If you learn Buck Showalter asked the Oriole front office for a team cardiologist after Friday night's American League Championship Series opener, try not to be too surprised. You might, too, if you were the manager whose closer opened the ninth of a tie game by walking the bases loaded before getting a run-erasing force at the plate.
Unfortunately, you might need a neurologist aboard, too, after you watch the Royals win it, 8-6 in 10, in ways customarily associated with the Orioles. They sure didn't look like the running, gunning, stunning Royals who normally swarm out from under the baseboards, when they hit two home runs in the tenth to smash a five-all tie.
The Royals hitting home runs? The Orioles stealing bases? What's next? The Royals becoming baseball's first team to win four extra-inning games in one postseason? Oops. They just did that. Next question.
And to think Showalter had walked the third rail in the ninth and looked as though he'd live to tell about it. But so did Royals manager Ned Yost, even if his walk in the bottom of the inning wasn't quite so electrified.
Zack Britton is know to dodge a few bullets while locking saves down. Friday night he dodged his own howitzer. Until he got Eric Hosmer to shoot a ground tracer right to first baseman Steve Pearce, he'd thrown 19 pitches, 15 out of the strike zone, and seemed almost reluctant to throw anything other than hard sinkers for the Royals refused to fish.
Pearce speared the Hosmer tracer and whipped a throw home, skillfully resisting the temptation to step on the pad at first and force an unlikely tag at the plate. Catcher Nick Hundley caught it in the heel of his mitt and lead runner Alicedes Escobar was a dead pigeon.
If the Orioles wanted to beat the Royals at their own mini-ball game, this was one way to do it. Though surely Showalter would have preferred the Royals had earned their way to the bases loaded if they had to load the bases at all. Or that the Orioles hadn't stranded the bases loaded themselves in the bottom of the second, after they'd worked their tail feathers off to load them with two outs in the first place.
He took no chances, though. He hooked Britton right after that force at the plate and brought in Darren O'Day, the near-submariner. And O'Day submarined Billy Butler into dialing an Area Code 6-4-3 that needed Pearce to take a tiny leap for the relay throw and reach to stay on the pad just a nanosecond before Butler might cross.
"If Houdini were here," crowed TBS broadcast analyst Ron Darling before the DP, "he couldn't have this in his playbook."
But he might have had extra innings in the footnotes, which is where the game went after Royals setup man Wade Davis struck out the side, including Nelson Cruz for the third out, in the bottom of the ninth.
Even before the 10th arrived Game 1 of this ALCS looked like a game of role reversal, too. The Royals took a fat early lead with passages from the Oriole's normal manual, and they attacked a pair of Oriole relievers in the tenth as though they'd been mortally offended by the Orioles shoving them back under the baseboards in the ninth.
Escobar, of all people, opened the scoring against Chris Tillman with a line drive over the left field fence with one out in the third. Alex Gordon made it 4-0 with a broken-bat 3-run double later in the inning.
And with right-hander O'Day staying in despite left-handed Gordon leading off the Royals' 10th, Gordon hit a 1-1 service that didn't stay low enough in the zone and sent it four rows up the right field bleachers to crack the five-all tie the Orioles had worked so hard to keep.
A walk and a strikeout later, Brian Matusz came in and Mike Moustakas sent a full count pitch over the right center field fence. The same Moustakas who'd hit one homer in 160-something trips to the regular season plate now had three in a single postseason. Had the Royals suddenly found Orioles taking over their players' bodies?
Those were not your 2014 Royals Friday night. And those were not your 2014 Orioles tying it in baby steps. Steps like Adam Jones singling home Nick Markakis on James Shields's first one-out service in the bottom of the third, and Ryan Flaherty pulling the Orioles to within one with a 2-run single in the bottom of the fifth.
Or Jonathan Schoop busting a pickoff after leaning too far off second but taking third when a throw to third sailed past the pad, then scoring the tying run when Alejandro de Aza's bloop dropped to the infield grass in front of second base. About the nearest the Orioles got to true character was Cruz doubling home de Aza earlier in the fifth.
Even Delmon Young, that well-reputed first ball/fastball crusher, got in on the small ball act. He pinch hit for Schoop in the bottom of the tenth and fought his way back from 0-2 with first and second and two out against Royals closer Greg Holland. Then he poked an RBI single up the pipe, leaving two aboard including another tying run for Markakis. Fat lot of good that did when Markakis bounced out to Royals second baseman Omar Infante to end it.
Gordon had a rather rough night otherwise, getting himself picked off first to end the fifth and taking an Andrew Miller pitch up his shoulder and neck to open the eighth. Not to mention ending the Oriole third with a diving catch. But he was almost nonchalant about the apparent role reversal after the game. Sure you hear and talk so much about the Royals' road-runner act, he said, but it's not as though they're completely lacking for a little gorilla warfare if and when necessary.
"You kind of throw what you did in the regular season out the window," Britton said after the game, "and you try to find a way to win."
The Orioles will have to come out for Game Two like vultures. Or exterminators. With or without the long balls. That or they'll have to take up a collection to hire that cardiologist and neurologist.
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