Royals Score More Runs Than Necessary; Win

The Royals beat the Red Sox handily tonight, and contrary to popular belief they are allowed to score more than 3 runs in  a game.

Despite entering the game only making twenty career appearances at DH, and hitting .211/.211/.316, Aoki would get the start there tonight and go 2-4 with an RBI and cementing his place as full time DH going forward. Royals would get multi-hit games from multi-players, including a 3-hit spot from Infante who was somehow allowed to not bat second.

The enigmatic Jeremy Guthrie would have one of his good days, throwing 8 strong innings of 3 hit ball, gathering two strikeouts and only walking one. Brandon Finnegan would relieve J-Guts and make it a sweet and almost short ending. Despite throwing too many fastballs, Finnegan would strike out David Ortiz and Yoenis Cespedes (for the second time), yield a hit to Allen Craig, but get a groundout to retire Mike Napoli and his Bostonian team for the night.

As of this writing the Royals are tied for first place with the Tigers of Detroit, but that club is currently losing to the Cleveland Racists Indians. If the scores holds, the Royals would fly solo into first place.

The highest leverage for the Royals tonight would see the Royals cash in as Sal Perez and score Lorenzo Cain in a 1.32 LI.

On the other side of peaks, the highest run expectancy state the Royals saw all night came with runners on second and third with no outs in the fourth. Eric Hosmer would strike out swinging. Such has been his season. Generally not succeeding in high run expectancy moments leads to a large loss in RE24, and Hosmer would have the worst RE24 event of either team tonight.

RE24 knows nothing about the game state as far as score or innings goes, but the highest run scoring moment was above the above mentioned Sal Perez double that "doubled" as highest leverage moment of the game for the Royals.

As far as increasing the Royals win expectancy, Nori Aoki would produce the highest WPA moment of the game right off the bat with his run scoring single in the first. A WPA of .098.

For the trifecta, Eric Hosmer's strikeout mentioned above was the worst WPA moment of the game.

<iframe src="http://www.fangraphs.com/graphframe.aspx?config=0&static=0&type=livewins&num=0&h=450&w=450&date=2014-09-13&team=Royals&dh=0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" height="450" width = "450" style="border:1px solid black;"></iframe><br /><span style="font-size:9pt;">Source: <a href="http://www.fangraphs.com/livewins.aspx?date=2014-09-13&team=Royals&dh=0&season=2014">FanGraphs</a></span>