Royals' Last, Best Shot Is Held Up at Third

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - From his seat at Kauffman Stadium on Wednesday, five rows behind home plate, Larry Baer waited for the final out of Game 7 of the World Series. Baer is the chief executive of the San Francisco Giants, whose ace, Madison Bumgarner, had retired 14 Kansas City Royals in a row. Only Alex Gordon stood between the Giants and their third championship in five seasons.

With an 0-1 count in a 3-2 game, Gordon lined a cutter to center. It was a single - and then it was pandemonium.

'There's four rows of pure blue in front of us, and they're jumping up and down, crazy,' Baer said. 'I guess the initial thought was, only in baseball could something that crazy happen, meaning an inside-the-park home run.'

It would not have been scored that way, of course. But the point was that, for a frantic, fleeting moment, Gordon seemed to have a chance to circle the bases and tie Game 7, just when all hope seemed lost. Instead, he pulled up at third.

No World Series has ended with a runner thrown out at the plate. The closest such situation was in 1921, in a triumph for the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds. In Game 8, under a best-of-nine format, the Yankees' Aaron Ward was thrown out at third base - by the first baseman, at the end of a double play - for the final out in a one-run game.

The San Francisco Giants - or some of their executives, anyway - have a much fresher memory of a postseason series concluding with a play at the plate. Their 2003 division series ended in Miami with Marlins catcher Ivan Rodriguez clutching the ball after tagging out J. T. Snow.

Baer thought of that, too, and other chilling memories from before the Giants' every-other-year pattern of bliss.

'I went back to the times when we always had these crazy things going the other way,' Baer said. 'We couldn't win a World Series in 2002 when we had a 5-0 lead in Game 6 in Anaheim. The J.T. Snow play in Florida. And maybe this was going to be another one. Like, maybe the good fate is over.

'It turned out to be that everything just had to be done the hard way this year, not the easy way. You've got to end it with a man on third and two outs.'

Bumgarner took care of that, of course, capping his spellbinding month by firing high fastballs to Salvador Perez until he fouled out to third baseman Pablo Sandoval. Perez had homered off Bumgarner in Game 1, the only run Bumgarner has allowed in 36 career World Series innings. But Perez looked overmatched in the end.

Imagine, then, what would have happened if the Royals' third base coach, Mike Jirschele, had waved Gordon home. It was not a wild notion. Considering how dominant Bumgarner had been, the chance to tie Game 7 right then might have been the Royals' best shot.

'It's hard to second-guess,' said Brandon Crawford, the Giants' shortstop, who took the relay throw from left fielder Juan Perez. 'In that situation, you're trying to find any way you can to score that tying run. So if he thought he could have scored, he probably would have sent him.'

Gordon's hit was troublesome from the start. He connected solidly, but the ball hung in the air just long enough to cause Gregor Blanco, the Giants' center fielder, to think. And thinking, as Crash Davis famously said in 'Bull Durham,' can only hurt the ball club.

As he charged toward the ball, Blanco said, he had two competing options in his mind: catch it or keep Gordon to a single. Instead, he rushed too close to the ball, neither diving for it nor keeping it far enough in front of him to gather the bounce easily.

'It's not an easy situation to be in, to try to go for that ball, but at the same time I really realized that I couldn't dive for it,' said Blanco, who then mentioned the importance of keeping Gordon at first. 'But it was too late. The ball passed me by. It gave me a really bad hop and I couldn't handle it.'

Blanco also appeared to slip on the grass in pursuit, and the ball skipped away, bouncing all the way to a sliver of padding under a scoreboard at the bottom of the wall in deep left-center. Perez was there, playing instead of Travis Ishikawa because of his defensive skill.

But when Perez reached for the ball, it skidded away from him, just as Gordon was hitting second base.

'I was kind of rushing a little bit,' Perez said. 'I had time to get the ball in. I should have taken my time to get the ball and throw it in. And I grabbed it and missed it, and I said to myself, 'He might send him home,' so I was making sure I made a good throw to Crawford so he can get the ball, and after that he would do the rest.'

Perez has a strong arm and had pitched until age 16 - including, he said, during high school in the Bronx. He said he prides himself on accurate throws, and this one, from the warning track, made it to Crawford quickly, on a short hop.

'That's a big outfield, so I was just wanting someone to get it and get it in, which they did in plenty of time,' Bumgarner said. 'But it was a little nerve-racking.'

In the Royals' dugout, Manager Ned Yost said he was hoping - 'for a second' - that Gordon would try for the plate. But with the scoreboard embedded in the wall, he said, it is hard to tell from his vantage point just what was going on.

Gordon, for his part, insisted he was not thinking about scoring. He runs well, with 12 stolen bases this season, but he is not a burner like Jarrod Dyson or Terrance Gore.

'Once I saw it get by him, I just put my head down and ran,' Gordon said. 'I was looking at Jirsh the whole time. I'm not as fast as Dyson; if I was, I probably would have scored. He made a good call holding me up.'

Jirschele, 55, spent 13 years in the minors as a player and 17 more as a manager before his first job in the majors this season. He assembles and repairs furniture in Wisconsin every off-season. This was the moment of a lifetime, and he did not let it cloud his judgment.

Sending Gordon would have been dramatic, for sure, setting up, perhaps, a home plate collision at the end of a season that included a sometimes confusing new rule about those kinds of plays. The rule came about partly because of a 2011 injury sustained in a collision by the Giants' Buster Posey, who would have been in position to face an oncoming Gordon with Game 7 on the line.

It never came to that, Jirschele said, for a simple reason: Gordon would have been out, easily.

'Even though there's two outs, if he's going to be out by a mile, I'm not just going to give them that last out,' Jirschele said, adding later, 'Once they got that ball to Crawford, I saw we had no shot.'

Crawford has a strong, accurate arm, Jirschele knew, and sending Gordon would have forced him to use it. But Jirschele also knew it would not take Crawford's best effort to end the World Series. Crawford could have thrown 10 feet wide of the plate, Jirschele guessed, and Posey would still have had time for a tag.

'To me, right there, if we have a chance to score him and I feel it's going to take a perfect throw to get him, I'll send him and take a chance,' Jirschele said. 'I just felt that there was no chance that he was going to score.'

From his spot in the executive suite, Royals General Manager Dayton Moore said, he hoped that Perez and Crawford would somehow botch the relay. Once Crawford got the ball, Moore said, he knew Jirschele had made the right call. His thoughts turned to the next hitter.

The Royals' Perez had ended the American League wild-card game with a hit down the left-field line. He was batting .348 in the World Series, the best average on the Royals. And he had delivered that Game 1 homer off Bumgarner. Moore believed.

'I thought Salvy was going to get it done,' Moore said, in the quiet Royals clubhouse. 'I thought he was going to get it done.'

Across the first-floor lobby, in the Giants' clubhouse, the mood was euphoric. Baer wore one championship ring and spoke fancifully of how the next might look. As the party raged around him, family and friends and reporters everywhere, Baer took a question about the pitcher who calmly kept Gordon at third, averting disaster and achieving glory again.

'The Bumgarner statue?' Baer said. 'We'll have it ready for Friday's parade!'

He was kidding.

Probably.