The Kansas City Royals evened their best-of-five American League Divisional Series against the New York Yankees on Monday night, scoring a 4-2 win on the strength of five one-run innings from their bullpen. Afterward, at least one member of the Yankees roster seemed to suggest they didn't find the Royals' victory too convincing.
"It still feels the same, that we're going to win [the series]," Yankees third baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. told reporters, including Jorge Castillo of ESPN. "I don't feel like anybody feels any different. We're going to go out there and do our thing still. We still don't feel like any team is better than us. We had a lot of missed opportunities tonight so they just got lucky."
For the most part, Chisholm's comments are frank if unsurprising. He's a professional athlete, after all, and professional athletes tend to operate with an unflappable confidence in themselves and their teammates -- that's just how it is. It would be far more surprising if Chisholm felt the Yankees were unlikely to win the series, or if he thought the Royals were the better team. He even has a point about missed opportunities: the Yankees stranded seven more runners on base than the Royals did.
Still, there's a concept in professional sports known as "billboard material," the idea that you don't want to say something your opponents can use as a rallying cry. Whether or not you believe that has any actual material impact on a team's performance -- and we're skeptical given that both sides were going to try hard to win the game regardless of what was said -- you can envision the "got lucky" part, at minimum, raising some eyebrows in the Royals clubhouse.
Will any of this matter? Probably not. But it will spice up the series a little and get people talking until Game 3 on Wednesday at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City.
Chisholm, 26, was added over the summer in a deadline trade with the Miami Marlins. In 46 games with the Yankees, he hit .273/.325/.500 (130 OPS+) with 11 home runs and 18 stolen bases. Chisholm has almost exclusively played third base for the Yankees after spending the previous season and a half playing center field for the Marlins. His ninth-inning homer in the Game 2 loss was the Yankees' only extra-base hit of the contest.
