Royals fall to Pale Hoes 7 - 6

Though the Royals feigned two comeback attempts, the Pale Hoes walked to the clubhouse victorious for the second consecutive night.

Once again, the Chicagoans were not deterred by the parking lots of Kauffman Stadium. The Pale Hoes did something foreign to baseball as played in Kansas City and hung dong. They hanged dong not once but twice.

Tyler Flowers deposited a Yordano Ventura offering deep down the line in left in the fifth. Flowers's dong knotted the game at two and set off a fifth inning that saw the White Sox turn a 2 - 1 deficit into a 4 - 2 lead thanks in large part to three Ventura wild pitches and an Alex Gordon misplay in left.

The Pale Hoes held that 4 - 2 lead until the top of the eighth inning, when Aaron Crow decided it was time to prove that his 0.00 ERA of just a few days ago was a distant memory. In one-third of an inning, Crow allowed three hits. The final hit he allowed was a monstrous dong hanging from large man Adam Dunn to straight-away center.

Those seven runs would prove to be all that the Pale Hoes would need.

The Royals mounted a bit of a rally in the bottom of the eighth inning. Baseballs were hit; bases were stolen; runs were scored. To go into detail, however, would imply that these runs might have meant something. If it ever felt like the Royals were going to win this ballgame, maybe it would have meant something. In the ninth, Billy Butler ripped a two-out double and scored on a Gordon single that actually drew the Royals to within one run. Jarrod Dyson pinch-ran for Gordon, stole second base, and represented the tying run just 120 180 feet from home plate. None of it mattered.

The Royals offense wasn't quite as impotent as Royals fans have grown accustomed to, no thanks to Norichika Aoki or Alcides Escobar, who went 0 - 9 with a walk at the top of the order. The four-through-eight hitters in the line-up did the bulk of the work for the Royals, with Butler, Gordon, and Valencia each reaching base three times.

They did not, however, do much against Pale Hoes' starter Andre Rienzo. For the first time in his Major League career, Rienzo struck out eight batters. Through six, the Royals managed little in the way of offense. As they are wont to do, they dug themselves a hole from which they were unable to climb out of, ensuring that they would dip back below the .500 mark, crushing the hopes of children and olds across the Heartland.

Ventura was not exactly sharp tonight, though his efforts were undermined a bit by defense and a tough chopper just over the glove of an extended Valencia that extended the excruciating fifth inning. He still allowed seven hits, one of them being a home run, while striking out three and walking none in six innings.