These Royals are eager to include their fans in this long-awaited moment

By now, you have probably heard about Eric Hosmer and a bunch of his teammates using social media to invite friends to a bar downtown. You probably heard about the champagne being sprayed and that they — how cool is this? — bought drinks for everyone there.

But in the middle of that epic party after making the American League Championship Series, there was something else that tells a small but awesome story about a team and a town. The Royals star grabbed a bottle of champagne and handed it to a new friend of his, a salesman for a construction company. Hosmer told his friend to spray the crowd.

“You’re a part of this as much as we are,” Hosmer told him.

Hosmer’s friend is Tim Grimes. He’s 28 years old, a lifelong Royals fan, and recently diagnosed with stage IV cancer. Doctors have given Grimes around a year to live, and ever since the Royals heard about him, they’ve adopted him as one of their own. Grimes has been invited to watch batting practice on the field, sat in the Buck O’Neil seat, and watched Sunday night’s clincher from the team president’s Crown Seats.

This story is about more than just Grimes, and more than the way the team embraced SungWoo Lee, the fan from South Korea whose visit to Kansas City coincided with the team’s rise up the standings. This is a story about a group of baseball players accomplishing more than almost any of them ever have before, and their fundamental understanding that this is about something so much bigger than making and advancing in the playoffs.

The story of starved fans who’ve waited through a 29-year playoff drought for this moment could grate on the players. They could take it as a slight, as something that has nothing to do with them but yet is overshadowing their greatest professional moments. Instead, there seems to be a genuine appreciation for the opportunity to be part of something so special.

This group could be doing the same things in Detroit or Anaheim or New York or Chicago and it would be all about them, all about baseball. Doing it in Kansas City makes it all about something else, which this group truly seems to embrace.

When James Shields walked to the mound at the beginning of the Wild Card Game against Oakland, he felt the ground shake. Literally, the grass and dirt beneath him shook, like an earthquake, from all the fan noise. Players from the A’s and Angels have told friends with the Royals they’ve never experienced anything like the crowd noise at these Kauffman Stadium playoff games. Every stadium is loud this time of year, but not every stadium creates earthquakes.

The appreciation can be told in a hundred ways. With most teams, if you ask the men inside whom their success makes them happiest for they talk about players, teammates, scouts, executives, the manager, the owner, people on the inside. Someone is being vindicated, or someone is achieving success a long time coming after years of hard times. The Royals have guys like that, too. Dayton Moore, most obviously, but also Ned Yost and David Glass and Alex Gordon and Billy Butler and Mike Moustakas and on and on and on.

But talk to the men on the inside, and their answers are almost always the same. They are happy for the fans. Twenty-nine years is too long to wait. Being able to change that history is seen as an honor, and if you get to talking to some of them about what it all means they will tell you they’re getting goose bumps.

“Best atmosphere I’ve ever played in front of,” Shields said after Sunday night’s game.

In Chicago, when the Royals first clinched a playoff spot, they partied in their clubhouse for a few minutes until word circulated that hundreds and maybe thousands of their fans were still celebrating in the stands. That’s when the clubhouse emptied, the players ran through a tunnel out to the field and began high-fiving and laughing and taking selfies with their fans.

They did the same thing after the Wild Card win against the A’s, and again Sunday night after sweeping the Angels. They’re experienced with this now, in a beautifully bizarre way, and eager to do it again.

It doesn’t always work like this, you know. It might only work with fans whose faith has been tested through more bad times than they deserve, and with fans who are mostly local, mostly passionate, and can rattle off names like Runelvys Hernandez and Emil Brown and Mark Quinn as far back as their memories can go.

Those are the types of things that can push a playoff run from fun to historic, from the nice escape that sports provide to something that feels more like a perspective changer. More fans showed up at Kauffman Stadium this year than any season since 1991, and the team is expecting even more next year. Game two in Anaheim was the highest rated baseball game on record in Kansas City, and that will probably be broken in the ALCS.

Everything that this group accomplishes will, in some ways, be told in the context of a sorry 29 years of franchise history and the fans who’ve waited through it all for this payoff.

This is the right group to do it, too, because they are embracing the change like an honor, making sure in ways public and otherwise to make their fans feel as much a part of this as they are.

This story was originally published October 6, 2014 at 2:42 PM with the headline "These Royals are eager to include their fans in this long-awaited moment."