How David Glass celebrated the Royals’ championship, and no, he’s not going to sell the team

On the night the team he bought 15 years ago scrapped and ran and came back one more time to forever make its mark in baseball history, David Glass did not sleep.

He stayed at Citi Field for as long as his Royals celebrated their World Series championship, first in the clubhouse, then out on the field, and then in points all around the stadium. It’s good being the boss, and it’s great being the boss of the world champs.

The thing about celebrating a championship, though, is you lose track of time. So Glass doesn’t really remember what time he felt the party simmering down — or, more likely, moving to other parts of New York — but rather than go back to his hotel for a couple hours, he went to the airport to fly back to Kansas City.

“And we celebrated on the airplane,” he said.

Late Sunday night had turned to early Monday morning by the time his plane landed, the sun starting to rise on a very new day in Kansas City, and even by then Glass did not feel tired. Or, at least, he did not feel like sleeping.

That entire next day is a blur of thank yous and congratulations — though not from the president, who instead called manager Ned Yost — and how many times does a man get to live this kind of joy?

“You need to live in the moment sometimes,” Glass said. “These things don’t come along very often. Someone wins the World Series every year, but that means it’s been done 100 times in 100 years. That’s pretty rare. You want to take advantage of it. You don’t want to miss anything.”

Glass prefers to keep a low profile, of course. He doesn’t do many interviews, and even though he is at most home games, he enters and exits Kauffman Stadium in such a way that some fans assume he’s not there.

When the team isn’t doing well — and there have plenty of those times — this is sometimes twisted into a narrative of absentee ownership. But the truth has always been something sturdier. Glass drove a major change in the team he loves in 2006, when he hired Dayton Moore as general manager and promised to support and fund his vision for a better franchise.

When that vision began to gain traction — and Glass admits it took longer than he expected — the owner maintained his steady presence in the background. He calls himself “just a fan with good parking and good seats.” The truth is obviously much deeper than that, but this speaks to Glass’ preference to lie low.

It also leads some fans to wonder if he will sell the team now that it’s achieved the ultimate goal.

Not a chance, he said.

“No,” he said. “My whole family, we’re all sort of baseball junkies. My goal in life when I was a kid was to be a major-league baseball player, and I didn’t have the talent to do that. This is the next best thing, to do it this way. Dan (Glass, David’s son and the team’s president) is the same way. We enjoy it. It’s fun to go to the game.

“I enjoy my relationship with the players and the coaches and interacting with the fans. So as long as you enjoy it, and recognizing at the same time we have a responsibility to continue to put a good product on the field, so we continue to have good fan support, then if you can make all that work, it’s fun.”

Glass has a line ready for this, too, saying that winning the World Series was so much fun he’d be willing to do it again every year.

Like a lot of Royals fans, Glass’ favorite memories from this postseason are the comebacks. So many comebacks. He admits that going into the ninth inning of World Series Game 5, he “was almost to the point of believing we were going to have to do it in Kansas City.” Everything changed so quickly after that, so massively.

Game 4 in Houston, he remembers watching the Astros extend their lead with three runs in the seventh inning, Minute Maid Park seeming to explode with defeating noise, virtually everyone in the building believing the Royals’ season was about to end and the Astros would go on to the American League Championship Series.

Game 6 against Toronto, too, when Wade Davis was on the mound in the ninth inning with the tying run on third base with nobody out. Davis got out of that, of course, and Glass saw him in the clubhouse afterward during the celebration.

“I asked him,” Glass said. “I said, ‘You really made me nervous, were you nervous?’ He looked at me, really calmly, and just said, ‘No,’ like, ‘Why were you?’”

But of all the moments, Glass’ favorite — “the most spectacular thing I experienced” — came after that sleepless and joyful night. He did go to bed, finally, sometime Monday night. And then he got up early Tuesday morning for a parade he will never forget.

He didn’t know what to expect, but knows now it was better than he could’ve imagined, with more people than he’s ever seen in one place in his life.

He will remember the thousands who came out hours early to stand and wait, and he will especially remember all of the kids along the route, and the signs they must’ve made up the night before for their favorite player.

It reminded him of a story he’s told before, the story of how he fell in love with baseball. He was a boy in Mountain View, a tiny town in the southern part of Missouri, in the 1940s — a place and a time when the only thing to do in the summer was play baseball.

One day, a man in town loaded some kids into a car and drove to Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis to watch the Cardinals play the Dodgers. Glass remembers all the things grown men remember about seeing a big-league stadium as kids — the vibrant green grass, the perfectly kept fields, the bright uniforms and big crowds. If he ever needed the love of baseball to be reinforced in his life, that moment did it, which brings him back to the parade.

Maybe, hopefully, that was the moment for a new generation of kids.

“They got to go to the parade and see their players ride by and wave to them and saw them during the year and saw them achieve the ultimate in baseball,” Glass said. “That’s something that will stay with them from now on, and will do a lot to orient them toward baseball, and make them baseball fans.”

At some point, Glass will turn his focus toward doing this again next year. He said he does not yet know his team’s budget for 2016, because he does not yet have all the numbers for 2015. That will come in the next four weeks, he said, and eventually the team will have to make another offseason’s worth of hard decisions.

The last year, in particular, has resulted in nothing but correct choices. Kendrys Morales, Edinson Volquez, Chris Young, Ben Zobrist, Ryan Madson, and, yes, even Johnny Cueto.

Glass downplays his role in the franchise’s major decision this winter, which is how to approach Alex Gordon’s free agency. Glass said this is Moore’s decision, but he speaks glowingly of Gordon as a ballplayer and a man.

“In the end, Alex needs to do what’s best for him and his family,” Glass said. “If that includes us, great. If it doesn’t, then I respect his decision. And at the same time, Dayton needs to do what’s best for our team and keep us competitive to where we can try to do this again next year. I don’t have any idea how that will all wash out, but I have a lot of confidence in the people involved in the process.”

The business, however, will come later. For now, Glass said he is still enjoying the accomplishment. There’s a lot to remember, not just from the postseason, but from the Royals’ most successful regular season since 1980, and all that fed into this historical moment — the trades that brought in Davis, Lorenzo Cain and Alcides Escobar, the breakthrough last fall, the emergence of homegrown stars like Eric Hosmer, the stubborn optimism of Yost, the deft evaluations of a beefed-up scouting department, and so much more.

Other small-market teams have had success, of course. The A’s have been celebrated with a best-selling book and a Brad Pitt movie. The Rays made the World Series. The Pirates have built themselves into a power.

But what the Royals have done is unprecedented in the modern big-money era of baseball. Their payroll ranked 17th this year. Since the strike, the World Series winner has averaged the seventh-biggest payroll. Only the 1997 Marlins have been lower than the Royals, and that team was under .500 the year before, and detonated itself after the title, losing 108 games. In other words, no budget-conscious team has won a World Series since the strike with the kind of sustainability the Royals are showing right now.

Winning the championship is great. But if there’s anything that can make it greater, it’s winning the championship in the way the Royals just won it.

“That does make it extra special,” Glass said. “There may be other ways to do it, but from the time we brought Dayton on board, Dan and I have been convinced that for a small market, this is the only way to build it.”

This story was originally published November 13, 2015 at 5:14 PM with the headline "How David Glass celebrated the Royals’ championship, and no, he’s not going to sell the team."