The Royals and Tigers, a Midwest Masterpiece In the Making

Miguel Cabrera had just dug in to lead off the bottom of the ninth Sunday night, his Tigers tied 1-1 with the visiting Kansas City Royals in the rubber game of their three-game set, when Detroit's skies opened up. The grounds crew brought the tarp out, and the players returned to their clubhouses. Grumbling abounded, with the end potentially near and the local masher at the plate, but there was no avoiding a delay.

A postponement, frustrating as it would have been to the paying attendees, would also have brought the weekend to a fitting close. The teams had split the first two games, bringing the season series to a tie of three games apiece, and any advantage gained in the division by the end of the night—the Royals started the evening a half-game up in the American League Central—would be nominal.

As it happened, an hour and a half later, the rain let up. In the top of the tenth, Tigers reliever Angel Nesbitt nicked the buttons on Alex Gordon's jersey with a fastball. Gordon took his base, advanced to second on a wild pitch and then to third on a Salvador Perez ground ball, and came home on an Omar Infante sacrifice fly. Kansas City closer Greg Holland worked around a self-authored bases-loaded jam with no outs to pitch a scoreless final frame, and the Royals got the win. This will all matter in four months, or it won't.

A month and a half into the season, the Tigers and Royals have dismissed March's detractors—this was supposed to be the year that metronome-steady Detroit started to slip and that the blessed bounces behind Kansas City's World Series run broke the other way—to establish themselves as long-haul adversaries at the top of the division. They own two of the best four records in the American League and two of the more distinct styles in baseball. With any luck, in an era that has seen runaway winners and Wild Card jostling increasingly supplant tight division races, this is just the start of a six-month Midwestern masterpiece.

Detroit is an ideal incumbent. They have won the Central four years running and are built as classically as the old-timey D on their uniforms, with an all-time great in the three-hole and a flamethrower pacing the pitching staff. The former is Cabrera, who keeps on raking even as he tiptoes towards the trouble years in a slugger's life cycle. The latter was once Justin Verlander, then became Max Scherzer, and is now David Price. In their best moments—which is to say, before one of their discount-bin relievers takes a break from trying to remove the gum stuck in his hair to give up a three-run lead—the Tigers seem singular and insurmountable. Cabrera sends a homer over the left-field wall, his bat lifted in self-salute. Price ends an inning with a fastball on the outside corner and his fist pounding his glove. Repeat as needed.

The Royals, conversely, are still upstarts, even after their run last postseason. Questions about the sustainability of the bunt- and contact-heavy, bullpen-leaning approach surrounded the team during its miraculous October, and they only grew louder during an offseason that saw chief innings-eater James Shields and lineup mainstay Billy Butler leave town. Personnel changes aside, there was the sense that the jig had to be up. Those grounders and cue shots would start finding gloves, and the bullpen would have fewer leads to convert to victories.

Instead, the Royals have the best on-base percentage in the American League and have scored the second-most runs, and look far more like the charmed scamperers of last fall than the league-average offense they were through that summer. Lorenzo Cain, Eric Hosmer, and Mike Moustakas have all started the season at career-best clips, Kendrys Morales has proven a fine and aesthetically consistent replacement for Butler, and Gordon remains one of the game's best left fielders. Though the starting pitching has been, in turn, unsteady and salty—characteristics most apparent in the collective plus-four ERA and Yordano Ventura's assorted kerfuffles—the Kansas City defense is still one of the best in baseball, and the bullpen has stayed nearly perfect.

These teams' clashing styles, and their occasional breaks from them, lend their meetings an extra dose of fun. See, for example, the first game of the weekend's series, which Price started for Detroit. Price makes no bones about his desire to throw strikes; the home broadcast repeatedly mentioned his credo of on or out in three pitches. It is a solid tactic, especially for a pitcher with a mid-90s fastball and a knack for spotting it.

At the start of the fourth inning that evening, things were going well for the Tigers. They had scored four runs in the third, and the Royals had managed nothing more than a few scattered hits. Price started off Gordon, the second batter, with a dastardly combination: a cutter just off the plate that coaxed a breezy swing, and another that settled on the outside corner.

Gordon then restrained himself from offering at a subsequent pair of fastballs out of the zone before knocking the third cutter in the sequence hard the other way for a double. It was the first of a five-hit frame, which—with the help of a Nick Castellanos error—plated four runs.

That half-inning was Ned Yost's dream made real. It was an ode to the primacy of the batted ball, a celebration of the small stuff. It demonstrated how vile a thing the strikeout was. Work your way back into enough counts, put enough balls in play, and this is what eventually happens.

Later, in Detroit's half of the ninth, with the score tied at 5 and Anthony Gose on second base, Ian Kinsler dropped a bunt down the third base line. Royals reliever Yohan Pino botched the throw to first, and Gose came around to score the winning run. Small stuff, indeed.

On a larger scale, both the Tigers and the Royals have cause for urgency. For all of its regular-season success, Detroit has come up short in the postseason; with the still-great Cabrera likely to deteriorate more rapidly than his paychecks, opportunities to compete for a World Series may soon become rare. Fans in Kansas City, meanwhile, surely fear the potential transience of their team's success—young players get old or expensive quickly. The teams' macro-narratives are as distinct as their methodologies: one wants things to stay the same for a little while longer; the other wants change, but not too much of it.

A neck-and-neck division race is largely a thing of the past. Big-ticket teams run away with divisions, and everyone else fights for Wild Card scraps. Last season, only two divisions finished with fewer than six games separating winner and runner-up; one of them was the AL Central. The Royals and Tigers play a dozen more games this year. We can only hope, and should probably expect, that each of them will mean something.