You may not have bought Royals gear for a year, but it’s almost go time again

While you’re at Kauffman Stadium the next time the boys are in town, check out the general condition of the Royals gear worn by fans.

Most of it looks to be the same age. The T-shirts are deep blue with lettering only now starting to lose some sheen. The “KC” logos on ball caps remain bright and unfrayed.

That’s because of what happened not quite a year ago in the marketplace of Royals stuff.

Everyone bought at once when the surging club reached the postseason. The closets of Kansas City baseball fans, long bereft of hometown jerseys and polos, changed at Jarrod Dyson-like speed.

And they’re apt to change again soon, thanks to the dynamics of the sports merchandising world.

Last October and through the holiday season, Alyce Elliott and her extended family bought all of the shirts and caps that three generations of Elliotts and Sopticks were wearing at the most recent home game.

They hadn’t bought much Royals merchandise this year. But Elliott, 74, pledged to open up her wallet again in the postseason.

“Oh, we’re not done” showing fan loyalty, said the Overland Park great-grandmother. “We’re just waiting to buy more.”

Sure enough, shirt designers and pennant makers already have drawn up the next door-busters — memorabilia proclaiming your Royals to be the American League’s Central Division champs.

Unless the team’s September struggles lead to an epic crash, local cash registers will ring up that gear minutes after the final out of the clinching game.

The cyclical nature of baseball-gear economics is well known in major-league cities that haven’t suffered 29-year playoff droughts. But Kansas Citians are rather new to the modern rhythms and bursts of this business.

So we’ll start by citing what academics consider a rule of buying that separates true fans from the rest:

It’s not about donning something that simply shows you like a team. It’s about being part of an ongoing narrative.

The shirts, banners, Bobbles of the Month and — for the first time in club history — an official Royals snowboard do tell a compelling story.

In early 2014, powder-blue “Believe” shirts felt right. Now some wear on their chests an all-out order: “Respect the Logo.”

Whatever moves product.

“What they’re buying connects them to a memory and a story,” said Mike Ross, a sports management instructor at Wichita State University. “The stories of a winning season are so much bigger to sports fans than it is to just say, ‘Hey, I paid $30 for a T-shirt.’ ”

One shirt out there especially illustrates his point.

For $125 you could own a Johnny Cueto replica Royals jersey, No. 47. Sales were brisk until the hurler’s recent string of poor outings.

A free agent come winter, Cueto isn’t even expected to be a Royal next season.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Daniel Wann, a Kansas City area native who now is a “psychology of sports fandom” professor at Murray State University.

“Cueto is part of the story being written right now about this team,” Wann said. “It’s a story spreading around the country.”

If the pitcher can return to All-Star form and help the squad win it all, anything stamped “Cueto” will show Kansas City’s future generations that you were there.

Big bang

Hard to fathom now, but throughout the 2014 regular season, center fielder Lorenzo Cain had no jersey to his name hanging at the K’s Majestic Team Store.

That’s how suddenly the big bang occurred in the Royals’ retail galaxy.

In the past at some Rally House outlets, a team jersey could sit in a box or dangle on the racks for years, said CEO Aaron Liebert. During the lowest of low points, Mike Sweeney items lingered until the slugger left the Royals in 2008.

“Then we just had to mark it way down” to be rid of the stuff, Liebert said.

Today you can find replica jerseys for almost every starter in the lineup without ordering online. Official products heralding utility man Ben Zobrist were on shelves within days of his arrival in late July.

“When you have nine or more on the same team where fans want to be in their jerseys, that’s unusual,” said Andrea Bell, store manager at Academy Sports + Outdoors in Belton.

Cain now leads all teammates in sales at the K.

Brett Salzenstein recalled the very moment the marketplace erupted.

“Once the postseason (last year) started, it turned into a whole new animal,” said Salzenstein, retail division manager for Aramark, the stadium’s concessionaire.

He was there at the Team Store late in the Wild Card Game, when the Royals were four runs behind the Oakland A’s. Shoppers slouched in to browse in the eighth inning before exiting through the doors that went out to the parking lot, not back into the concourse.

The Royals rallied, and the store stood empty through extra innings, all eyes on the field.

Then victory. And buyers stormed in to grab anything Salvador Perez.

In the wee hours after the chaos, Salzenstein and others handling licensed apparel had a eureka moment: How about a “Best Game Ever” T-shirt?

More than 800 sold two days later.

Royals gear was Fanatics.com’s top-selling Major League Baseball brand in the first week of October.

And that’s saying something. For as long as merchandisers can remember, New York Yankees gear has dominated the baseball market.

Dodgers and Red Sox usually follow. Even the Detroit Tigers carry a certain fashion cachet, said Ryan Sullivan of SportsOneSource, which tracks and reports on industry trends.

Save for that miracle month of October, “even last year you were a drop in the bucket of the MLB,” Sullivan said. Royals things of all kinds in 2014 made up just 2 percent of Major League Baseball sales. Still, that’s quadruple its share of sales in 2013.

Among the most popular T-shirts: “We Own The Pennant,” which players wore on the field after winning the league championship game that thrust them into the World Series.

The Academy Sports + Outdoors store in Belton had preordered shirts and ripped open boxes for fans who gathered late that night. The line wrapped around the building.

At the stadium this season, an all-time record attendance helped move three times more product than last year.

But elsewhere our buying binge settled a bit.

So far in 2015, sales of Royals merchandise have dropped back down to 1 percent of all Major League Baseball sales, Sullivan said. He hastened to add that we’re still a small-market club and “nobody’s wearing a Kansas City hat for fashion as they do with bigger teams.”

“Certain teams need to win to sell,” he said. “The Royals are about in the middle when you’re winning. You’re near the bottom when you’re not winning.”

OK, smart guy. Just wait for October.

Getting ready

A year ago everything Royal was ordered and sold in a frantic manner.

The team wasn’t expected to contend for a crown. And when they steamrolled in that direction, manufacturers scurried to find enough royal-blue shirts to emblazon with the latest achievement.

Many vendors dealt in more plentiful gray shirts. (You see lots of those worn at the stadium, too.)

This year apparel makers and local sporting goods outlets have had weeks to prepare.

“On-call teams” of workers already are assigned to come in on the night the Royals clinch their division, said Bell of Academy Sports: “We’ll reopen even if extra innings stretch the game past 1 in the morning. …

“Finding employees for that night is no problem. They’re anxious to do it again this year.”

What might be a problem: merchants and fans expecting too much after the last postseason blitz.

Retail managers tend to lower their voices when speaking of all the madcap memorabilia that could roll out come October. Wanting neither to jinx the Royals nor crank out gear before any team advances, merchandisers are “a pretty cautious group,” said Salzenstein of Aramark. “We don’t plan too early.”

Then again, they can’t plan too late.

One team after each postseason series will be decked out in made-to-order “locker room Ts and locker room caps,” noted Eric Marshall, the Kansas City community marketing manager for Dick’s Sporting Goods. “Fans will want them as soon as they can get them.”

Invariably that means producing celebratory gear for a team that winds up losing.

Sports licensing agreements call for those items to be given to charities, typically overseas where few may notice the gaffe.

“An old joke around the industry,” said Liebert of Rally House, “is that everyone in Africa thinks the Buffalo Bills won four straight Super Bowls.”

This story was originally published September 20, 2015 at 5:57 PM with the headline "You may not have bought Royals gear for a year, but it’s almost go time again."