So much for the wait: Giants quiet Royals' World Series party

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – So they sat around for going on three decades, then drove I-70 early, before the traffic you know, and got their good parking spots outside Kauffman Stadium, and dropped their tailgates and had themselves a grand time, because, hell, it'd been almost three decades and all. You might've heard.

They couldn't wait. Could. Not. Wait.

It was this enthusiasm, this life-long (in some cases longer) loyalty, this anticipation that carried them into the ballpark, into their clean blue seats, and into a World Series game that often seemed would never, ever happen here. Somebody'd even blued the skies for the day, and warmed the evening so it felt like rebirth, and it was all so, so wonderful for, like, 4½ pitches.

But, what a 4½ pitches.

After that, not so great, because the 2-2 changeup James Shields threw to Gregor Blanco, that seemed OK about halfway to the plate, landed in center field, and then Joe Panik flied to deep left-center, and Buster Posey singled and Pablo Sandoval doubled and, before anyone could even ask what had gotten into the San Francisco Giants' lineup all of a sudden, Hunter Pence had hit a tracer over the center-field fence.

By then, it was hard to tell if the Giants were primed for Shields or Shields, the Kansas City Royals' ace, was ripe for the Giants. It was just that, with Madison Bumgarner on his way to 32 2/3 consecutive scoreless postseason innings and 21 2/3 consecutive scoreless World Series innings, a 3-0 lead after about 10 minutes and exactly 19 pitches was enough to knock a city and parts of two states directly to their heels.

The final score Tuesday night was 7-1, Giants. It got a little squishy after five pitches, and the Royals were in it for the better part of only 18 pitches, and other than a legitimate Royals' threat in the third and some lukewarm threatening moments thereafter, there was little that happened Tuesday night Royals' fans couldn't have seen in the 29 years waiting for Tuesday night.

So, while granting that Shields might've had something to do with 3-0 after one inning and 5-0 after four innings, there remains the notion that the Giants have spent two games – their clincher in the NLCS and Game 1 of the World Series – being quite the offensive beings.

From a grand total of zero home runs in the first four games of the NLCS to three in Game 5, to another home run in the early moments of the World Series, and 13 runs in two games, and nine runs across six innings across those two games, the Giants – for a bit – buried the notion they create runs from the residue of grit, sweat and rosin. They absolutely jumped Shields, whose fastball imprecision undermined his often killer changeup.

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Walk into a loud ballpark against a ballclub that's won eight consecutive postseason games and drop three in the first inning? On its ace?

Is that important?

"Mucho," Sandoval said.

Blanco settles himself, especially early in games, by trying to drive the ball through the middle. Not a prototypical leadoff man (few things in the Giants' lineup are prototypical anything), Blanco led off a game in Los Angeles a month ago with a home run to center field. In 10 postseason games before Tuesday night's, in 10 first-inning at-bats, he'd hit the ball to center field six times. And so on Tuesday night he singled to center field on a changeup that, were he not so centerfield centric, he'd likely have pulled.

With one out Posey singled softly to left. And an inning was born.

Sandoval, who'd once famously tripled in this ballpark as an All-Star, ambushed a curveball and lined it into the right-field corner, enough for Blanco to score, but not Posey, who was out from here to the fountains.

"I think I definitely set a record," Posey said of the distance between himself and the ball in Salvador Perez's mitt.

Along came Pence, who'd watched four good at-bats in front of him, and measured Shields best he could.

"Just think of each pitch as a wind sprint," Pence said. "That is what the pitcher is doing. It's taking a little chink out of them. But, at the same time, the only thing I can see – because in this game you can never be fixated – but sometimes people get into patterns. …The only thing that I'm trying to see is the timing of his pitches. Kind of in my mind, you're watching his fastball, 'OK, it's about this time.' You're watching his off-speed, 'It's about this time.' "

On the seventh pitch of his at-bat, after the sixth may or may not have grazed the far edge of the strike zone for the inning's third out, Pence got the very fastball he'd timed up from the on-deck circle, in the very place he'd hoped it would be, and hit it just to the right of center field. Lorenzo Cain galloped after it, but pulled up just as that ball left the park, and as the crowd realized that this first inning might not work out, and the scoreboard operator was changing that 1 into a 3. It got quiet. Well, it got quiet for most.

Still, Pence said, "It was really loud in my head."

There's this interesting thing about Pence. A thousand interesting things, really. But this particular thing is about how he hears, computes, breaks down, processes and interprets a statement, and then decides if this statement is indeed fact. If so, well, then fine. If not, he responds the same way, whether that's about the kind of season he's having or if a third World Series championship for the Giants would amount to a dynasty or if Kansas City is actually in Kansas or Missouri or both.

[Photos: Best of World Series Game 1 - Giants at Royals]

His eyes will widen and he'll look down from his 6-foot-4 inches or so and he'll say this: "It's an opinion. It can never really be true."

But…

And he'll say, "No. Never."

Well…

"Nope."

And it's amazing, because there's so little gray area for him to see or bother with. That's the game, too. You win or you lose. You have a good at-bat or not. And at the end of the day it's all up there on the scoreboard, for better or worse.

So he hit his first home run of this postseason, and it was the blow that rained on the best baseball time in Kansas City in forever, and the fact was that the Royals would not – could not – recover. Not for one night, anyway. That was Bumgarner, and it was a whole pile of good at-bats, and there was the time and place where it all began, from Blanco to Panik to Posey to Sandoval and, finally, to Pence.

"I say this," Pence said, "and I truly mean it, sometimes in my mind when I'm playing the game or our team is doing something good, it's like an emptiness."

Yeah, around here, for one night, they know how he feels.