A peculiar game
Baseball is a peculiar game. Go to bat and fail seventy percent of the time and they make an All-Star out of you and pay you millions of dollars. If you are a pitcher and you can make it to the sixth inning with your team still in the game, you get those same plaudits. More than perhaps any other game it is made up of mostly individual results but is called a team game. A collection of individual efforts that blend together to make a team sport.
Ted Williams once said that “the most difficult of all sporting activities is the ability to put a bat on a baseball when someone is throwing it at you at 95 miles per hour.” Perhaps that is why we are so impressed when someone gets a base hit only .300 of the time, or hits a home run when their team really, really needs it.
A home run like that was hit by the Royals’ Jarrod Dyson earlier this week in a 7-3 win over league-leading Cleveland. Not just a home run, a grand slam home run. Those four runs were the difference in a game that just might be one of the most important of the season. How can any one game be so important in the long, long major league season you might ask? Stay with me and we will discover.
The Royals have been locked in a yo-yo type of season. Win four and lose five. Win five and lose four. It brings to mind the old joke about the golfer who had such a time because he had to “hit the ball, drag Charlie.” The Royals have played this 2016 season like they are “dragging Charlie around.”
Dyson’s grand slam is the kind of play that can ignite the rest of a team. Another of baseball’s peculiararities. Sometimes when the “least of them” on a team does something terrific, something heroic, it motivates the rest of the team, stars and average players alike, to up their game to a new level. We see it in all sports but especially in baseball. That’s what late-inning rallies are all about.
Dyson’s grand slam winner against the Indians was Dyson’s first of the season. Heck, it was the first of his major league career! It was also Dyson’s first home run of the season. So, you understand how this just might be something significant in the Royals’ season. Something that just might snap them out of their lethargy and re-energize the World Series Champions for a second-half run to a pennant.
The Royals need Alex Gordon to start hitting. Perhaps Dyson just said, “Hey Alex, here’s how you do it!” Dyson now has one home run, two triples and only ten doubles in a .259 season and, yet, we are looking to him for inspiration, for someone to jolt the Boys in Blue out of their doldrums. Can a .259 hitter be a hero to this team? Can your local American Legion baseball team by spurred on by the efforts of the numbers eight and nine in the batting order? Can a simple walk start a rally? Can a stolen base by one of the slowest players on the team get a baseball team fired up, get them to all of a sudden start hitting and pitching better? It happens all of the time in baseball. We’re looking for the Grand Slam home run by Dyson in the important first game of the Cleveland series to be a second-half motivator for the Kansas City Royals.
The least imposing home run hitter on the team has pointed the way. Baseball’s peculiar that way!