As bitter as Wednesday's loss may have been for Royals fans, the rebound should come pretty swiftly.  The Royals play 21 games the rest of April, and 11 of them will be played against bottom feeders Seattle and Cleveland.  That should help the Royals fairly easily bolster a record with which they will look to stay over .500 on the season.  The other games include three against the Tigers this upcoming weekend, and four against the Twins spread out over the course of the month, and then a 3 game set in Texas that would look to be the toughest match of the month.

4-2 is a good outcome to a homestand that brought in the White Sox and the Angels.  It could have easily been 6-0.  It could have easily been 1-5.  It was, however 4-2, not a bad result for a team that played far more than 54 innings of baseball (64, to be exact), and outscore the Angels and White Sox by one run.  That scoring margin could have easily been seven runs scored over runs against, if Joakim Soria had merely retired Juan Pierre before the damage began.

With better days in the near-term future for the Royals, today's outcome would seem more like the evening out of a crazy luck filled season to date, although the Royals didn't lose this game because of poor fortune, instead losing on a rare meltdown by closer Joakim Soria.  In terms of second guessing the manager, I was convinced the Royals should have skipped Soria because he was handling a high workload and even with an off-day on Thursday, and because pretty much any reliever you put out there can close out a team up three runs with three outs to go.  The Royals, I feel, were set on using Soria in a save situation with an off-day to follow.  While fatigue was certainly a part of Soria's meltdown, I don't feel that the Royals had a better play in terms of raw win percentage other than to pitch Soria.  This was proven out by him getting the first two outs.  The White Sox had the perfect mix of fortune: hits falling, and not just that, but finding the gaps in the infield and the outfield in the perfect order.  It only took five hits for the White Sox to take a one run lead.

Juan Pierre, Alex Rios, and Paul Konerko hardly reached by convincing contact off Soria, but by placing the ball where plays couldn't be made.  Soria's walk to Gordon Beckham may have been the most troubling play of all: with two outs in the inning, a walk and a home run there hurt exactly the same.  Soria, at that point, was clearly struggling with his command.  Rios' ball probably would have been an out if it made it through to Alcides Escobar at short.  Carlos Quentin's double was the first solid drive of the inning off of Soria, and it was only combined with the really good managerial decision to "go for the win" and pinch run for Konerko with Brent Lillibridge that the White Sox were able to take the lead on that play.  Soria is having trouble missing bats, sure, which is contributing to the problem, but he's not exactly throwing batting practice out there.  He didn't make a pitch when he needed to make a pitch, though history shows this to be an isolated fluke.

Anyway, if this loss hadn't occurred in such improbable blown save fashion, it wouldn't have made any more of an impact on the fan despair meter than yesterday's win -- tied up in the 8th on a Billy Butler bomb -- was worth in terms of euphoria.

It's great that the Royals are finally playing some close games against teams in the playoff race, and they have hitters they can rely on after six games, and this is an easy team to like going forward.  It doesn't seem this way now, but because of the unexpected 4-1 start, even one win on Friday in Detroit will quickly erase the sting of the White Sox extra inning loss.  The Royals have a shot to move to 5-2, and everyone who follows the team would have taken that before the season.