Kansas City’s baseball moment has finally arrived

Tuesday night, grown men will cry.

One of them bought tickets in section 132. Steve McDonald had tickets in that same section of Kauffman Stadium the last time the Royals were in the playoffs, too.

He was 14, and went with his dad. He is all grown up now. He’s a cook, and says his wife is going to scream when she sees what he paid for these tickets. But he’s waited 29 years for this. His dad passed away. So he’ll take his son to watch the Royals play the Athletics in the American League Wild Card Game on Tuesday night.

And at least one of them will cry.

“I don’t know how I’ll explain it to him,” Steve says. “I hope I don’t have to.”

There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of stories like Steve’s. One man writes in and claims to have not missed a home game in 20 years. Another says he and his brother did not speak for years, something about a woman, but the Royals broke the ice. They’ll watch the playoff game together at a bar.

The first thing a former soldier working with the military in the Middle East does every morning is check the Royals score from his iPad. He’ll set his alarm to wake up at 2 a.m. to watch the playoff game.

“It’s a no-brainer,” John Lorenzen sends by email. “I can sleep when I’m dead!!”

There is no explaining just how or why sports get into our hearts. There is no logical reason the outcomes of kids games played by strangers should matter as much as they do. For years and years, the Royals have meant something very personal to many people in and around Kansas City, but that was always so hard to describe to everyone else.

The team lost a lot of games. Attendance wasn’t great. You didn’t see too many Royals T-shirts. It’s hard to flaunt a team that doesn’t pay you back, so, for the longest time, it has been easy to forget that Kansas City has the soul of a baseball town.

That will change Tuesday night.

That will change in a dramatic way, because through a national broadcast, casual baseball fans are going to be shocked by what they see in a do-or-die game played in front of a starved fan base.

Last year, Pirates fans lived what Royals fans are living. Their playoff drought was 21 years, old enough to drink. Fans there screamed so loud and so long that they spooked the opposing pitcher into dropping the ball on the mound. Lifelong fans who couldn’t afford tickets watched through tears at bars around town.

The closest we’ve seen in Kansas City is the home run derby two years ago, during the All-Star Game festivities. Royals fans manufactured a slight from Robinson Cano and turned it into a spectacle. They booed him into a Little Leaguer, basically, the one-time derby champion reduced to zero home runs in 10 swings.

Royals fans did that for a meaningless skills contest played the day before what is still essentially an exhibition game.

What do you think they’re capable of for an actual playoff game, the first in a generation?

The folks from Guinness are in town for another attempt by the Chiefs to break the “world record” for fan noise at the Monday night game (which the Chiefs did). They might think about sticking around one more night.

This will be 29 years of disappointment, angst and frustration unleashed by lifelong fans who started to wonder if they’d ever see it. Many paid far more than would be responsibly advised to be part of it. Many more are making plans to watch on television at houses and bars across Kansas City and beyond. One way or the other, some of them won’t be showing up for work tomorrow.

There is a tired old cliché in sports, usually bellowed out by grumpy fun sponges, about acting like you’ve been there before. But what if you haven’t? What if you have waited as long as you can reasonably remember for what you still wonder might be a once-in-a-lifetime experience?

Over the last few days and weeks you have probably heard and read a hundred times about the Royals owning the longest playoff drought in North American sports. That ends Tuesday night, but those words are a weak descriptor about what this means to a lot of people.

Twenty-nine years is longer than most of the Royals’ players have been alive. Babies have been born, and grown up to be doctors and lawyers and cops and teachers in the time that it’s taken the Royals to get back to the playoffs.

Those of us old enough to have even grainy memories of 1985 — Denny’s countdown, Motley’s catch, George Brett and Bret Saberhagen hugging it out — are so incredibly different that it feels silly to even point that out.

There are people who had no children in 1985, and are now grandparents. Some have gone to college, been married, been divorced, bought houses and foreclosed on them. Some have paid off student loans and gone from ratty apartments to vacation homes. They’ve joined the work force and retired. They’ve put on weight, wrinkled, made some memories and forgotten others.

Through all of it, they’ve had the Royals. The first nine years felt like no big deal. The Royals had good teams. In 1989, they won 92 games. In 1994, they won 14 straight and looked like a playoff contender before the strike changed everything. Then came 17 losing seasons in 18 years, the team alternating between disappointing and infuriating and empty. That’s a lot of summer nights with the radio on, or the television playing in the background, the Royals — despite themselves — wedging into lives and routines.

The reward for all of that comes Tuesday night, and it will be like nothing else that Kansas City has seen in quite some time. A generation of missed celebrations comes out, turning a baseball game into something much more important.

Tuesday night, grown men will cry.

This story was originally published September 29, 2014 at 7:25 PM with the headline "Kansas City’s baseball moment has finally arrived."