Last year the Kansas City Royals won the American League pennant. Three weeks into this season they lead the league in the number of times their batters have been hit by pitches. Cause and effect?

Dayton Moore, the Royals’ general manager, doesn’t think so.

“I think four times the pitches were intentional,” Moore said. “Teams are pitching us inside. We have guys who look to run and we steal bases. Pitchers use slide step and that prompts a pitcher to hit a batter.”

Perhaps more significantly, Moore said, “I think a lot of people are getting hit. I think it’s up throughout baseball.”

Moore was speaking on his cell phone Friday afternoon before the second game of the Royals’ four-game series with the Chicago White Sox. At the time, through the Royals’ first 16 games (A.L. best 12-4), their batters had been hit by pitches 17 times, tied with the Texas Rangers.

According to Elias Sports Bureau, entering the weekend, pitchers had hit batters 0.74 times per game. That average confirmed Moore’s suspicion because in the equivalent number of games last season, pitchers hit batters 0.63 times per game.

Look at the Kansas City batters, who have accounted for 14 of the major league-leading 17 times the Royals have been hit:

• Mike Moustakas       5 times; last season 3 times in140 games
• Alex Gordon              5 times; last season 11 times in 156 games
• Lorenzo Cain             4 times; last season 4 times in 133 games

Only Anthony Rizzo of the Chicago Cubs has been hit more often, 6 times in 16 games. Last season he was plunked 15 times in140 games. Then there’s the Texas second baseman, Roughned Odor, who has been hit 5 times among the 17 times Texas batters have been hit. Last season, as a 20-year-old rookie, Odor was also hit 5 times but in 114 games.

The outbreak of pitches that have connected with batters’ bodies has fueled fights and other skirmishes and has resulted in seven suspensions and nine fines. One player, Kelvin Herrera, a Royals relief pitcher, was suspended and fined twice in five days, and another Royals pitcher, starter, Yordano Ventura, was suspended once and fined twice.

The last player to be suspended twice around the same time, according to Major League Baseball was outfielder Nyjer Morgan in 2010. He was suspended Aug. 25 for seven games for intentionally throwing a ball into the stands and again Sept. 3 for eight games for running into a player, charging the mound and making inappropriate comments and gestures toward fans.

Herrera, a 25-year-old Dominican right-hander, was suspended for five games April 21. two days after he threw a pitch behind Brett Lawrie. The same Oakland batter was at the source of Ventura’s fine. A day earlier Ventura threw a 99-mile-an-hour fastball that hit Lawrie above the left elbow, a pitch that Major League Baseball officials decided was deliberate. Josh Reddick had just hit a home run.

The Royals were upset with Lawrie because of his hard slide into second base in the first game of the three-game series. Shortstop Alcides Escobar was injured and had to be helped off the field.

Some observers, including Harold Reynolds of MLB Network, a former major league second baseman, called the slide dirty. Reynolds knows a lot more about runners taking out infielders at second base, but after viewing replays, I felt Lawrie’s slide was aggressive but not dirty.

The play was close enough that the sliding Lawrie could have thought he had a chance to beat the backhand flip from third baseman Moustakas to Escobar, who was covering second in the Royals’ defensive shift.

The Royals, however, were not seeking excuses to absolve Lawrie, who was out on the play and became a target for the Royals’ pitchers.

“I don’t mean to hurt anybody,” Herrera said. “I was just trying to throw inside, but just a bad grip on that fastball. It started raining pretty good. And they just tossed me out of the game.”

As he walked to the dugout, Herrera raised the level of heat, pointing to his head. He later told reporters he simply was telling Lawrie to think. But that’s not how Lawrie saw the gesture.

“That’s what got me hot,” Lawrie said. “That’s what got me mad. You can’t throw at my head and then say, ‘Next time I face you, it’s in the head.’ He needs to pay for that. He doesn’t throw 85. He throws 100.”

Commenting on the Lawrie play, Moore said, “Lawrie made a very aggressive slide. Often times when a runner slides aggressively into a middle infielder a pitcher takes it upon himself to make up for it.”

