Kansas City Royals History: 1985 Team Completes ALCS Comeback

Series Recap

With a series this crazy, it’s best to explain how this matchup reached the point of needing a winner-take-all Game 7. As you know already, Toronto jumped out to an early lead. The Blue Jays scored six runs within the first four innings of Game 1 to cruise to a 6-1 win.

In Game 2, the Kansas City Royals let a 3-0 lead slip away to the point where they needed a run in the ninth inning off a solo homer from Pat Sheridan to send the game to extra innings. The road team then took the lead in the top of the 10th when Willie Wilson scored on Frank White‘s single. However, Toronto scored twice in the bottom half to take a healthy two-games-to-none lead to Kansas City.

The Royals got back into the series with a massive 6-5 victory in Game 3. Trailing 2-0, the Blue Jays scored all five of their runs in the top of the fifth inning. A solo homer from Jim Sundberg and George Brett‘s second blast of the night—a two-run shot—tied the score after six innings. In the eighth inning, Brett also scored the go-ahead run on a bloop single by Steve Balboni.

Toronto moved to the verge of winning the series with a ninth-inning rally to win Game 4 by a 3-1 score. That’s when the wheels came off for the Blue Jays. The Kansas City Royals completed the shutout they almost had in Game 4 in a 2-0 Game 5 win.

The series returned to Ontario with the Blue Jays still needing just one win to reach their first World Series. An even Game 6 fell the visitors way by a 5-3 score, as Brett hit his third home run of the series that gave the Royals the lead for good.

It also helped him win ALCS MVP honors.

Game 7

Entering the high-stakes finale, the Kansas City Royals clearly had the momentum. Toronto clearly, though, had home-field advantage—although road teams had already won twice in six games. Either way, the winner-take-all scenario after six hard-fought games proved the new format worked.

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The AL’s Cy Young award winner in 1985, Bret Saberhagen started on the mound for the Kansas City Royals. However, he lasted just three innings—albeit scoreless ones—before making way for Charlie Leibrandt, who had suffered two defeats already in the series. On the other side, Toronto started Dave Stieb, who had won his two previous starts in the series.

It didn’t seem to faze the Royals, though. Sheridan scored single runs in the second and fourth innings—the latter being a solo home run—for a 2-0 lead. Meanwhile, a Toronto offense that hadn’t scored more than three runs in a single game since Game 4 continued to struggle. The Blue Jays finally got on the board in the fifth inning, as they cut the deficit in half.

But the Royals came right back and jumped on Stieb in the sixth inning. Sundberg drove in his second, third and fourth runs of the day on a bases-clearing triple that hit literally the top of the wall and bounced back into play. He came in to score on White’s single for a commanding 6-1 lead.

Leibrandt kept things that way until Dan Quisenberry replaced him with two on and one out in the ninth inning. An RBI-groundout cut the deficit to 6-2, but Quisenberry forced another groundout to finish things off and complete the miraculous comeback.

The victory sent the Kansas City Royals to their second World Series—the other coming in 1980. It also famously set up an all-Missouri World Series. The St. Louis Cardinals had clinched the NL pennant earlier that same day with a win over the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 6.

Next: Best Outfielders in Franchise History

The highly anticipated World Series started on Oct. 19, but we’ll have more on that soon enough.