There’s a new style of player in Kansas City this season. It’s never been proven to work there, but the Royals are trying it anyway. Brace yourself, fans: The hitter who comes to bat most often is now good at getting on base.

It’s a wild concept at Kauffman Stadium, but can you blame the Royals? Historically, they haven’t needed a leadoff man like Jonathan India clogging up the bases to win.

In 1985, their first championship season, Royals leadoff hitters had a .315 on-base percentage, ranking 19th of 26 teams. Thirty years later, when they won their second title, their leadoff hitters had a .295 OBP, ranking 28th of 30.

And last year, when the Royals returned to October as a wild-card winner, their leadoff hitters had a .270 OBP — the worst mark in the majors.

How sickly is a .270 on-base percentage? Here’s a sampling of retired players with that precise career OBP: backup infielders Rafael Belliard and Pedro Florimon; backup catchers Caleb Joseph and Jerry Narron; and old-time pitchers Ted Lyons and Johnny Sain.

Yes, the 2024 Royals went 86-76 despite leadoff men masquerading as bench guys and pitchers. It took an extraordinary effort from Bobby Witt Jr., Salvador Perez and Vinny Pasquantino — who combined to hit .357 with runners in scoring position — to capitalize on relatively few scoring chances.

“Resilient hitters can’t just rely and hang our hat on one person to do all the damage,” Royals hitting coach Alec Zumwalt said recently. “We’ve just got to get on base and put pressure on the opposing team. That’s how it works. When we can put someone on base consistently, you can see the (energy) in the dugout change.”

That’s where India comes in. India, the National League Rookie of the Year for Cincinnati in 2021, had always thought he might land in Kansas City, mainly because of Royals pitcher Brady Singer, his teammate at the University of Florida.

“He was trying to get me over here for a couple of years,” India said.

Alas, when India finally did get traded to the Royals last November, it was Singer who went to the Reds in return. But India said he felt comfortable immediately with the Royals, because he fit so well with what they needed.

“They wanted me to be a leadoff guy and get on base,” he said. “I think I just have a good sense of my zone. I’m not up there trying to take every pitch, but I don’t give in much and I see the ball really well. As a leadoff guy, you want to take pitches and set up the at-bats for the rest of the team, right, so that is a goal of mine.”

The average MLB plate appearance was 3.88 pitches last season, while India averaged 4.16. He’s been even more selective with the Royals, averaging 4.34 pitches per plate appearance through Thursday’s game against the Minnesota Twins, when he took the pivotal at-bat in a 3-2 victory.

Trailing 2-1 with one out and runners on the corners in the seventh, India took five pitches in a row to run the count full. The pitcher, Cole Sands, was mixing cutters, sinkers and four-seamers, trying to jam India for an inning-ending double play.

Sands stayed on the edges of the strike zone as India fouled the next four pitches. On the tenth pitch, he pounced on a fastball down the middle, lashing it to left to tie the game. Witt followed with a go-ahead sacrifice fly, and soon the Royals had taken three of four in the series.

India, a third baseman, was more of a slugger at Florida. He hit 21 homers as a junior, good for a gaudy .717 slugging percentage, and went fifth in the 2018 draft. When he walked, it was mostly because pitchers feared him.

As a leadoff-hitting rookie for the Reds, India usually batted two or three spots ahead of Joey Votto, the most disciplined hitter of his generation. Votto taught India — who is 5-foot-11, 200 pounds — to understand himself as a hitter.

“He helped me a lot by being patient at the plate, looking for your zone, your pitch, and I built that into my game because of him,” India said. “In college, I really wasn’t a patient guy; I always wanted to swing and hit homers, hit the ball hard and far. Once I got to the big leagues, I was a small guy, not going to be the home run guy. My game was different now. I had to adjust to being a guy that gets on and scores runs.”

India had a .376 OBP as a rookie — .001 better than Votto — and after a dip in the next two seasons, he drew a career-high 80 walks in 2024, with a .357 OBP. That’s also his OBP in his first 13 games for Kansas City.

Otherwise, India has started a bit slowly. He’s hitting .234 with no homers, and the doubles and triples he expected from the wide gaps in Kansas City haven’t come just yet; he has one extra-base hit in 10 home games. India was 1-for-12 against the Twins until his hard-earned single on Thursday.

“I’ve just been having a tough series, not swinging it well — all I can do is just battle,” India told the Royals’ TV network, before Witt and MJ Melendez ambushed him with the water bucket. “I’m that kind of player.”

For Hunter Greene, a hook before a homer

Terry Francona gave his starter a chance. With two outs in the bottom of the ninth in San Francisco on Tuesday, Francona, the Cincinnati Reds’ manager, let Hunter Greene chase his first career nine-inning shutout.

After a single and a walk, though, Francona pulled Greene for reliever Tony Santillan. Greene, he said, had started to overthrow.

“If I would have managed with my emotions, I’d have left Hunter in, because he deserved (it),” Francona told reporters. “I wanted him to finish that game.”

If he had, Greene might have done something extremely rare for a modern starting pitcher: Give up a walk-off homer. Complete games are uncommon now anyway, and managers almost never put a starter in a position to lose on the game’s final pitch.

According to the Elias Sports Bureau, the last starter to serve up a game-ending homer was the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Rich Hill in 2017, under unusual circumstances in Pittsburgh.