The dugouts emptied after each of those incidents, but somehow the teams avoided throwing punches. Those were to come in Chicago.

The scene shifted to Chicago as the Royals traveled there for a four-game series, but the intensity did not abate with the White Sox in the other dugout.

“It’s a shame it keeps happening,” an unidentified Kansas City player said. “I don’t know what it is.”

The first game of the series lasted 13 innings and produced the brawl that didn’t occur between the Royals and the A’s. In the seventh inning Ventura fielded Adam Eaton’s bouncer back to the mound, and the two yelled at each other as Eaton trotted to first and Ventura threw him out. It was believed Eaton felt Ventura had quick pitched him.

“Ventura is emotional,” Moore said. “He has to learn to channel the emotion and I know he will.”

The dugouts emptied, and the featured fight of the brawl was attempts by the Royals’ Cain and Chicago’s Jeff Samardzija, former Notre Dame football player, to get at each other. The pair had had previous experiences with each other.

Those two as well as Chicago’s Chris Sale and Kansas City’s Ventura, Edinson Volquez and Herrera were suspended. Herrera and Ventura have been suspended seven games each, Volquez, Sale and Samardzija five games each and Cain two games. They will serve their suspensions once their appeals are heard and decided.

The day after the brawl two interesting developments were reported: Samardzija expressed remorse for his participation in it, and it was learned that Sale tried to get into the Royals’ clubhouse after he was ejected.

MLB.com quoted Robin Ventura, the White Sox manager, as saying, “Yeah, all emotions are running high at that point. I just found out about it. You’ve got to have a conversation, and you move on from there. Luckily, cooler heads prevailed and nothing happened.”

Some baseball people have said they think the Royals have been targeted because of their unexpected success last year in getting to the post-season as a wild card and then in the post-season in which they went unbeaten until San Francisco beat them in the World Series opener.

Others feel the Royals have become overly aggressive because other teams don’t give them credit for what they achieved.

Moore, however, said, “I don’t see anything going on with our team. Our team is trying to win in 2015. They’re a more confident group. There is maybe a hungrier pursuit getting back and winning the World Series after coming up short. No doubt that seed has been planted. They’re a very hungry group.”

There is always one danger for a team the year after it plays unexpectedly well. It can easily suffer a setback in the face of higher expectations.

“That’s one of the things we worked hard to monitor,” Moore said. “There’s nothing that needs to be said. In our players’ routines this season we were no different from previous years. You pay attention to those things to see if there’s going to be a difference. We haven’t seen anything.”

What about the skeptics?

“We’re our biggest skeptics,” Moore said. “We’re constantly evaluating, seeing what we can do to get better, make better decisions. There’s no time for reflection in this game. We’re not trying to prove anybody wrong. We want to put a good team together.”

TIME TO RUN TEXT MESSAGE LEADERS?

Baseball has come to this, and what would Bob Gibson and Hal McRae say about it? Baseball players using social media to say they’re sorry? What a revoltin’ development.

Brett Lawrie of Oakland took out Kansas City shortstop Alcides Escobar with a hard, aggressive slide at second base, was criticized for it and sent a text message to Escobar with an apology.

Escobar said he never got it.

Lawrie said he had text messages from a number he was told belonged to Escobar. He said the number was given to him by a friend and Royals first baseman Eric Hosmer.

“I reached out to him in a text message, and he got it,” Lawrie told reporters. “I have the text message. I did reach out to him, and I sent a number of paragraphs and he messaged me back and he didn’t really seem to care about my apology to him. He actually said it was stupid and that it was intentional.”

Lawrie said he sent Escobar another text message, “He don’t say nothing,” Escobar told reporters. “I don’t hear nothing from him. Yeah, I’m surprised because when you do a guy like that you say, ‘My bad.’ He don’t say nothing. I don’t know why.”

Frankly, I don’t care who sent what to whom. In the interest of full disclosure, I have never sent a text message and wouldn’t know how if I wanted to, which I don’t.

It would be bad enough, then, if I suddenly sent someone a text message, but a baseball player sending one to apologize to another player for something he did on the field? Oh my. What is to become of the grand old game?