffic almost the entire game it felt like to keep the score where it was. Just a disappointing finish.”
With a strong core of young position players built around shortstop Gunnar Henderson, the Orioles entered the season as World Series contenders. Mustering only one run against Kansas City left a sour end to the season, particularly with the impending free agency of ace Corbin Burnes, who allowed one run in eight innings in Game 1. While Eflin wasn’t quite as good, lasting just four innings, the Orioles recognized that the pitching didn’t matter as long as the hitting was neutralized.
“When you lose like this,” Hyde said, “there’s frustration, there’s anger, there’s disappointment because you felt like there was opportunities there in those couple games to change the score. And it didn’t happen.”
What did happen was more Kansas City magic. In addition to Zerpa’s scoreless inning, right-hander John Schreiber, left-handers Sammy Long and Kris Bubic, and closer Lucas Erceg continued the Royals’ magnificent bullpen run, with 7⅔ scoreless innings in the wild-card series.
They’ll need more ahead, as the rested Yankees will throw reigning AL Cy Young Award winner Gerrit Cole in Game 1 on Saturday against right-hander Michael Wacha, another of the offseason signings that turned around the Royals. They’re already just the second team to lose 100-plus games and win a playoff series the next year.
They have no intention of stopping there — particularly not against their historic rivals, whom they haven’t played in the postseason since 1980, when they swept the Yankees in a five-game AL Championship Series.
“We didn’t come this far just to come this far,” Witt said, “so we’re going to keep getting after it, keep trying to create our own legacy.”
