Royals trounce Giants 10-0, force Game 7 (w/video)

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – We’re going the distance. Well, yeah. Of course we’re going the distance.

There was no way either of these two teams - plucky, resourceful and so frequently smiled on by fate - would go away before the seventh game of the World Series. The Giants entered the National League playoffs as the lowest seed. They had no true leadoff batter and no obvious fourth starter. The wild-card Royals couldn’t hit the ball out of the park.

Yet, here they are preparing for just the second World Series Game 7 in the past 11 years.

“This is what you work for starting in spring training,” Giants manager Bruce Bochy said. “If you told me we were going to be playing the seventh game in the World Series, I think we’d all be doing cartwheels.”

They’ll decide the 2014 championship at Kauffman Stadium tonight, with Tim Hudson throwing for San Francisco and Jeremy Guthrie for Kansas City.

The Giants will win and return home as champions for the third time in five years, allowing their fans to breathe again, and then party again. Or they will lose a postseason series for the first time under Bochy and be left to reflect on their similarity to the 2002 Giants team, which took a 3-2 World Series lead against the Angels only to lose the final two games in Anaheim.

Though the Giants and Royals are very evenly matched, this series has produced only one close game. That certainly didn’t happen Tuesday, when Kansas City scored seven runs in the second inning and started the visitors down the path to a 10-0 loss.

That second inning was a quagmire for the Giants. The Royals wound up scoring seven runs, the most they’ve ever plated in one inning in a postseason game, and they did without a lot of solid contact.

Alex Gordon looped a soft fly to center field for a single. Salvador Perez lined a sharp ball over the leaping Joe Panik for a single. Mike Moustakas pulled a ground ball directly over the first base bag, and just under the glove of Brandon Belt, and wound up with an RBI double. Alcides Escobar dinked a little grounder to Belt, who checked the runner at third and raced to tag Escobar, but missed him. That loaded the bases, and Nori Aoki poked an opposite-field single past Pablo Sandoval at third base, scoring another run.

Lorenzo Cain shot one off the handle of his bat for a meek single, scoring two runners. Eric Hosmer chopped a high ground ball right over the head of shortstop Brandon Crawford, who was drawn in, and got two more runs home. Hosmer hustled to second for a double, and Billy Butler brought him home by lofting a double into the right-center gap.

The final tally: seven runs, eight hits, 34 minutes of abject misery for the Giants.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever been through one of those innings, to be honest with you,” San Francisco starting pitcher Jake Peavy said. “Seemed long. Seemed like we couldn’t catch a break. I don’t how many times in a 13-year career you break three bats and don’t get not even an out on one of them. Unfortunately, the way it played out, just not my night.”

Peavy said Gordon, Moustakas and Escobar each broke his bat on his hit.

Peavy has been a very good pitcher for a long time, but he has not been a September sensation. His career postseason numbers going into Game 6 included a 1-4 record, an ERA of 7.05 and a sky-high WHIP (walks + hits per inning pitched) of 1.703. He had made eight previous postseason starts and had never gone six innings, the longest such streak in MLB history.

It got longer Tuesday as the Royals throttled him for five earned runs and six hits in 11/3 innings. Peavy had hurt his thumb trying to catch a foul ball in the dugout in Game 3, but said it did not affect him at all in Game 6.

Reliever Yusmeiro Petit split the damage with Peavy, and that was more surprising. Petit had clearly been one of the team’s postseason MVPs, making three long-relief appearances and earning the win in all of them, while not allowing a run in 12 innings. His magic ran out against the Royals, who got him for two runs and three hits in two-thirds of an inning.

Staked to a huge lead, Royals starter Yordano Ventura cruised. The 23-year-old right-hander with the 97-mph fastball rolled through seven innings. He got into a small jackpot right after the Royals’ big rally, when he walked the bases loaded in the top of the third. But Buster Posey swung at the first pitch he saw and grounded into a double play.

Ventura threw exactly 100 pitches, allowing just three hits and four walks.

“You’ve got a 23-year-old kid pitching the biggest game that this stadium has seen in 29 years with our backs against the wall, and he goes out there in complete command of his emotions, with great stuff, and throws seven shutout innings,” Kansas City manager Ned Yost said.

When the score got lopsided, Bochy got strategic. He went with his more expendable relief pitchers, saving the likes of Santiago Casilla, Sergio Romo and Jeremy Affeldt for Wednesday’s big showdown. Yost had the luxury of doing the same. None of his top relievers - Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis or Greg Holland - saw the field. All will be available in Game 7.

“It’s not that you ever say ‘uncle,’ but at the same time if you get down that far, it does allow you to use some other guys and maybe stretch them out like we did,” Bochy said. “… So we’re loaded tomorrow, I feel, and they are, too.”

The Royals added three additional runs against the Giants’ overextended bullpen. One of those came on Moustakas’ seventh-inning home run against Hunter Strickland. It was the sixth long ball allowed by Strickland this postseason, a record among MLB relievers.

There was much about Game 6 the Giants would like to forget. And yet in the clubhouse afterward, few seemed unaware that they still have a chance for a historic and gleeful moment on Wednesday.

“Who doesn’t like Game 7?” Peavy asked. “That being said, we really wanted to get it done tonight. I really wanted to get it done tonight. Like I said, just wasn’t meant to be.”

You can reach Staff Writer Phil Barber at 521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com.