FanPost

Watching the Royals is starting to feel like playing Elden Ring


A decent amount of my free time lately has been spent either watching the Royals or playing Elden Ring. Over time, the two experiences have started to feel similar to me. If you are not familiar with Elden Ring, it is a video game made by From Software, and it has taken the gaming world by storm. It first came to notoriety because George RR Martin helped build the world. This dark fantasy world has a pervasive feeling throughout where you feel like you are about to die. I mean that very literally, you know you are going to die while you play the game, it is just a matter of when and how. You die over and over in both predictable and unpredictable ways. Then you get back up and go again until another death finds you. This team, and really most Royals teams of my lifetime, are just the MLB version of being a Tarnished running about The Lands Between.

Sunday's game was a very good example of this, complete with twists and turns. Aaron Judge hits a bomb in the first, and I was thinking here we go again. Except Lynch settled in and got through five, giving up a respectable three runs. In the meantime, the offense put together 4 runs in the 3rd and 4th, so he left with a lead. The bullpen has been the second-best part of the Royals' year so far behind only the defense, so it was looking like they had a decent shot at avoiding the sweep. Then Dylan Coleman gave up a couple walks and two runs without recording an out, and the loss was found. This team seems to be determined to find that loss every time. You don't know exactly how they will lose, sometimes it is obvious, and the struggling offense just doesn't score (today), and sometimes they find new adventurous ways, but you feel like it is going to happen every time. Even when the offense has also managed to score a good number of runs, getting five or more runs on April 11th, 12th, 23rd, 26th, and 28th, they end up losing three of those five.

Luckily, there are also bright spots to distract from what could be a long season. Bobby Witt Jr. makes a ridiculous play on defense with some regularity, and he is starting to hit. MJ Melendez is about to get his first go at the big leagues, and we will get at least one more big call up this season. Lynch has been very good his last three starts and Brad Keller seems to be in good form. Not all is lost, there is still hope. These moments are like opening a new area on the map of Elden Ring, with new opportunities to grow, or new tortures to endure. What I have found is a lot of your experience depends on your mind set. For most of my trip to becoming Elden Lord, I was zen-like, shrugging off each death as unimportant or even a chance to learn. That is how you should approach this team. Enjoy the good, and float above the bad, do not let it get you down. The best is yet to come (probably after 2022...).

This FanPost was written by a member of the Royals Review community. It does not necessarily reflect the views of the editors and writers of this site.