Fan with cancer relishes every moment of Royals’ postseason run

At just before 3 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, Jim Spalding stood behind the third-base dugout at Camden Yards. He wore a 1985 Royals jacket, clutched a old leather glove in his hands, and gazed out toward the field before game two of the American League Championship Series.

Spalding, 79, likes to get to the ballpark early. Always has. There’s something about a half-empty baseball stadium on a cool and cloudy afternoon, when the sightlines are clear, the field is storming with activity, and the crack-crack-crack of batting practice fills the time.

Yes, time. Here’s the thing about that. Of all the people sitting inside Camden Yards on Saturday night, Jim Spalding can tell you what time really means.

Go back, for instance, to that day in a doctor’s office in January 2013. The diagnosis was multiple myeloma, an aggressive type of bone marrow cancer that attacks the body’s white blood cells. Spalding was told he had 18 months to live.

“They said roughly, I had about a year and a half at the most, but the Lord has been good to me,” Spalding said Saturday before the Royals played game two against the Baltimore Orioles at Camden Yards.

Better yet, go back to that day last year, on a Friday in late October, when Shirley Joan Spalding, 78, was killed in an automobile accident. They had been married nearly 57 years.

“We’ve done a lot together,” Spalding said.

Yes, that’s true, though it was more like everything together. And, really, so much of it was Royals. They attended spring training together. They spent nights at Kauffman Stadium. Spalding said that in October 1985, he wrote down a list of 12 people that might help him secure World Series tickets. One by one, he went through the list.

“I couldn’t get them,” Spalding said.

Spalding said that soon after that, he went out and bought season tickets.

So perhaps you could consider this October a way of making up for lost time. Nearly two weeks ago, Spalding was at the Wild Card Game against Oakland. This last weekend, he headed for Baltimore with his son, Randy, grandson Dustin and grandson-in-law Josh Gibbs. They watched both games. Sat next to this rowdy group of Royals fans near the press box — the group you could faintly hear shouting on television.

They came back with this story: During game one on Friday, in the moments after shortstop Alcides Escobar lined a solo homer to left field, Escobar pointed up toward the Spaldings’ section.

“It’s something that we could never do before, and it’s wonderful that we can watch the Royals as they’re climbing the ladder,” Jim Spalding said.

The cancer, as you might expect, has slowed parts of Jim Spalding’s life. Randy Spalding said that for a time, a spate of blood clots took a hefty toll on his dad. But then came another rally. It was mid-February, and Jim Spalding headed for Surprise, Ariz., once again. Spring training was about to begin. And so Jim Spalding was busy scheduling his cancer treatments around the baseball schedule.

“He was there the third day of spring training,” Randy Spalding said. “All the way through.”

Now comes the end of this story, but definitely not the end of Jim Spalding’s story. He was born in Windsor, Mo., a small town southwest of Sedalia, and grew up in Deepwater, an even smaller town near Clinton. But for as long as he can remember, the Royals have meant something to his life. So last week, Spalding had a choice. He was scheduled to take some shots as part of another cancer treatment. But the shots have a way of draining some of his energy and leaving him lethargic.

“If I felt bad,” Spalding said, “I probably couldn’t make it up here to watch the Royals play.

“So we did not take that shot.”

This story was originally published October 12, 2014 at 7:25 PM with the headline "Fan with cancer relishes every moment of Royals’ postseason run."