I’m guessing the Kansas City Royals didn’t use their extended hiatus between clinching the ALCS and commencing the World Series to get to know our vast array of New York Mets blogs, which is to say I’m also guessing the Kansas City Royals are totally unfamiliar with us and our work. I put that out there because I always find it presumptuous when somebody congratulates a given entity on their well-known achievement when it is obvious that said entity will never encounter those congratulations. Yet I’ll put my reality-based reservations aside for a moment and offer my congratulations to the Kansas City Royals anyway.
Won’t they be thrilled?
The congratulations are not specifically for winning the American League pennant or for starting the postseason 8-0, though, yeah, sure, of course. The victories themselves have been monumental and my applause for them are implicit. Their spurt started by refusing to lose in sudden death [1] and has morphed into a plaintive insistence on winning every time they take the field. As they methodically removed the A’s, the Angels and the Orioles from their path, their journey felt less filled with the angst we associate with our vaguely recalled postseason participation [2] and more informed by a brisk joie de vivre. K.C. hasn’t made it look easy, but they have made it look simple. Perhaps if and when they drop a game or have to scuffle from behind again, it will get heavy at Kauffman Stadium. Thus far, the scene is as light as a puffy cumulus cloud.
All of the above is congratulations-worthy, but the achievement I admire most is that by their reaching this penultimate plateau, the Royals have ensured they are no longer that team.
What team? You know, that team. They’re no longer that team the rest of use as our default negative example to illustrate so many undesirable conditions. Without even thinking about it, somewhere between the mid-1990s and no more than a couple of years ago, you probably did it. I know I was prone to do it. It was a reflex reaction by the turn of the century.
• A bad team — like the Royals.
• A hopeless team — like the Royals.
• A perennially overmatched team — like the Royals.
• A team that can’t keep its young talent together — like the Royals.
• Why are they showing us Royals highlights?
• This is a big game, not some Tuesday night against the Royals.
• Look at how easy their remaining schedule is — six of their last nine games are against the Royals!
• It’s a shame about the Royals.
• I feel sorry for Royals fans.
• I wouldn’t want the Mets to wind up like the Royals.
You can certainly strike that last one. Every team’s fans but one at this instant should want their club to wind up exactly where the Royals are, and perhaps Giants fans will feel that way in four to seven games. You don’t have to have cared very much about the Royals over the bulk of the past three decades to appreciate what they’ve accomplished and to envy their current standing. You needn’t approve their every step [3] up to this moment to celebrate their arrival. The team from next to nowhere now stands next to a championship. My goodness, that’s exhilarating.
There’s a reservoir of goodwill for these Royals. They don’t seem to have hacked off anybody during their years at competitive liberty. There’s no good reason to begrudge them their run to glory. When they won their pennant, Ernie Johnson on TBS framed it as having ended “29 years of frustration”. That didn’t sound quite right. Frustration is coming close and not getting there. That wasn’t the Royals. More like desolation. You never heard about them except when someone was groping around for a handy example of futility.
Most Octobers include an entrant that hasn’t been there before or in a great long while. Maybe that mystery team makes itself at home for the postseason haul. If your allegiances aren’t already spoken for (and if you don’t have a good reason to maintain stubborn enmity in their direction), you’re as likely as not to attach yourself to their cause. Call it bandwagoneering, if you insist. There’s only so many teams and so much baseball left. You wouldn’t be a baseball-loving human if you weren’t drawn to one of a dwindling few.
On the last night of September, the Royals charged into our consciousness with a plethora of rootable qualities and they’ve done nothing to discourage temporary acolytes from digging deep for additional emotional busfare. Theirs has been a fresh powder-blue breeze blowing across this nation, and as it brushes our extremities, it touches us as distinct from anything that’s wafted our autumnal way in ages. Granted, it’s probably a little like plenty of since-diminished winds that have rippled previous October skies. Teal breezes. Purple breezes. Breezes pushed into the atmosphere by unfortunate mascots and gestures. Of course the breeze off Flushing Bay that moved heaven and earth 45 years ago last week. I can still feel that one [4] at my back.
This current meteorological pattern, though, feels just different enough to grab your attention and keep it a while. It’s Kansas City’s, first and foremost, but we can all revel in its invigorating properties.
And when it’s over, we can turn our attention to doing something about passages like this one [5] from Adam Kilgore in the Washington Post on October 7…
After Harper’s blast pulled the Nats even in a do-or-die game, Williams stuck to the same plan he would have used in a July affair against the New York Mets.
…and this one [6] from Tim Keown on ESPN.com ten days later…
But scripting doesn’t always work in baseball, and the script for the second game of a three-game series against the Mets in May is far different from the realities of a season-in the-balance playoff game in mid-October.
The subject in both cases was bullpen management. The subtext was when baseball gets real, don’t act like you’re just playing the Mets. In other words, we’re that team these days. Or one of them, at any rate.
Maybe someday soon we won’t be. If it can happen to the Royals, I’d like to believe it can happen to anybody. Even us.