Royals ready to repeat, but they know it won’t be easy

SURPRISE, Ariz. — This city was created in 1938 on Sonoran desert scrubland 25 miles west of Phoenix. “I’ll be surprised if the town amounts to anything,” said Flora Mae Statler, the founder, unintentionally providing a name.

The population of Surprise — surprise! — now is more than 117,000.

Sometimes you can’t predict the future. Sometimes you can, as the Kansas City Royals demonstrated by beating the Mets in the World Series after falling to the Giants in the Fall Classic a year earlier.

“And now,” Royals manager Ned Yost said, “let’s do it again. We were marked last year after getting to the World Series the year before. Our guys don’t shatter.”

The Mets know. They kept building leads and the Royals kept overtaking leads in the World Series.

“I don’t think any team came back as many times as we did,” Yost said.

They did it in eight of their 11 postseason victories, and all four World Series wins.

“We had a real ability to string together five or six hits in crucial situations in the playoffs,” Yost said. “As a team, we have a very high degree of confidence that if we’re down a run or two, tied or ahead from the fifth inning on, we’re going to win the game. We don’t hit a lot of home runs, but we feel we can manufacture a run or two and our bullpen is going to shut you down.”

He was sitting in an office in the spring training complex the Royals share with the Texas Rangers, as far away from the excitement of October as imaginable.

Success by teams from what East Coast and West Coast people label “fly-over cities” — meaning between New York and California, cities such as St. Louis and Kansas City — often are unappreciated. But the 60-year-old Yost, born in the redwood country of California’s north coast and residing in the deep woods of Pine Mountain, Georgia, is unconcerned.

As he correctly pointed out, “We’re the only team now that has the opportunity to win two World Series in a row.”

The difference between the Royals and Mets in the 2015 Series may not have been very great, but it didn’t have to be.

“We had a team comprised offensively of a bunch of guys who could put the ball in play,” Yost said. “We didn’t strike out a lot. In our big ballpark in Kansas City, it’s hard to hit home runs, so we kind of give up trying to hit home runs. That plays to our advantage against really, really good pitching like the Mets.

“And I think we had some real ly good scouting reports. I think we pitched [Daniel] Murphy different than other teams did in the playoffs. We played spectacular defense, and we took advantage of some situations to keep batters going. And our bullpen is lock-down.”

Yost is a believer in what some would call 21st century baseball — a starting rotation that keeps a team in the game through the fifth or sixth inning, followed by a group of relievers who are practically unhittable. Stacking power arms, the Royals in 2015 were 73-6 when ahead after six innings, 72-3 when ahead after seven.

“This was my eighth World Series,” Yost said. “So many times, but only one win [as a player with the Brewers in ’82]. When we got there, I kept waiting for this big explosive feeling of euphoria. But it was more a feeling of contentment.”

Better than a feeling of remorse.