Kansas City Royals: Second half of season not nearly as brutal
Any time a baseball team loses 100 games in a season, there’s not much to applaud. With the Kansas City Royals, however, at least their second half performance hasn’t been as bad as the first half.
When the 2018 All-Star break took place, the Kansas City Royals were sitting at 27-68, a mere 41 games under .500 and 25 games behind first place in their division. In other words, the Royals were already out of any type of playoff race.
When second half play picked back up on July 20th, however, things were immediately off to a much better start. The Royals won three straight games, sweeping the Twins, and looked like a much different team from what fans had been “treated” to in the first few months of the season.
While the Kansas City Royals weren’t necessarily fun to watch this year, there were certainly bright spots in the second half of the 2018 season. Highlights of this team included Brad Keller (who had one of the best rookie pitching performances of any Royal ever), Adalberto Mondesi (he looks like a star), Ryan O’Hearn (another impressive rookie), and Whit Merrifield (good ol’ Whit).
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Fans got to watch some guys who could very well be big pieces in this team’s future and that part was fun. One of the few fun aspects of this season actually.
In the first half of the season, the Royals had zero walk-off wins. Obviously winning is the most important part in baseball (and any sport), but the walk-off wins in baseball bring players together. The Royals failed to capitalize on that aspect in the first couple of months, but notched five walk-off wins in their last few months of action.
The first walk-off win came on a Friday night in August against Cleveland. The Indians had tied things up late, but rookie Ryan O’Hearn tied the game back up in the ninth. Minutes later, Hunter Dozier walked the game off with a home run to give Kansas City their first walk-off win of 2018.
That moment right there showed that this team could be a lot of fun, but we have to continue to be patient with them. They’re not going to become a World Series contender overnight. Moments like the one with O’Hearn and Dozier in August could be one fans look back to and say, “That’s where things slowly started clicking for these guys”.
With the 2018 season almost over, the second half of the season gave fans something to be optimistic about. Sure, the Royals still weren’t great, but things are slowly, but surely starting to come together for these rebuilding Royals.