Royal Again: KC celebrates after a long road back to playoffs

Champagne stings the eyeballs and George Brett doesn’t have any goggles, so he’s standing along a hallway, away from the players he has come to know and love and cheer for.

The proud past is here in a sport coat, drinking from a plastic cup. The historic present is over there, on the other side of the room, spraying one another with Cook’s Brut and Bud Light.

Alex Gordon and James Shields and the rest of the Royals gather around the drink carts, a group of ballplayers jumping into each other as they scream and laugh and hug the greatest moment of most of their professional lives. “We Ready,” the rap song that’s become a sports anthem, plays on loop.

After 29 years, they have pushed a once-proud franchise from punchline back to the playoffs by beating the White Sox 3-1 on Friday. The longest playoff drought in North American sports is the Blue Jays’ problem now. At the very least, the Royals will play in the American League Wild Card Game next week. They are one game behind the Tigers in the division, with two to play. Over and over between bottles, they will say there is still so much to accomplish.

But for now, they party.

“I did this in Double-A one time,” Alex Gordon says. “Definitely not as fun.”

The Royals earned this bash with 88 wins and counting, mostly done through good pitching and great defense and a stubborn resiliency. A generation of stink doesn’t go away easily, and the Royals fought it all year. A slump in May cost their hitting coach his job. A surge in August restored hope.

Hundreds, maybe thousands, of Royals fans showed up at U.S. Cellular Field to see it in person. They watched their team score three runs in the first, and then choke out the rest of the game with suffocating pitching and flawless defense. Sal Perez caught the last out, which was fitting, and then home plate turned into the night’s first mosh pit.

“That’s the best catch I’ve seen you make since you’ve been in the big leagues,” Brett told Perez.

They earned this celebration for a lot of reasons. The best farm system known to man. The trade that brought their ace and a wipeout reliever. The other trade that brought their shortstop and center fielder. Gordon’s stardom. The emergence of Danny Duffy and Yordano Ventura. Perez. On and on.

This is a talented group. But there are teams with more talent. No Royals player has as many as 20 home runs, or even 75 RBIs. You don’t have to be the most talented to make the playoffs. You just have to be a very good team.

Maybe it helps that so many of the guys in this clubhouse have done this celebration in cramped minor league clubhouses together. Somewhere, they must be thinking about everything that’s been put into this moment. Not just for them, but the team they will now forever represent.

“I can’t put it into words,” Duffy says.

It’s not just that this franchise hasn’t been to the playoffs in 29 years, it’s that it hasn’t even been particularly close in that long. Before now, the closest the Royals have been to the playoffs might have been 1994 — and baseball didn’t even have the playoffs that year.

The darkest times came after the strike that year, when the combination of founder Ewing Kauffman’s death and a board of directors whose only purpose was to save money drove a proud franchise into the ground. Back then, scenes like this — Royals uniforms soaked in champagne and beer — weren’t even a legitimate thought. Just get through the season, survive.

“A ship without a rudder,” longtime broadcaster Denny Matthews says.

Brett was newly retired and given a lifetime job as a club vice president, but so turned off by all the losing that when people asked if he still worked for the team, he’d say, “not really.” When the Royals lost 100 games on the last day of the 2002 season, Frank White was infuriated at the key players not playing — “no pride,” he says. The sports page of the next day’s Star had a hundred Ls, and White kept a copy of that paper in his desk for a year.

Those men were used to moments like Friday night, all champagne and joy. Seeing the franchise they grew to love and personify fall so far hurt in a personal way. There was no long-term plan, and no short-term plan, either. Those years are perhaps best summed up by Buddy Bell, the manager, who said: “don’t ever say things can’t get worse.”

Even if the reality is more complicated, stories like the Royals’ rise are usually told through big moments. The Royals’ first big moment to rise from punchline to playoffs came in 2006.

David Glass bought the team in 2000 after serving on the board of directors, and after a while, friends say the losing embarrassed him. He saw small-money teams like Oakland and Minnesota find success, and didn’t know how to replicate that in Kansas City.

So Glass asked around, and he kept hearing about Dayton Moore, then an assistant with the Braves. Moore ended up taking the job as general manager, but with important conditions. The Royals would spend to sign the best amateur players, both in America and abroad. They’d hire better and more scouts, improve and build new facilities. Even then, friends warned Moore against taking the job. You’ll never win there, they said. It’s a dead end. Besides, the Braves’ GM job will open up soon.

