Wild card for the Royals would be nothing to complain about

The champagne is packed away, out of sight. The beer will be cold when the time comes. The goggles will go on and the hugging will start and then the laughing and the screaming.

WE DID IT!!! the Royals will scream.

“Not really,” some of you will say back.

To which, well, someone needs to say it: Are you freaking kidding me?

The Royals beat the White Sox 6-3 on Thursday night, a combination of good pitching, lots of hits, a little bit of luck and a touch of speed. It was their 87th win, the club’s most since 1989. They need just one more win or Mariners loss to clinch the franchise’s first playoff spot in 29 years.

That’s the longest drought in North American sports, and longer than many of the players on this team have been alive. Salvador Perez, the Royals’ two-time All-Star catcher, was born five years after the 1985 World Series.

You know all of that, which makes it insane that some of you seem ready to dismiss the significance, just because it’s not the division title. Like ending a playoff drought older than the last Halley’s Comet sighting isn’t worth a group of ballplayers going back to their hotel smelling of champagne and joy.

“These guys haven’t celebrated anything in 20 years,” manager Ned Yost says. “Twenty-nine, 30 years.”

There are doctors younger than the Royals’ playoff drought. There are college graduates whose parents had not even met the last time this team made the postseason. And some fans want to minimize the moment because it’s the wild card, and not a division championship?

Stop it. Don’t talk anymore. Loosen up. Have some fun. Enjoy it a little.

If you have rooted for the Royals for any length of time and can find it in your dark heart to be disappointed — in even a small way — by your team winning the wild card, you might want to reconsider why you bother with the whole thing.

Fans of teams that haven’t been to the playoffs in a generation are not allowed to say the wild card isn’t good enough, just like starving men are not allowed to say their steak is overcooked.

Obviously, winning the division is more important since baseball adopted the current playoff format in 2012. Wild-card winners play one game, do-or-die, usually with their best starting pitcher. Win that, and they play a best-of-five series against a division winner without their rotation set up. In the Royals’ case, winning the division would also mean playing the beat-up Orioles instead of the loaded Angels in the first series.

There are other benefits, too. Most notably, only the winner of the first wild card — and here it’s worth pointing out that the Royals would have the tie breaker against Oakland — is guaranteed a home game. After all these years, Royals fans deserve to see a playoff game at Kauffman Stadium.

But this is also true: the Royals will, and should, fly a flag over the Hall of Fame building in left field for winning a wild-card spot. They should sell T-shirts, and if anyone wearing one of those T-shirts hears some joke about it not being a real playoff spot they should kindly tell their new friend to shut up.

This is the format now. When baseball first created the wild card back in 1995, some people stuck in the past didn’t consider it a real playoff appearance. Talk to some old-timers, and they’ll tell you the same thing happened when baseball created divisions — doubling the playoff teams from two to four — back in 1969.

Last year, the Rays had to beat the Rangers in a one-game playoff just to win the wild card. They ended up in the division series. The Pirates ended their own 21-year playoff drought with a wild-card appearance, the fans going so bonkers they spooked Reds pitcher Johnny Cueto into dropping the ball on the mound. Pittsburgh won that game and pushed the Cardinals to five games in the division series. The year before that, the Cardinals made it all the way from the wild card to the seventh game of the NLCS.

“Do you want to play a one-game playoff, do-or-die?” Yost says. “You’d rather win the division so you don’t have to do that. And stranger things have happened. We could play a (game) 163 on Monday…

“(But) you’ve got to get in. Everybody else is going home. If it’s a one-game playoff, we’ll take the one-game playoff. Whatever gives us the opportunity to continue on is important.”

To win the division, the Royals would have to win their last three and the Tigers lose their last three, or win three and have the Tigers lose two of their last three, and then win the so-called 163rd game in Detroit on Monday.

So more and more, it’s looking like the Royals’ path to the playoffs is with the wild card. Most likely, that means facing Oakland and their rented ace, Jon Lester. Assuming Seattle is eliminated, the Royals just have to play within one game of the A’s over the last three to play the wild-card game in Kansas City. If that happens, it would be the biggest sports party back home in years, probably decades — wild card or not.

Over the years, the Royals’ leadership group has shown a willingness to take and ask for more credit than they’ve earned. General manager Dayton Moore’s awkward, “in a small way I feel like we won the World Series” line is the most circulated example.

But this isn’t that.

This is the playoffs, as decreed by the rules of major league baseball. You want to worry about what playing the wild-card game might do the Royals’ chances of winning a division series? Fine. You want to worry about losing the division series, and wondering if you were in the real playoffs or some Tuesday night play-in game in Dayton, Ohio? Fine.

But don’t do that yet. At least wait until we get to that point. Not now. Not with the Royals on the brink of accomplishing something they haven’t done in so long, of finally giving fans who’ve deserved better something real to cheer for and feel happy about.

This is the best Royals team in a generation. They are about to make that official, and then they will spray each other with champagne and generally make a mess of the visitors clubhouse here.

At some point, they will likely come back onto the field to share the moment with some of the fans outside. There, it will be players and fans, reveling in something most of them can’t ever remember happening before. In the stands and watching on TV, some will wipe away tears at the sight of something they’ve waited so long to see.

That’s worth celebrating, wouldn’t you say?

This story was originally published September 25, 2014 at 10:42 PM with the headline "Wild card for the Royals would be nothing to complain about."