Royals Blow Golden Opportunity to Go for Giants' Throat in Game 4

For the Kansas City Royals, the hardest part about losing Game 4 on Saturday night isn't that they were blown out 11-4 by the San Francisco Giants. It's that at one point, they actually were leading 4-1 in hostile territory with a golden opportunity to take complete control of the World Series by going up three games to one.

Alas, after their four-run top of the third—a half-inning marked by Giants mistakes and the Royals getting four singles and a walk to score all four runs with two outs—Kansas City allowed San Francisco to put up 10 unanswered runs starting with the bottom of the third inning.

Before anybody knew it, a Game 4 that felt so much like it was going to fall in the Royals' favor based on the early dinks, dunks and lucky bounces turned into the Giants knotting the series at two games apiece—and essentially saving their season.

What's especially frustrating for the Royals is that they did exactly what they wanted to by knocking right-hander Ryan Vogelsong out after just 2.2 innings and snatching an early lead to hand over to their dynamite bullpen.

But for the first time all postseason, their relievers let them down.

Entering Game 4, Kansas City's bullpen had been the first ever to start an October by going a perfect 7-0. After the disaster that struck on Saturday, the carnage leaves Royals relievers with much less pristine numbers.

The unit sported a 1.66 postseason ERA after its dominating work in Game 3, featuring four scoreless, hit-less innings to nail down Friday's 3-2 victory.

Now? Well, their collective ERA sits at 2.91—a run-and-a-quarter worse.

Granted, the damage didn't come against any of the vaunted end-game trio of setup men Kelvin Herrera and Wade Davis and closer Greg Holland. Somehow, manager Ned Yost decided his three best relievers—heck, his three best pitchers—should all stay on the bench in what was a very tense, very tight tie game through five innings.

Instead, the Giants came back and then blasted ahead by taking advantage of not having to face any of those three but rather the likes of Jason Frasor, Danny Duffy, Brandon Finnegan and Tim Collins.

Finnegan carried the biggest load. Such a great story 24 hours earlier when he became the first player ever to pitch in both the College World Series and Major League Baseball World Series in the same year, the TCU product was left in the game to suffer the loss by giving up five runs in his inning-plus of work.

This is a 21-year-old rookie who has been pitching since Valentine's Day and who, after being drafted 17th overall in June, had thrown exactly 12 innings in the majors between the regular season and postseason prior to Game 4. It's not Finnegan's fault that Yost trusted him with the most critical portion of a World Series game.

As Yost said afterward via Dick Kaegel of MLB.com: "[We] wanted to...try to find some way to get through the sixth inning to get to Kelvin [Herrera]. It just didn't work tonight. It doesn't work every night, you know. Most nights we do a pretty good job doing it. It just didn't work tonight."

So now the Royals have to overcome not only the missed opportunity that presented itself in Game 4, but also none other than Madison Bumgarner in Game 5 on Sunday.

The Giants ace has been baseball's best player throughout these playoffs, owning a 1.40 ERA, 0.72 WHIP and 33-to-6 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 38.2 innings across his five starts so far. In his most recent outing, the lefty limited Kansas City to just one run on three hits over seven frames to win Game 1 on Tuesday.

The Royals will counter with James Shields, who is supposed to be their top starting pitcher, except for the fact that he has been the exact opposite to this point. His 7.11 ERA and 1.79 WHIP in four turns are both the worst among all K.C. starters in the playoffs.

By no means is that to suggest that the Royals should simply expect to lose and the Giants to win.

"We can't just go out there and say, 'Bumgarner's pitching, let's just throw our gloves out there,' " Giants outfielder Hunter Pence said in his on-field interview after Game 4. "We still have to play with just as much intensity and passion. That's the only way to get this done."

And to Finnegan and the Royals' credit, they're well aware of the situation.

"This team's full of fighters," Finnegan said, per Kaegel. "We grind out everything. We have a lot of heart, and we've shown that. It's tied 2-2. Anybody's game. We're going to come out [Sunday] ready to play."

Anybody's game, indeed. But mainly because the Royals let it get there.

Statistics are accurate through Oct. 25 and courtesy of MLB.com, Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs, unless otherwise noted.

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