Moore came to Kansas City anyway, and if he’s honest, getting to the playoffs has taken longer than he expected. Some of that is in mistakes and some of it is that the Royals were in even worse shape than he thought. White was right when he said there was no pride. Moore was shocked when he heard that the year before he took the job, the Royals lost 106 games and didn’t even take a team picture.

“Who would want a picture of that team?” he was told.

So this was a culture change, not unlike the challenge of a new coach taking over a rotten college football program. There were setbacks, of course. Many setbacks. This is Moore’s eighth full season in charge of the Royals, and just the second winning season.

But underneath it all, the Royals were building something real. Progress happens slowly, and in the Royals’ case, too slowly to keep Moore’s talking point of “The Process” from being turned against him by some. But at times like this, the key moments are easy to spot in hindsight — like signing Kelvin Herrera and Perez during the same scouting trip through the Dominican and Venezuela.

The Royals are at this point because they finally had a plan, and finally stuck with it. In 2008, they spent more money on their draft picks than any team in baseball history. They outbid the Yankees and Red Sox for some players in Latin America. People started to notice, small things at first. A rival scout called one of the Royals’ affiliates the best minor-league team he’d ever seen. Four years ago, the joke around the Cactus League was that the best team anyone scouted was the 2014 Royals.

The next big moment came on Aug. 10, 2011. That was Perez’s big-league debut, and it came with all the subtleness of a sledgehammer. He drove in a run, and picked two runners off base. The future had arrived.

“I remember that clearly,” Moore says. “That brought energy and life to what we were doing. A little bit of light.”

Six of the nine players in the starting lineup that day were in the starting lineup on Friday as the Royals clinched their first playoff spot since many of the players were born. This is the group that will be remembered for turning a franchise’s sorry history from an insult to the setup for the greatest story in the last 20 years of Kansas City sports.

There are a million steps from the bottom to the top, and back in Kansas City they’ll talk through them all. More than anything, this group of players has given fans joy and memories.

“My bosses would hate me thinking this,” says a rival scouting director, “but we’re out of it and I’m rooting like hell for your team.”

Like all good sports teams, the Royals have come to mean a little more than baseball to Kansas City. They are the city’s easiest conversation starter, and finally for good reasons. This is the team that made a long-time fan from South Korea something like a celebrity. SungWoo Lee watched Friday’s clincher online. These Royals also gave a 28-year-old lifelong fan a spiritual boost after a grim cancer diagnosis. Tim Grimes drove from Kansas City on Friday to see this in person.

For Royals fans, there is no sense in acting like they’ve been here before — because most of them haven’t. Lifelong fan Matt Rippee was 9 years old in 1985, and says he still hasn’t forgiven his parents for not ripping him away from a board game called Crossbows and Catapults to watch the Royals. They recorded the game — VHS, not DVR — which Matt says he’s watched 100 times. He promises his two sons, 10 and 13, won’t miss a pitch in the playoffs.

Scott Jarboe went to the clincher in 1985 with his father, a present for the boy’s 12th birthday. He lives in St. Louis now, but remained a Royals fan. His dad had a hip replacement eight weeks ago, but Scott got playoff tickets and has been researching the team’s golf cart service. The game will be two days before Scott’s 41st birthday. Dad is protesting at the moment, but Scott will get him to the ballpark. There are thousands of stories like this, across Kansas City and beyond.

Most of those who came to watch in person stayed long after the last out, until the guys walked through the tunnel from the clubhouse to share the moment and throw hats and T-shirts into the crowd. Some of those fans packed their own champagne back in their hotel rooms. Many watching on TV did the same in their homes, because 29 years means a lot of pent-up joy.

As wild as the celebration was, it came with a consistent perspective. Moore toweled his face of champagne and talked about the future. Shields talked about needing to play well and long enough that this would not be their last celebration together.

And amid the chaos, Duffy stepped away for a moment and pulled back his goggles. He looked at a clock, and mentioned he needed to get to bed early. There’s still a division to win, and Duffy is the starting pitcher on Saturday.

This first celebration does not have to be the last, or the sweetest.

“There’s more of this coming out, and on a grander scale,” he says. “There’s more to be had.”

This story was originally published September 27, 2014 at 12:33 AM with the headline "Royal Again: KC celebrates after a long road back to playoffs."