Royals stun Athletics, 9-8, to win AL wild card

The Kansas City Royals had waited 29 years to reach the postseason. They weren’t going down without a fight.

Salvador Perez singled down the left-field line with two outs in the 12th inning, allowing Christian Colon to score from second base and giving the long-suffering Royals a 9-8 victory over the Oakland Athletics in a wild American League wild-card game Tuesday night.

“This will go down as the craziest game I’ve ever played,” said Eric Hosmer, who sparked the final rally with a one-out triple. “This team showed a lot of character. No one believed in us before the game. No one believed in us before the season.”

The A’s raced out to a 7-3 lead by the sixth inning, sparked by two Brandon Moss home runs, but the Royals countered with three runs in the eighth. Nori Aoki’s sacrifice fly off Sean Doolittle in the ninth forced extra innings.

The teams kept trading blows over the next couple of innings, as and the tension continued to build. Rookie Brandon Finnegan finally cracked after tossing two scoreless innings, but the Royals were there to rally one last time.

Hosmer hit a rocket to the wall in left field off Dan Otero for a one-out triple in the 12th, and Colon, a former Cal State Fullerton star, hit an infield chopper that he beat out for a tying single. Colon stole second, and that set the stage for Perez, who lined a pitch from Jason Hammel just inside the third-base line to send the Royals pouring out of their dugout in a mad celebration.

“We wanted to use our legs,” Hosmer said. “We’re an athletic team, and we stuck to that.”

Kansas City will now face the Angels in an AL division series. The long-suffering franchise hadn’t played in the postseason since beating St. Louis in the 1985 World Series, and the excitement the permeated the city might best be summed up by a statement posted by the Kansas City Police on Twitter in about the 10th inning: “We really need everyone to not commit crimes and drive safely right now. We’d like to hear the Royals clinch.”

For the Oakland, it was one final collapse in a season full of them. The club that had the best record in baseball much of the season wilted over the second half and needed a victory on the final day of the regular season just to squeeze into the playoffs.

They had chances to put all that in the past. Instead, it will be dragged up for years, after a pitching showdown between Oakland ace Jon Lester and Kansas City counterpart James Shields instead turned into a battle of attrition between the bullpens.