PRESSURE ON A DIAMOND

How the 2015 Kansas City Royals won a World Series…

In 2006 Sports Illustrated writer Jack McCallum published Seven Seconds or Less, a book about the Phoenix Suns 2005-06 season told from the inside; the Suns actually made McCallum an “assistant coach” and because he had almost total access McCallum wrote one of the best sports books ever. Fans got to hear about coaches meetings and locker room conversations and player personalities—the inside stuff fans rarely get to hear about.

After the Royals won the 2015 World Series I wanted to write something similar. I didn’t have total access to the 2015 team, but I had a lot of access and knew some behind-the-scenes stories that never became public.

Turned out, my publisher wasn’t interested in that book.

So I shelved the book idea if by “shelved” you actually mean “forgot all about it until the Royals started bringing those 2015 players back to town to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of their championship.”

Fans still love those guys so I figured what the heck, post the book I wanted to write back then on this blog now. So that’s what I’m going to do (maybe…we’ll see) between now and the end of the baseball season.

It’s going to be a combination of my original rough draft (with some updating) and bits from columns I wrote in 2015 and I’ll remind you of things you probably forgot about or didn’t notice at the time they happened and you’ll hear things you’ve never heard before and if you’re one of those 2015 Royals and just went, “Oh shit!” don’t worry:

I didn’t burn any players back then and won’t start now.

But there are stories that didn’t make it into the Star and stories I wouldn’t tell while the players were still playing, but now most of them are retired so I’ll tell the ones that won’t get anybody in trouble and that includes me.

Be aware that this is my version of events and others might see things differently, but in 2015 I was writing all this stuff down so I’d remember it.

You’re also going to notice I talked to some players and coaches all the time and some hardly ever and that’s because some players and coaches like to talk about baseball and are very articulate and other players and coaches don’t and aren’t.

The first time I tried to talk to Billy Butler I wanted to know about hitting the ball to the opposite field, which he was great at doing and asked him if he was emphasizing his bottom hand (the bottom hand pulls the bat forward, the top hand pushes the bat head out) or just waiting for the pitch to get deep in the strike zone or using more weight shift than rotation and all this time I can see Billy’s getting more and more agitated and frustrated and he finally blurts out:

“I JUST HIT IT AND IT GOES THAT WAY!”

And walks off.

OK, thanks for the insight.

I never got the feeling Billy wanted to talk to me, but I did get the feeling Billy thought I should want to talk to him and would get irritated when I walked right past him to talk to a backup catcher.

So I did that as often as possible.

Then one night Billy hits a game winner and I think OK, let’s talk about that and Billy describes how he did it and what pitch he was looking for and why he was looking for it and then recites the pitcher’s selection of pitches and how often he threw each one (like fastball, 56 percent of the time) and I’m thinking this is pretty smart of Billy until I add up the pitches and the percentages and it comes out to 103 percent.

Is that backup catcher still available?

You won’t hear much from Billy—he was gone by 2015—but you will hear lots from guys like Eric Hosmer although Hos didn’t like to talk about hitting either, probably because he didn’t want to start thinking about hitting and I don’t know if that’s why Hos didn’t want to talk about hitting because Hos didn’t want to talk about hitting.

(This psychological bullshit gets complicated.)

We got along great, but the one time I know Hos got pissed off at me is when I thoughtlessly complimented him on a hot streak and his response was:

“I can’t believe you said that to me. I can’t even look at you right now.”

Because me mentioning his hot streak would make him think about his hot streak and who knows where that might lead because talking and thinking about a hot streak might end it. It’s one of those Wile E. Coyote walks-off-a-cliff deals; you won’t fall if you don’t look down and I was saying, “Hey, Hos, look how high up you are.”

After my thoughtless compliment Hos ignored me and went into some sort of Stuart Smalley Self-Help Talk like:

“I’m better than this.”

“I won’t let this effect me.”

“What he said doesn’t change anything.”

Other than regularly breaking the Unwritten Rules of Baseball (which was easy to do because as the title suggests, the Unwritten Rules are Unwritten and you’ve got to break one to find out it exists) I mostly got along well with players because I was writing about “process” (how things are done) and not so much about “results” (what happened).

Analytics advocates and newspaper columnists and sports-talk radio guys are up to their eyeballs with opinions about baseball and I wanted to write about baseball from the ballplayer’s point of view; how did the players view the game and how it should be played?

So my questions would be about making tags on runners or dealing with pop flies in the sun or the best way to break up a double play without starting a riot and those are things most players like to talk about.

I was talking to Luke Hochevar about pitching to David Ortiz – why this pitch after that pitch – and Luke stopped and asked: “Why can’t every interview be like this? We’re just talking baseball.”

To be honest (as usual, a temporary policy) I had a much easier job than most baseball reporters. I had no deadline and no story I was required to cover.

I was asking about things players wanted to talk about and showing up for early work (it happens before batting practice) so we could talk-one-on-one (once there’s a crowd of reporters, players start talking in clichés) and because most days I was there early I spent time with players and coaches and grounds crew members and clubhouse kids and cops and ushers and I’d occasionally get Ned Yost all to myself for 20 minutes, which meant I was hearing stuff that never got mentioned in a press conference.

BTW: Press conferences are about the worst way in The Wide World of Sports to gather information because if a player or coach doesn’t like or know a reporter he’s not going to say anything that can be used against him. And if you get enough reporters together (two usually does the trick) there’s always a reporter they don’t like or know and then a player or coach won’t say jack shit.

Not that all the players and coaches liked me, because they definitely didn’t and we’ll talk more about that before we’re through.

In any case…

The main story about the 2015 season will be told chronologically—month-by-month, a few pages at a time—but every so often we’ll take a trip back in time or into the future to tell a story that helps explain why something happened in 2015.

I’ll post a story (wait a minute…let me look at my schedule) whenever the hell I feel like it and if you’re one of those people who hate baseball, go ahead and skip them because all the regular stuff will still be here, but if you skip them you’re missing some really funny stories and lots of information about what makes baseball the greatest sport ever devised by man with the possible exception of beer pong.

So now Ten’s Year After – which is either a good name for a rock band or a bad idea for a book – I’ll tell the inside story (OK, as inside as I can make it) of the 2015 Kansas City Royals.

P.S. I have some severe doubts about this project, but if I’m ever going to do it, now’s the time. Still, it’s going to be a lot of work and if it turns out only 12 of you are interested I reserve the right to quit because if History has taught us anything, it’s that giving up is highly underrated.

People die trying to climb Mt. Everest (5-to-10 climbers a year on average) because no one had the balls to say, “It’s cold, it’s late, there’s a storm coming, so fuck it, let’s turn back.” Let me assure you I have what it takes to give up and by the way, that’s a real picture of people waiting in line to summit Mt. Everest. If I arrived at a movie theater and the line was that long I’d say screw this, let’s go home and find something on Netflix.

I’ll commit to getting through the first month of the 2015 season so if you enjoy it, tell your friends and repost whatever I post and if you decide pay for a skywriter I won’t mind one bit.

Come back tomorrow and we’ll start with the cast of characters.