Rain delayed play in Game 6 of the American League Championship Series on Friday night at Kauffman Stadium.
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Bautista was a one-man wrecking crew for Toronto, driving in all three runs with a pair of homers included a two-run shot in the eighth inning that tied it at 3-3 when the Jays were down to their last five outs.
A lot of the talk going into Game Six between the Blue Jays and Royals was about David Price.
The Kansas City Royals secured a spot in the World Series for the second straight year with a 4-3 win over Toronto Friday. The righthander allowed an infield single by Revere but Donaldson struck out, bringing Bautista to the plate with the Royals five outs away from reaching the World Series.
Yordano Ventura and Kansas City’s bullpen held Toronto to seven hits.
The Blue Jays threatened in the ninth off Wade Davis. Donaldson ended the game with a groundout to third base. The homer was also the only runs allowed in the series by the Royals’ fearsome, high-leverage relief quartet of Wade Davis, Madson, Kelvin Herrera and Luke Hochevar.
“It wasn’t quite an hour, but it felt like it was four hours”, said Royals manager Ned Yost.
The Royals jumped on David Price early with home runs in each of the first two innings.
They simply couldn’t win their sixth straight elimination game. Kansas City lost a heartbreaking 4-3 series past year to to the Giants, but the experience gained during that run makes it the favorite this time around.
The Royals open the World Series on Tuesday night against the New York Mets, trying to do one win better than they did previous year.
From there, the bullpen nailed down the victory and lifted the team into the World Series.
Cain, who was not running on the pitch, was able to score easily after Jose Bautista’s throw from the right field corner went to second base instead of the cut off man.
It was up to Davis, who got the Royals out of a jam in the eighth, to finish it off.
The first instance involving KC occurred in Game 4 of the AL Division Series when Terrance Gore was ruled safe sliding into third on a stolen base attempt. It should be noted that if the weather in Baltimore at the end of the season hadn’t conspired to squeeze three games into one 24-hour period, Gibbons likely would have rested his starters for just one game not two, and there is no guarantee the Jays would have won the games their starters Saturday But that certainly won’t stop the second-guessing, particularly since the Jays finished just two games behind the Royals.
Davis gave up a single to Russell Martin and walked Kevin Pillar before striking out pinch-hitter Dioner Navarro. Their path back to the World Series included a plan to take the league’s top seed in the regular season-which they did-and then to fight their way through the playoffs.
The Royals have played in three absolutely mind-blowing playoff games in the last 13 months.
The home run was Zobrist’s second of the series, which is impressive because he came into the ALCS having hit just two postseason home runs in 26 games.
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After scrawling the initials of his late mother, Connie, into the dirt with the end of his bat, Moustakas sent a 1-2 pitch from Price screaming over the fence in right. “But God knows what would happened if I would have done that anyways”.
