Royals do it with dingers, win 5-3 in extra innings

The Royals did what they had to do - win. Yea, the bullpen coughed up a lead. Yea, the pitchers in general gave up a ton of hits. It didn't matter; the Royals won. The Blue Jays clinched their division today by winning one game of their doubleheader, so the Royals kept pace.

Out of the Royals' seven hits, three were home runs, and all five runs came on those homers. Alex Gordon hit a solo shot in the third, Mike Moustakas hit a two-run homer after a Kendrys Morales walk in the sixth, and Eric Hosmer put the Royals ahead for good in the tenth with another two-run dinger. That pretty much sums up the offensive side.

Edinson Volquez, on the other hand, ran into trouble early. After getting the first two outs of the game, he loaded the bases by allowing three straight singles. Volquez was able to exit the inning with no damage done by inducing a fly ball from Avisail Garcia. The singles train got to Volquez in the second though; another round of three straight singles led to a run. Volquez mostly cruised for the rest of his outing.

Volquez's final line: 6 IP, 9 H, 1 R, 1 BB, 5 SO. He gave up only three hits outside the two singles trains.

Unfortunately, the White Sox got to the bullpen. Luke Hochevar allowed a home run to Jose Abreu leading off the seventh. Kelvin Herrera had all kinds of trouble in the eighth. He got the first two outs just fine, but then he allowed a single, the player of which single was allowed to get to third base on a throwing error by Salvador Perez on a stolen base play. Tyler Flowers hit a ground-rule double to bring that guy in, which tied the game. The Sox pinch-ran for Flowers with Leury Garcia, who advanced to third on a wild pitch. Herrera gave up a walk before getting Abreu to ground out.

That would do it for the Sox. Franklin Morales pitched a scoreless ninth before Wade Savis came on for the save in the 10th.

Aside from the home runs, the Royals didn't do much. That's kind of the thing with home runs though. You don't have to do much when you hit a few of them.

The bad news out of the game was that Lorenzo Cain fouled a ball off his knee and was later removed from the game. It sounds like he is "day-to-day" according to a big ESPN top news tweet when I searched Twitter for news.