KANSAS CITY -- The Royals felt like they were on the verge of breaking Tuesday’s game open all night with traffic all over the bases and pressure on the Tigers’ pitching.

Double plays, key strikeouts and a clutch Tigers’ bullpen made the opportunity to do so disappear in the Royals’ 3-1 loss in 10 innings at Kauffman Stadium, their third consecutive loss.

Tuesday’s loss means the Royals (82-70) trail the first-place Guardians by five games in the American League Central. Kansas City still sits in the second AL Wild Card spot, 2 1/2 games behind Baltimore and 1 1/2 games ahead of the Twins in the third spot.

But Detroit, surging in September, is now just 1 1/2 games out of that third and final spot. The Royals do hold the head-to-head tiebreaker over the Tigers with a 7-5 season series record and one more game to play.

“Any time you lose, it’s frustrating,” Bobby Witt Jr. said after his history-making night. “But it’s just trying to figure out how you can improve. We didn’t come this far just to come this far.”

Witt’s run was the only one the Royals scored on Tuesday, when he came home on Michael Massey’s RBI single in the third inning. That tied the game at 1, and that’s where the game stayed until the top of the 10th when the Tigers scored two off Royals reliever Lucas Erceg.

After a scoreless ninth, Erceg came back out for the 10th and allowed the automatic runner to move from second to third when he balked by flinching his knee. Parker Meadows’ bloop single into left field scored the go-ahead run. A four-pitch walk to Matt Vierling extended the inning, and Riley Greene’s single up the middle gave the Tigers an insurance run.

“I got away from my process a little bit,” Erceg said of the walk. “I’m not going to sit here and say that I was full of energy. I was tired. … After that walk, I hit the reset button and said, ‘Hey, we’re onto the next guy.’ I executed a couple good pitches, he was just able to put a good swing on a fastball in.”

Opportunities were everywhere for the Royals to break through offensively. But they went 1-for-9 with runners in scoring position and left 10 on base Tuesday, a frustrating trend for a team that has been so good this season in clutch situations.

They rank fourth in MLB this year with an .805 OPS with runners in scoring position. In the past 25 games, though, the Royals are batting .195 (38-for-195) with runners in scoring position.

“A lot of this is to do with who we’re facing as well,” manager Matt Quatraro said. “... You got to put yourselves in those situations in order to come through with them. We got to continue to get to those spots, and something’s going to come through one of these times. And it’s going to break a game open.”

The Royals hit into three double plays Tuesday. Twice, they loaded the bases but weren’t able to score. In the fifth, the Royals knocked starter Casey Mize out of the game by loading the bases with one out, only for Massey to ground into an inning-ending double play on the first pitch he saw from reliever Shelby Miller, a slider in the zone.

“He wants one of two things: He wants a double-play ball or he wants a strikeout,” Massey said. “To let him get ahead with strike one gets him one pitch closer. I like to hit early in those counts and be ready to go.

“... I felt like I got a pretty good pitch to hit and just hit the outside part of the ball instead of the inside part of the ball. They turned it, made us pay for it.”

The opportunities vanished in the late innings when the Tigers turned to their back-end relievers.

Royals starter Cole Ragans allowed just one run in seven innings. He also faced traffic throughout the night and walked four batters. Catcher Freddy Fermin threw out two of those walks on the bases, one attempting to steal in the fifth and one trying to advance on a ball in the dirt in the seventh.

“They didn’t really chase much,” Ragans said of the Tigers’ approach. “I had to come in the zone to get them out. When they did chase, it was very close to the zone. They have a really good approach, they’re a good team and they’re playing good baseball right now.”