This column originally ran in The Standard-Times on Nov. 1, 2015.

By Nick Tavares
Pʀᴇsᴇɴᴛ Tᴇɴsᴇ

I had a nightmare a few years ago.

It’s the middle of August and I’m sitting in the stands of a generic Major League park, and there’s a lineup of all-or-nothing swingers at the plate, taking their hacks and their walks and their strikeouts as delivered by the pitcher.

There’s Jack Cust, Adam Dunn, Mark Reynolds, Ryan Howard and five more similarly minded players, all assembled to drive pitch counts and deliver runs in the grand tradition of Rob Deer and the other “Three True Outcomes” players — strikeouts, walks and home runs.

It’s a statistically sound method of working an at-bat. It’s also incredibly boring. Thankfully, the Royals have been delivering us from these drawn-out, actionless plate appearances for two years now. And it’s given them a 2-1 advantage in the World Series over the Mets heading into Saturday night’s Game 4.

Strikeouts are, basically, a safe out. There’s no chance of a double play on a strikeout and they’re generally seen as the symptom of a power-heavy approach at the plate.

The Royals don’t seem to care about that. Their motto this postseason has been to keep the line moving, and that’s what they do. They hit singles, they take extra bases and they don’t give away outs on a whiff when they don’t have to.

As a team, the Royals struck out less than anyone, with 973, or 134 fewer than the Braves, who had the next-fewest strikeouts. Among players with at least 400 plate appearances, they didn’t have a single player among the Top 40 in pitches per at-bat. They don’t work the count as much as they just apply Stan Musial’s old method of looking for a strike and hitting it.

It might be riskier, but they’ve mostly reaped the rewards so far.

Take the fifth inning of Game 2. Alex Rios singled on the third pitch he saw from Jacob deGrom (a 1-1 count). Alcides Escobar sent the third pitch he saw into centerfield to score Alex Gordon. Ben Zobrist moved the runners along on his second pitch, Eric Hosmer singled and scored two on his second pitch, Kendrys Morales singled on his second pitch, and Mike Moustakas saw a Herculean eight pitches before singling to score Hosmer.

All told, the Royals sent nine batters to the plate, with five singles, two groundouts, a line-out and a walk. They never got that stereotypically big hit, instead they strung together a bunch of them and took their chances when they saw it. And they put the ball in play eight out of nine times.

They’ve been just as daring and seemingly impatient on the basepaths. It’s not just in stolen bases, though they’ve taken their share, but in running for that extra base off contact.

That aggressiveness has obviously paid off. In what will go down as one of the all-time great moves on the basepaths, Lorenzo Cain scored from first on Eric Hosmer’s single in the bottom of the eighth inning in Game 6 of the ALCS against the Blue Jays. That proved to be the pennant-winning run, and the Royals have just kept swinging and running since.

This alone doesn’t make them infallible, of course. They had a good approach against Noah Syndergaard in Game 3, but a shaky start by Yordano Ventura and a bullpen implosion ensured that we’d see a Game 5 Sunday.

But it does make them entertaining. Going against more than a decade of trends in the game, they’re swinging early and often. And it’s worked more often than it hasn’t.

There are a lot of ways to build a successful team and a lineup that can generate enough runs to win 95 games and a pennant. Let’s appreciate the Royals for having so much fun while they do it their way.

Nick Tavares' column appears Sundays in The Standard-Times and at SouthCoastToday.com. He can be reached at nick@nicktavares.com