KC Royals brought back down to earth with humbling loss to star-studded Mets

I suppose good things have to come to an end at some point, but that age-old saying still doesn't eliminate the sting that Friday's Kansas City Royals loss comes with.

For the Royals on Friday night, their four-game winning streak came to a close as fans left Kauffman Stadium with a much emptier feeling than they did the three games prior in the week when they swept the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The Royals were rolling to start July, jumping out to an opening 7-2 record entering Friday's contest. And while one loss doesn't completely spoil the strong month that's been, the Mets definitely served the Royals a humbling reality check.

KC Royals brought back down to earth with humbling loss to star-studded Mets

The humbling process started right off the bat, as the Royals were able to muster a pair of base runners in each of the first three innings, but as we've seen time and time again from this offense, they struggled to capatilize.

Then after getting the lead back in the sixth and the seventh it took the Mets just a half inning to make things look very ugly, as the immense star power of the Mets came through, lead by Juan Soto, Francisco Lindor and Mark Vientos, came through.

The Mets reminded the Royals that even high flying relievers like newly-named All-Star Carlos Estévez and breakout sensation Steven Cruz are not immune to the volatility commonly associated with relief pitchers. Any arm can have a bad night on any given night, and the Royals were served with that reality in abundance Friday.

At the end of the day, as nice as winning two of three against the Arizona Diamondbacks might be, as well as sweeping the Pittsburgh Pirates was, those are two teams that are out of the postseason picture and teams who the Royals should be beating in the manner they did if they want to truly be considered as legitimate contenders.

The true test will be how they handle themselves against the top-end contenders, like the Mets are most definitely classed in category at now at 54-41.

Again, one loss is no reason to jump ship and press the panic button, as there were definitely some things that were on display during the loss.

They ended up out-hitting the Mets 10-8, their top-end star power in Bobby Witt Jr., Vinnie Pasquantino, Salvador Perez and Jonathan India all had multi-hit nights and bottom of the order contributors like Nick Loftin continued to put together quality at-bats.

Hopefully, this was indeed just a wake-up call and things can get back to the clicking manner they were for Kansas City before Friday.