Kansas City Royals: Best Individual 2017 Game Performances

There were plenty of wonderful individual performances for the Kansas City Royals this year. Some were flashes in the pan; others came from the team’s stars. Here are our top picks.

As a whole, the Kansas City Royals had several disappointing players in 2017. But even some of the disappointing players put together stellar individual games.

We decided to highlight those performances, as well as the best ones from the team’s good players. So basically we are taking all 162 games and picking some of the top individual games over the course of the season.

To make this exercise a little more intriguing, we chose to select exactly four performances out of each month. We also stipulated that every starting position player from the main second-half lineup have at least one performance chosen. There was also the stipulation that at least five different starting pitchers have a game selected. (We actually ended up with six different starters—believe it or not.)

For this exercise, we chose to ignore relief pitchers. Their performances, while obviously important to the outcome of a given game, are much harder to judge in a larger context.

When filling out the months, a few things became clear:

1. Great individual performances can happen any time, but they are more likely to occur during stretches of great play by the entire team. As evidenced by us struggling to find enough examples in months like April and September, but then having a surplus of performances in June.
2. Pitching carried the team early on, and the offense did the heavy lifting the final few months.
3. A vast majority of the best performances came at home, where the Kansas City Royals went 43-38.

Without further ado, here are the performances that made the cut.