HOUSTON — If there was anything to be gleaned from last year’s playoffs, it may have been this: Never count the Kansas City Royals out.
If that lesson needed any burnishing, it arrived on Monday when the Royals — six outs from elimination — scored five runs in the top of the eighth inning and two more in the ninth for an off-the-mat 9-6 victory over the Houston Astros, sending the American League division series back to Kansas City on Wednesday for a deciding Game 5.
There seemed to be little chance of that happening after the bottom of the seventh when the Astros’ Carlos Correa, the precocious rookie shortstop, hit his second home run, a two-run blast, and Colby Rasmus followed it with a solo homer, his fourth of the postseason.