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Sports

The Mythical Kansas City Royals

The World Series Champion Royals love the late innings, the deep night.
Robert Deutsch-USA TODAY Sports

Alcides Escobar uses a regular-sized bat, but it looks heavy in his bony fingers. He swings it the way a kid swings the mallet at a carnival strongman game. He misses by a foot, or he fouls the pitch high and straight back into the third deck, or he pulls a double down the line. Then he heads out to short and picks a ball off the dirt or out of the air like he's trapping fireflies, and, before throwing to first, looks at it for a moment in the same easy and amazed way.

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Ben Zobrist stands at the plate with a bat, then the security footage gets static for a moment or two, and then he is at first. Lorenzo Cain walks like he's just pulled something, swings like he's trying to pull something, and runs like no muscle in his body has ever hurt him for a moment in his life.

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There is a certain audio-visual-synaptic sensation that lets you know, watching a baseball game on TV, that a pitch has been struck perfectly and that it will, barring an even more perfect play from an outfielder, land in the grass for an extra-base hit. Eric Hosmer does not strike a pitch this way. His singles Slinky-tumble up the middle, or they arc into shallow left and land while the left fielder charges in and the shortstop knocks his heels together. His doubles are in the air for a long time, to the point where it seems sure they will be caught, and then they are not. He broke for home in the ninth inning of the last game of the World Series on a stock 5-3 putout, and it seemed sure that he would be caught, and then he was not.

Kendrys Morales sits on an invisible stool when he hits, and he yawns when he swings, and when he yawns extra-huge, he hits the ball hard.

Mike Moustakas was quite bad for long stretches early in his career. He was sent down to the minors as recently as last season. While he was there, he took some solace at a local burger-and-arcade joint, where he ordered a basket of fries and played a game of pinball. He admired the quickness and accuracy with which the bumpers shot the metal ball across the surface and the simple aims of the flipper. Now, he plays third like a bumper, his throws across the diamond low and keen and hard, and he hits like a flipper, his swing quick and humble, and he is quite a bit better than he used to be.

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Salvador Perez has to pull in his shoulders to walk down the average city block, lest they scrape the buildings on either side. He has made some sort of a pact with pain. He takes tipped fastballs to the Adam's Apple and bats to the wrist on their follow-throughs. His chest, nearly an acre across, makes the netted backstop redundant, but the netted backstop—which similarly stops everything—cannot hurt. Perez does hurt, slumping into the dirt after shots to his torso. But he stays in the game, and he stores all of this absorbed impact and transfers it back to the baseball. His throws to second are as fast as jets. His doubles are crashing comets. That's your World Series MVP.

Alex Gordon, in left, tracks fly balls in unfailingly perfect lines. The game, to him, seems to be a perpetual drill; he pays attention to the patterns of his feet and the technique of his glove hand. Corralling a straightforward pop-up or running down a liner for an over-the-shoulder grab, he resembles an inked illustration in a baseball instruction manual. If nobody's on, he pauses for an instant after catching the ball as if to recap his performance and check it for errors.

Alex Rios hits pretty well for someone who has spent most of his baseball career in the middle of a decade-long avant-garde hypnosis demonstration.

Johnny Cueto keeps a rabbit's foot in one pocket and an actual, live, very pissed off black cat in the other. Kelvin Herrera once bounced a slider and caused a lengthy delay, as home plate was reduced to a pile of ashes and a new one had to be located. Wade Davis will wake with a start every night this winter to find that he's been sleep-warming-up, wandering the halls of his home and spinning his arm as if to get his shoulder loose, and he will smile and go back to bed and dream peaceful dreams of untouchable cutters. No one has been able to hit him for two years.

One day when he was a child, Ned Yost was buying candy at the general store. A troubled-looking man came in, demanded a bottle of booze, paid in quarters flung at the shopkeeper, and spat on the counter. Ned helped the shopkeeper collect the change and clean up the phlegm. On his walk home, Ned spotted the same man playing in a game of sandlot baseball, and he sat down and watched. The man went one for four with a home run, a walk, and a strikeout. Ned knew that this was not the kind of man he wanted to be.

The Kansas City Royals are a fairly young team, and in the way of young people the world over, they seem not to like early things. They start games slowly, squinting at fastballs the way high school kids squint at first-period algebra teachers. The Royals love the late innings, the deep night. They like being in and getting out of trouble, and trouble is easier to find after midnight.

The Royals won the World Series, and now they may start their days as late as they like, until it's time to start doing it all over again.