KANSAS CITY, Mo. — I didn’t even get a chance to finish my first question to Dave Eiland in the Royals’ clubhouse before KC’s pitching coach answered, emphatically.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, letting out a chuckle. “Yeah, it is. It sure is.”
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I was asking if it was better to answer questions about how good Johnny Cueto was instead of about why the on-again, off-again ace had struggled on a particular night. I knew how Eiland was likely to answer, of course, but I wanted to see his reaction.
The laughter told me what I wanted to know. It was a little bit of relief, mixed with a little bit of "I told you so."
Cueto was brilliant against the Mets, a 7-1 victory in Game 2 that gave his Royals a commanding 2-0 lead in the World Series. He allowed only a couple of soft opposite-field singles to Lucas Duda in a dominating complete-game effort. He walked three and struck out four in the 122-pitch outing.
“We’ve seen him do this before,” Eiland told me. “Not just in Game 5 of the ALDS, we saw him do this earlier in the year against Detroit and Anaheim and a couple of other teams. He was really good, but it’s not like it was surprising or surprised any of us.
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“This is exactly why we got the guy, to pitch games like this for us.”
Cueto was good on a historic scale.
Some Cueto superlatives tonight: first pitcher in WS game to throw at least 9 innings/allow no more than 2 hits since Maddux/1995 and ...
— Vahe Gregorian (@vgregorian) October 29, 2015And first AL pitcher to do so since Jim Lonborg/1967 WS
— Vahe Gregorian (@vgregorian) October 29, 2015Also first AL pitcher to throw complete game in WS since Jack Morris/1991
— Vahe Gregorian (@vgregorian) October 29, 2015Cueto has been incredibly hit-and-miss with the Royals.
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He was just OK in his first playoff start, Game 2 of the AL Division Series against the Astros, but he was Kansas City’s hero in a winner-take-all Game 5 of that series. Then, in his lone ALCS start, he only managed to record six outs in Toronto before he was pulled after allowing six hits, four walks and eight earned runs.
Largely because of that disaster on the road, Royals manager Ned Yost made sure to set up his World Series rotation so Cueto could make both of his potential starts — Games 2 and 6 — in Kansas City, where he had so much success in the ALDS clincher.
“I felt Johnny thrives in this environment and he's comfortable in this park,” Yost said after the game. “He loves our fans. He feeds off their energy. I just felt very, very strongly that he was going to put up a great performance, and he did.”
It might be strange that the Royals have to be so careful to have so many external factors lined up — pitch him at home, make sure catcher Salvador Perez sets his target low in the zone, etc. — for a veteran pitcher, but that’s the case. And the Royals have figured it out.
It was clear early that Cueto was comfortable and in rhythm. Eiland knew it from the early moments of the game. “You can see the body language, knowing that he feels good about himself,” the pitching coach said.
His pitches had the type of life that they didn’t in Toronto — the way the ball was coming out of his hand, the way he was finishing and the life his pitches had coming across the plate. He had the Mets all discombobulated.
“He threw three or four pitches for strikes,” Mets third baseman David Wright said. “He’d quick pitch, and then he kind of takes his time a little bit. As a hitter, it’s all about timing, and he disrupted it tonight, for sure. He was throwing cutters away from right-handed hitters, curveballs, just four excellent pitches.”
And thanks to Cueto, the Royals are heading to New York in a pretty good position.
