The Kansas City Royals didn’t trade for Johnny Cueto to beat the Boston Red Sox in August or the Baltimore Orioles in September.
Good thing, too, because Cueto gave up 15 runs in those two games.
Doesn’t matter now, does it?
Doesn’t matter that Cueto had a 4.76 ERA in his 13 regular-season starts for the Royals. Doesn’t matter that he can crumble in big-stage starts on the road.
All of the above may well hurt his case as a free agent this winter, but all that counts for the Royals is that the two times they really needed Cueto, he delivered, and he delivered big.
He beat the Houston Astros in the decisive Game 5 of the division series, giving up two hits in eight innings. He beat the New York Mets in Wednesday night’s important Game 2 of the World Series, giving up two hits in nine innings in a 7-1 victory at Kauffman Stadium.
As my buddy C. Trent Rosecrans of the Cincinnati Enquirer tweeted going into the ninth inning:
He’s right. With their big lead in the American League Central, the Royals didn’t need Cueto to pitch like an ace in the regular season. They’ve needed him to be an ace two times—in Game 5 against the Astros and again on Wednesday.
He delivered both times. Sure, he mixed in a bad one in Game 3 of the ALCS, giving up eight runs to the Toronto Blue Jays.
But as Royals manager Ned Yost said Wednesday, “He’s had one bad start and two tremendous starts.”
If the bad start at the Rogers Centre raised some questions, it also provided the Royals with one very important answer as they planned their World Series rotation. Cueto pitched Game 2, and he’ll pitch Game 6 if the series gets that far.
Neither of those starts would be on the road.
So when Cueto ran into trouble in the fourth inning Wednesday, walking two of the first three batters he faced and getting frustrated with Mark Carlson’s strike zone, he didn’t hear the sing-song “Kway-toe! Kway-toe!” that haunted him in the 2013 Wild Card Game in Pittsburgh or last week in Canada.
All he heard was catcher Salvador Perez, reminding him to just follow his mitt.
“Keep aggressive, please,” Perez repeated after the game to Fox’s Erin Andrews.
Cueto gave up a run on Lucas Duda’s bloop single, but the Mets didn’t get another baserunner until Cueto walked Daniel Murphy with two out in the ninth. He finished off the first complete-game two-hitter in the World Series in 20 years (Greg Maddux threw the last one in 1995) and just the second in 44 years—and the first World Series complete game by an American Leaguer since Jack Morris’ 10-inning shutout in Game 7 of 1991’s Fall Classic.
It wasn’t the best game Cueto has ever pitched. He had a two-hit shutout against the Washington Nationals in July, with 11 strikeouts. He had a three-hit shutout last year, when he was a 20-game winner with a 2.25 ERA.
He was one of two true aces on the trade market in July. The other was David Price, who went to Toronto and had a great regular season followed by an underwhelming October.
Cueto got his underwhelming out of the way early on in his stay with the Royals, back when they didn’t need him. He always knew what the real goal was.
“That’s what they brought me here for was to help win a World Series,” Cueto said. “And that’s what I’ve worked for.”
The Royals have a real chance now to win a World Series. It’s certainly not over—Mets fans will point out that their 1986 champions lost the first two games at home, and Royals fans will remember that their 1985 champs lost the first two—but Cueto’s performance Wednesday has the Mets in a real bind as they head back to Citi Field.
Yes, the Mets are going home, but they’ve already lost two games started by Matt Harvey and Jacob deGrom. The two real kids in the rotation, Noah Syndergaard and Steven Matz, start the next two contests. Both are talented, but with neither likely to pitch deep into a game, the pressure will be on the Mets’ shaky middle relief and on the slumbering offense.
Game 2 was the one in which the pitching matchup supposedly favored the Mets, with the dominating deGrom against the inconsistent Cueto. Instead, Cueto was the one who dominated.
“This is why they got him,” Pete Rose said on the Fox postgame show. “This is the Johnny Cueto we knew in Cincinnati.”
This is the Johnny Cueto the Royals traded for. No matter what, that trade now stands as a total success.
Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.
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