For some Royals fans, panic creeps in

Say, local sports fans: It’s so much better to BIRG than CORF, right?

But jumping from one to the other can create issues, psychologists say.

Royals rooters are learning now. If sports-fan research is correct, many spent the bulk of 29 years CORFing — “cutting off reflected failure,” which is what social scientists call the impulse to distance one’s self from woeful teams.

Yet for most of 2015, these same fans have been BIRGing, or “basking in reflected glory,” a state in which they tend to say “we won” rather than “they lost.”

BIRG and CORF. They’re the sweet and sour, the heads and tails, the yin and yang of sports fan-ology.

Now we in Kansas City face a conflicted, in-between situation. The Royals have been in a September slump, even before Friday’s extra-inning loss.

The Chiefs didn’t help Thursday, blowing it in the final seconds of a home opener that everyone thought was in the bag.

Take a breath. For this story, let’s just focus on baseball.

Still enjoying the largest divisional lead of any squad in the majors, the Royals’ fan base is restless. The P-word, for panic, is surging through social media. “Are you still confident in your Royals?” a call-in host asked listeners to 610 Sports radio.

To experts who study fan psychology, this all makes sense.

Our self-worth is in jeopardy. Again.

“At the core of BIRGing and CORFing is the enhancement of self-esteem,” said clinical psychologist Rick Grieve of Western Kentucky University.

Studies going back to the 1970s suggest that for some fans — especially bandwagon types — a winning team boosts their own confidence and sense of belonging. A losing team can have the opposite effect, causing fickle supporters to detach and avoid the emotional investment.

BIRGers wear the team colors the morning after a big victory. They boast of how fan support fuels the team. Many tell researchers their own job performance improves.

When defeat becomes the norm, fans don’t necessarily spiral into misery. They just disconnect, the studies say: It’s the club’s problem, not theirs.

Local baseball buffs long familiar with CORFing aren’t reverting back anytime soon. Grieve said Royals boosters have basked in reflected glory so much the past 12 months that “right now they seem as passionate as any fan base in the country.”

With passion, however, come expectations that would have been considered crazy just a couple of seasons ago.

As a bartender of Chappell’s Restaurant and Sports Museum in North Kansas City, Chris Lewis is a fan psychologist in his own right. And what he’s diagnosing at the bar makes Lewis a bit nervous about how Royals fans might react if the season ends short of a world championship.

“The tough thing about being in Kansas City is trying to meet the expectations coming off of last year and the success early this season,” Lewis said. “We weren’t just going to have a good year. We were going to win 110 games and cruise into the World Series. And win that.”

Were we realistic? What about those 29 years of disappointment? “We’d been down that road to losing for so long, it’s in the back of your mind to get ready for a huge letdown,” Lewis said.

The lunch crowd Friday at Chappell’s was mostly buzzing about the Chiefs’ loss. CORFing was evident; there was barely a stitch of red in the room.

But customer Steve Delaney wasn’t going to let a streak of losing series for the Royals spoil his outlook for the postseason. “Online, it’s all this doom and gloom,” he said, “and I don’t understand that....

“It really doesn’t matter how the regular season finishes out. It’s a new season after that. Anything can happen. That’s the beauty of the game.”

Royals fan Tom Henry gets that. Then again, he’s 26 and he hadn’t seen a favorite team play for a championship until watching the Royals do it last year.

After the 2013 NFL season, when the Chiefs were up 28 points over the Indianapolis Colts in a playoff game, “I still felt like we were going to lose that one,” Henry said. “And we did.”

Ryan Zapalac, who studies sports fan behavior, sympathizes.

With uneasy Royals rooters, “do you think part of it are the memories of 2003?” asked Zapalac, an associate professor at Sam Houston State University.

“In 2003, the Royals had that strong push toward the playoffs before it all fell apart,” he noted. Until recent seasons, “that was the one good year that many probably remember.”

Thanks, Zapalac. Did we need to be reminded?

Maybe Kansas City just doesn’t swagger very well. Or maybe its fans think that decades of hardship entitle them to just one year of unbridled basking.

“I think everyone needs to take a chill pill,” said Andrew Jacobs, who was the Royals’ team psychologist until 2011.

“This is baseball. It’s seven months, 162 games, and yes, there are going to be down weeks. ... This team still has the best record in the American League.

“Just enjoy it and let ’em play.”

To the tweeter who this week posted on a Royals fan site, “Oh no! We Suck Again,” consider what people like you were saying last September in San Francisco:

Over a two-week stretch just before season’s end, the Giants lost nine games and won only four.

But the team collected itself in the postseason to take the World Series.

Oh, yeah. Royals fans remember.

“I’m an optimist,” said restaurateur Jim Chappell.

So the boys in blue are “in a bit of a funk ... and the Chiefs just lost a game they should’ve won.”

Chappell isn’t yet ruling out a BIRG bonanza: “This still could be the year the Royals win the World Series and the Chiefs win the Super Bowl.”

This story was originally published September 18, 2015 at 10:53 PM with the headline "For some Royals fans, panic creeps in."