Hill had been pulled from a perfect game after seven innings the year before and this time he was perfect through eight. Manager Dave Roberts let him keep going, and while Hill lost the perfecto on a ninth-inning error, he carried a no-hitter into the 10th before Josh Harrison beat him with a leadoff homer.

That game had been scoreless, but Greene was protecting a 2-0 lead with two outs. And according to Elias, it’s been more than two decades since a starter allowed a lead-flipping walk-off homer with two outs in the ninth. The last to do it: St. Louis’ Matt Morris, who lost on a homer by Jeff Kent in Houston on April 11, 2003.

Alas, we’ll never know if Heliot Ramos would have victimized Greene in the same way. Santillan got him to line out to left to preserve a 2-0 victory.

Gimme Five

The Rangers’ Kumar Rocker on completing the comeback trail

Few top prospects have had a more challenging journey to their first opening-day roster than Kumar Rocker of the Texas Rangers. After his decorated college career at Vanderbilt — where he threw a 19-strikeout, 131-pitch no-hitter in a 2019 Super Regional — Rocker’s right arm was both coveted and cut upon.

The story is familiar by now. The New York Mets drafted Rocker 10th in 2021, but pulled their offer after medical concerns. Rocker then underwent a shoulder operation that September and returned to pitch for an independent team in 2022, when the Rangers chose him third in the draft.

After six starts in his first pro season, Rocker underwent Tommy John surgery in May 2023. He made it back to start three games for the Rangers last September. After a rough season debut in Cincinnati, Rocker looked strong against Tampa Bay Sunday, allowing one run in five innings. He’ll face Seattle on Saturday in search of his first career win.

Your college and pro stat sheet show one career shutout — that epic no-hitter as a Vandy freshman. Looking back on it, do you ever second-guess yourself? “No, no. See, that’s the thing. There’s no regrets in the game of baseball. It’s no different; I was watching Sandy Alcantara (recently), and he had nine complete games (in 2022-23) and no other team even had eight. And I’m like, ‘He was being a workhorse and he paid for it — can’t blame the guy.’ That’s part of baseball these days. You throw 98, 99, you gotta do what you gotta do.”

What hit you the moment you learned you needed Tommy John surgery? “It held on for so long. I got to go through the draft, I performed every time I had a chance to step on the field, and it finally gave out. When it gave out, it was a mental reset, because at that point you’ve got 12 months to readjust. It being back to back, you want to go out there and try and keep going, but it happens.”

Was it almost a mental relief, given everything that had happened? “Yeah, 100 percent. At that point in my career, it didn’t matter how I felt, I was gonna get a win. That’s all I did was show up to the ballpark and get you a win, nothing else. And the body’s not always gonna hold up, which is fine. Now I made the mistake and I know how to not repeat it.”

What was the mistake? “Just not taking care of it, not easing off the gas, going full throttle.”

How do you find the right balance between going max effort and easing up? “I always try to look back at the older guys, like a Verlander or Scherzer, and they went 93, 94 and then, boom, 96, 97. You want to try to be like them, (but) you’ve got to get the runway to be like them. Once you get the opportunity, you can kind of experiment a little bit. When you get that runway of, ‘Hey, you’re free to go,’ then you’ve got to do what you can do.”

Off the Grid

A Cub with 200 hits

There’s a lot of false advertising in baseball. Sure, Kutter Crawford throws a cutter. But Phil Leftwich was a righty. Cecil Fielder often played designated hitter. Bob Walk never led the league in bases on balls.

Then there’s Stan Hack.

I remember his name from the indelible Dan Frishberg song “Van Lingle Mungo,” a jazzy ode to the greats of the 1940s. I know Hack was a great hitter. And since writers love narratives, I figured he went up there hacking.

Not really. Hack is one of 15 Chicago Cubs to lead the National League in hits. But he’s not among the 15 Cubs with a 200-hit season, and that’s what Tuesday’s Grid wanted. Hack peaked at 195 hits in 1938 — and his eight hits in that year’s World Series, when he batted .471 in a sweep by the Yankees, don’t count.

Hack ranked among the NL’s top 10 in walks 10 times. A prolific leadoff man, Hack fashioned a .394 career OBP, better than Cooperstown on-base machines like Joe Mauer and Joe Morgan. And when he did swing, Hack had outstanding bat control, averaging just 39 strikeouts per season in his 16-year career.

So while Stan Hack was not a hacker, I swung and missed with him on the Grid.

Classic Clip

The Mets, the A’s and the 1973 World Series

The Mets visit the A’s in Sacramento this weekend, a matchup that always evokes the 1973 World Series, a seven-game thriller that marked the second of Oakland’s three consecutive titles.

Incredibly, there seems to be no existing NBC broadcast footage of the final out of Game 7; Wayne Garrett’s pop out can be seen only from an oddly angled, non-network camera. Fortunately, we do have the last out of the Mets’ final victory, when the irrepressible Tug McGraw froze Billy Conigliaro with a curveball on the outside corner to seal a Game 5 win at Shea Stadium.

It was the first of McGraw’s three career World Series saves, each ending with a strikeout — the last two against Willie Wilson for the Phillies in 1980. Conigliaro never played again, and the Mets didn’t win another World Series game for 13 years. They lost the final two games in Oakland, but McGraw’s signature ’73 rallying cry would last forever.

“Our season was over but the phrase ‘Ya gotta believe!’ lived on,” he wrote in his 2004 memoir. “I kind of knew it would.”

McGraw, a son of Northern California who died the year the book was published, made sure of it. The title: “Ya Gotta Believe!” of course.