That time the Royals changed Kansas City’s relationship with baseball forever
I am paid (thousands of dollars every year!) to put words in a certain order as to make a clear point, and of all the struggles that come with that charge, here is the biggest:
Explaining how this strange job changes my sports fandom.
My best friends don’t understand it. My family doesn’t get it. My wife pretends to, but really she thinks I’m a giant weirdo.
The best explanation is that I’m not good enough to do my job well and root for anyone other than me. I see my job as sort of your assistant sports watcher. I’m here to find a story you wouldn’t otherwise know, or an insight that comes from being able to talk with the people directly involved, often away from cameras, where the truth is easier to find.
I can still appreciate the moment — I shamefully once hugged a co-worker after a Patrick Mahomes pass — but I’m incapable of helping you if my day is made or ruined by the final score. Maybe that sounds subtle, but to me it’s fundamental. I can’t root for teams, or athletes. I root for me. I need it more, anyway.
That’s five paragraphs to help make this point: I’ve never been happier professionally for you, and by extension for me, than five years ago this fall, when the Royals changed their history with a World Series run that bordered on reckless and ended with a therapeutic parade on a gorgeous afternoon.
Kansas City has never been happier, at least not in my memory. Maybe that sounds strange to say now, just three months after the Chiefs changed their own sorry postseason history with a string of wild comebacks, including the one in Super Bowl LIV.
But that’s how it feels, still, and it’s definitely how it felt back then.
This does not diminish what the Chiefs did, or especially what they’ll continue to do. Patrick Mahomes is tracking as the most transformational athlete in Kansas City history. Two years in and he’s won as many playoff games as the Chiefs’ previous 30 starting quarterbacks had in 48 years.
Now, anything is possible. Everything is possible.
Which is part of the point with the Royals. For years — for decades — nothing felt possible with the Royals. Their good seasons were available only on grainy TV clips, back when the stadium lights reflecting on a batting helmet would leave a streak across the screen, like a comet going back and forth.
The Royals weren’t just bad. For years, they had no hope. No direction. The men involved knew it, too. Players told stories of looking at the lineup card and thinking their only hope was if everyone on their side had a career day, and everyone on the other side was hung over.
You know the greatest slips. Kerry Robinson climbing the wall for a ball that bounced in front of him. The Royals beginning a game with one out because the FIRST BATTER came to the plate out of order. The Royals losing a game because the throw from the outfield hit the cutoff man in the back.
Tony Pena Jr. once lost a ball in the sun because his glasses hadn’t been delivered yet. Esteban German took a black eye because he didn’t flip his sunglasses down on a sunny day (then wore them to hide the injury on the plane ride out of town). Buddy Bell promised to never say it can’t get worse.
Once, after he’d switched teams, John Buck’s New York Mets were getting blown out so bad they ran out of pitchers. Afterward, a reporter asked if he’d ever caught a position player before.
“Come on,” Buck said. “I played for the Royals.”
It was all bad, and it was sad, and sometimes it was funny, but only in the specific way that Chris Farley dancing like Chippendales was funny. They were laughing at the Royals, not with them.
That began to change in 2006, even if nobody could see it for years. David Glass changed. He’d been embarrassed. He asked everybody he knew about the game’s best general manager candidate, then he hired that man, and then he wrote the checks as the Royals transformed their operations. More scouts. More minor-league teams. More equipment, more computers, more money.
For a while, nothing changed much with the big-league team, and fans in Kansas City had been trained to expect the worst. More losses. More youth movements that don’t really move.
People here said all they wanted was to be competitive. Just to have a chance. Be close to the playoffs. That happened once, for around four months at least, in 2003. That team was one of the 21st century’s great sports flukes, but it’s remembered fondly. Eighty-three wins. It was fun!
The first year of any reasonable hope might’ve been 2012. The year before, the Royals promoted most of what had been widely believed to be the game’s best farm system — 11 rookies debuted — and those kids played above .500 after the All-Star break.
It was something. It was enough that the Royals’ marketing department — and the club’s baseball operations folks still haven’t fully forgiven this — called 2012 “Our Time.” That team was booed 16 minutes into its home opener and did not win a home game until May.
The cycle: awful baseball, a little hope, a kick to the face, rinse, repeat.
This is easy to forget now, but those championship Royals were doing the same thing as late as July 2014. They’d won just three times in a stretch of more than two weeks around the All-Star break, fallen below .500 in July, and it sure felt like that familiar cratering when manager Ned Yost simply claimed he had “a second-half team.”
Then his star first baseman broke his hand.
That whole run felt like some magic trick, like the losers who’d worn those jerseys for so long had been replaced by baseball’s brashest, fastest, hardest-throwing bunch of unapologetic badasses. It was like a popup concert from your favorite band, when all you’d been expecting was another trip the grocery store.
It all felt so new. So fresh. So unbelievable, in the literal sense of that word.
Again, a Chiefs comparison. With a few notable exceptions, Arrowhead Stadium has rocked since the 1990s. Fans showed up, even in (most of) the bad years. Sometimes the joke was that the team should lower ticket prices but raise parking rates, because that was the best part of the afternoon. The point is people showed up and they wore jerseys and they chopped and they screamed.
The other side of the parking lot was always different. Dayton Moore has said the Royals were in worse shape than he expected when he took the job, and as much as anything he meant watching fans walk through the gates with Yankees and Red Sox jerseys outnumbering the home team’s no matter who was playing.
The 2014 AL Wild Card Game will never be forgotten. James Shields said he could feel the ground shake before the first pitch, and it may have shaken again on Salvador Perez’s grounder down the line, but at that point who could’ve noticed?
One more thing that sticks in the memory: Kauffman Stadium had never been so full of fans in Royals gear since before most of those players were born. Mahomes is changing what the Chiefs are capable of, but the 2014 and 2015 Royals changed a city’s relationship with baseball.
This all comes up as Fox Sports Kansas City continues to air replays of the Royals’ run to the 2015 championship. It was a blur, these micro-moments that felt encompassing at the time and now serve as pixels displaying a bigger and brighter picture.
The parade was perfect, too. Kansas City and its people were charmingly unprepared. Traffic was so bad fans ditched cars on the side of the highway to walk, making damn sure they didn’t miss the party. School stopped. Businesses stopped. Life stopped.
A city is its people, but its people are the city, too, and for decades being of Kansas City meant accepting that you might have some fun moments but championship parades happened somewhere else. That was the deal we made. We accepted it.
The 2015 Royals changed that, and the city has never been so happy.
This story was originally published May 20, 2020 at 5:00 AM.