ANAHEIM, Calif. — Kansas City Royals Manager Ned Yost once worked as a taxidermist above a bowling alley in Jackson, Miss., using skills he had learned as a teenager when he thought it would be exorbitant to pay someone else to preserve his hunting trophies.
If the Royals continue to play baseball the way they are now, Yost may have to make room for a different sort of trophy. The Royals seized control of their American League division series Friday when Eric Hosmer blasted a two-run homer in the 11th inning, sending them to a 4-1 victory over the Los Angeles Angels.
Kansas City leads the best-of-five series, 2-0, and will host Game 3 on Sunday with its ace, James Shields, on the mound.
It was the Royals’ third consecutive extra-inning victory — the two wins here came after their 9-8, 12-inning win over Oakland in a wild-card playoff game Tuesday — and it followed a familiar script.
The Royals got a game-changing defensive play from the outfield — Jarrod Dyson’s throw that nabbed pinch-runner Collin Cowgill at third base in the eighth — along with a shutdown performance by the bullpen, speed on the bases and an unexpected, timely dose of power.
“I know teams right now don’t want to face us,” Hosmer said. “We’re tough to put away. It’s fun to be the underdog. It’s fun to go out there and play and you don’t have anything to lose.”
It was too much again for the Angels, who had the best record and the most runs in the major leagues this season but have managed only three runs in 22 innings against Kansas City. The Angels’ three biggest stars — Mike Trout, Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton — are a combined 1 for 25 in the series.
“We just didn’t get that big hit tonight and they did,” said Trout, the presumptive American League most valuable player.
The Royals took the lead in the 11th against Kevin Jepsen. Lorenzo Cain hit a chopper to shortstop and hustled to beat the throw, which Pujols, the first baseman, did not stretch far to catch. Hosmer, who hit just nine homers in 572 plate appearances in the regular season, belted the next pitch far beyond the right-field fence.
“It’s one of those you want back as soon as you let it go,” Jepsen said. “It’s almost like slow motion. You see it going right where you don’t want it to go. Sometimes they pop it up, sometimes they roll it over, but a good hitter like him didn’t miss.”
The Royals, who hit the fewest home runs in baseball this season, added another run in more familiar fashion: Alex Gordon walked, stole second, took third on a throwing error and scored on Salvador Perez’s infield hit. Greg Holland, the All-Star closer who arrived at Angels Stadium midway through Thursday’s game after flying to North Carolina for the birth of his son, closed out the victory.
Once again, the Royals’ outfield defense rose to the occasion to keep the score tied. With Cowgill at second after C. J. Cron led off the eighth with a double, Angels Manager Mike Scioscia chose not to have his No. 9 hitter, Chris Iannetta, bunt. Iannetta lined a pitch to left-center field that was caught by Dyson, who had moved to center as a defensive replacement.
Dyson fired a one-hop throw to third baseman Mike Moustakas, who gloved it in front of the bag and dived to tag out a sliding Cowgill. Dyson’s throw was just as dramatic — and deflating for the Angels — as a pair of catches the night before by two other Kansas City outfielders, Cain and Nori Aoki.
“Dyson made an incredible throw,” said Scioscia, who lauded Cowgill’s aggressiveness. “The ball died a little bit as far as when it was hit by Chris. It looked like it was going to carry far enough to get him over.”
Underlining just how important this game was to the Angels, Scioscia used closer Huston Street for two innings, the longest he had pitched in nearly four seasons.
The Royals took a 1-0 lead in the second when Hosmer, who reached second after right fielder Kole Calhoun booted his base hit, scored on Gordon’s one-out single.
The Angels tied the score in the sixth when Pujols’s two-out single, his first hit of the series, drove in Calhoun.
But much of the night was dominated by pitching. After Jason Vargas, a left-handed starter who relies on movement and command, held the Angels in check on Thursday night, they had a different problem to solve on Friday: the hard-throwing rookie right-hander Yordano Ventura.
Ventura, who led the Royals to a 2-0 victory at Yankee Stadium last month, spoiling a day the Yankees had set aside to honor Derek Jeter, was just as dominant for most of Friday’s game, relying on a fastball that consistently hit 100 miles per hour but using his off-speed pitches enough to keep the Angels at bay. Ventura struck out David Freese with a 102-m.p.h.
fastball and got Hamilton to lunge at a changeup for another strikeout. He got out of a jam in the fifth when Freese, a former World Series most valuable player with St. Louis, who homered on Thursday. But this time he bounced into a 4-6-3 double play. Ventura ended the inning by retiring Hamilton on a liner to right.
Hamilton, who has been bothered by a sore shoulder, missed 21 of the Angels’ last 22 regular-season games and has looked uncomfortable batting in this series, going 0 for 9. He hit into a double play to end the 10th.
Scioscia said before the game that he was not yet ready to turn to the right-handed-hitting Cowgill or the left-handed-hitting Efren Navarro.
“Right now, looking at all the alternatives, it’s definitely worth playing Josh now to see where it’s going to lead,” Scioscia said. “There’s no doubt about that. He’s a guy that’s a game-changer when he’s on. If it comes to a point where it’s really going the wrong way or we don’t see it happening, I think that’s a valid question.”
That time may have arrived. The Angels, who must win three in a row, will start left-hander C.J. Wilson, who has been erratic this season but has World Series experience. But they’ll also need big hits from their big bats, and a spark that the Royals have continually been able to find.
If not, the Angels are likely to end up as someone else’s trophy.
An earlier version of this article misstated the record of the Los Angeles Angels’ three-biggest stars — Mike Trout, Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton — in the team’s American League division series against the Kansas City Royals. They are a combined 1 for 25 in the series, not 1 for 27.