KC Royals: 3 big positives from a winning road trip

The KC Royals, a team on the brink of last place in the American League Central, beat Minnesota 5-3 Sunday afternoon. The victory capped Kansas City’s next-to-last road trip of the season, a journey that provided at least three good things to contemplate as the Royals take Monday off before facing the A’s and Mariners at home this week.

The KC Royals demonstrated they can be a resilient major league ballclub.

Kansas City embarked on this seven-game road trip after losing five of seven, including four straight to Cleveland, in a seven-tilt homestand with the Indians and White Sox. And the cure that should have been a trip-opening four games with Baltimore turned out to be a disappointing split.

More potentially damaging than those games, though, was Wednesday’s loss to the Orioles, a defeat solely attributable the club’s worst inning in recent memory. The Royals had few, if any, worries when they carried a seemingly comfortable 5-0 lead into the bottom of the eighth.

But Baltimore, then and still fiercely competing with Arizona to determine who the worst team in the major leagues will be at season’s end, shockingly bludgeoned Kansas City for nine runs to take a 9-5 lead, then held off Kansas City in the ninth to win 9-8.

It was the kind of eviscerating defeat capable of ruining a team for days. But the Royals, behind Nicky Lopez’s three-hit, two-RBI game and starter Carlos Hernandez’s six shutout innings, beat the O’s 6-0 the next day. The club moved on to Minnesota and took two of three from the Twins and left the Twin Cities winners three of their last four and two games ahead of last-place Minnesota.

That humiliating Wednesday loss could have flattened Kansas City, but the club bounced back convincingly to finish the road trip 4-3.

What other good can we take from this trip?

Andrew Benintendi is staking his claim to another season with the KC Royals.

That Andrew Benintendi was enjoying his best hitting of the season heading into Sunday’s game with the Twins was clear. He was slashing .341/.383/.682 in September and had already driven in 14 runs for the month. And he was 6-for-9 with a pair of home runs in the series’ first two games, extending the hot streak Kings of Kauffman’s Batoul Hammoud described so well in her Saturday story.

Benintendi didn’t let up Sunday. He went 2-for-4 with an RBI, raising his three-day average against Minnesota to .615 (8-for-13) and keeping his September torrid—he’s hitting .354 with three home runs and 15 RBIs in 12 games.

Those numbers solidify Benintendi’s Kansas City position for next season. Some may not realize he’s not a complete shoo-in to return: this is the final year of the two-year contract the Royals assumed when they traded for him last February, so Benintendi, ineligible for free agency until next season ends, is subject to arbitration this winter.

So, while he’s under club control, that control extends broadly. The KC Royals don’t have to bring him back—they can simply non-tender him, making him a free agent a year before he’d otherwise be eligible, or they could trade him.

The more likely scenario is that he stays in Kansas City. He is, after all, the decent left-handed bat General Manager Dayton Moore spend almost all last winter seeking, and has performed well much of this season. Look for Moore, famous for avoiding arbitration, to offer Benintendi an acceptable, yet lucrative, one-year deal; the parties might even find a satisfactory way to extend Benintendi.

Especially after the kind of September he’s having.