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KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- On a day in which several fly balls were lost in the sun and five homers were belted, the Kansas City Royals pulled off their largest come-from-behind victory of the season. Mike Moustakas, Jorge Soler and Drew Butera homered as the Royals completed a three-game sweep with a 9-8 victory over the Baltimore Orioles on Sunday.
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Kansas City trailed by five runs entering the bottom of the fourth inning, when they rallied to tie it.
"That's Royals' baseball," Butera said. "We've seen it the last couple of years, always been able to battle back and a never-give-up attitude. It was a lot of fun to say, 'Hey, let's do it again.'
"We struggled a little bit the first month, but the good thing about us is we never give up. We knew that we're a good team and there's a lot of baseball left. We kept working hard, grinding it out and it's starting to show."
Moustakas drove in four runs, including three with a fourth-inning homer. Soler's sixth-inning blast was an estimated 470 feet, the Royals' longest of the year, to straightaway center.
"I don't think I've seen a ball hit harder than that in this park," Royals manager Ned Yost said. "I mean it was on a dead-line over the center field wall. It was smoked."
Butera had three hits and scored three runs and drove in two.
The Royals picked up their fifth victory in six games.
"This is a great ball team here," Moustakas said. "We just had a bad month. You can't go out and score 12, 13 runs every game. Sometimes we'll have to go out and score two runs and play great defense and win a ball game like that. Fortunately, today we scored a good amount of runs and was able to hold off a great team over there and found a way to win again."
Neither starting pitcher made it out of the fourth. Matt Strahm (1-2) claimed the victory and Kelvin Herrera logged his eighth save but not before giving up a run in the ninth and stranding runners on second and third base.
Richard Bleier (0-1) absorbed the loss, giving up three runs (two earned) in two innings. He allowed three hits, walked one and hit a batter.
Royals right-hander Chris Young was removed after 3 2/3 innings, allowing five runs and six hits, two of them home runs, and a walk. In two starts, Young has permitted nine runs and 13 hits, including three home runs, in 6 2/3 innings.
Young yielded a home run to Chris Davis to lead off the second. The Orioles scored four in the fourth, highlighted by a Caleb Joseph two-run homer to end the day for Young. Ryan Flaherty drove in two runs with a double.
The Orioles' 5-0 lead did not last an inning.
The Royals sent 11 men to the plate in a five-run fourth to chase Orioles starter Kevin Gausman.
"It'd say the biggest difference is not being able to throw that fastball higher than high," Gausman said. "That's what we say, 'Higher than high.' You know, throwing a fastball up to a guy, leaving it a little too good and they put a good swing on it.
"That was one thing last year, that was a pitch I felt like I could go to, really, in any count and get a swing and miss. That was the four-seam doing up into the zone, and I don't know if it's something mechanically, but the ball is not riding as much as it used to."
Moustakas drilled a 3-1 Gausman pitch into the right-field bullpen with two runners on base. Butera and Alcides Escobar stroked run-producing singles for the first two runs.
"It seems like every one of our pitchers is averaging 20 pitches an inning, and our relief pitchers, too," Orioles manager Buck Showalter said. "I don't care if you've got 10 guys in your bullpen, that's not a good recipe. We've got to do a little better job of taking advantage of the counts that were in our favor."
NOTES: CF Adam Jones and SS J.J. Hardy were held out of the Baltimore lineup. Manager Buck Showalter wanted to give them both two days off with the Orioles idle Monday. ... LF Alex Gordon was back in the Kansas City lineup after missing the game Saturday with groin tightness. ... The Orioles promoted LHP Richard Bleier from Triple-A Norfolk and optioned LHP Vidal Nuno to their International League farm club. ... The Orioles will start LHP Wade Miley on Tuesday in the opener of a three-game series at Detroit. ... Kansas City is off Monday.
