When it comes to the ebb and flow of dynasties, Edward Gibbon doesn’t hold a Roman candle to Sid Boardman. In 1939, Boardman was a bat boy for the old Kansas City Blues, a powerful minor-league affiliate for the even more powerful New York Yankees at the apex of their empire. One of his roommates for a time was a kid from St Louis named Lawrence Peter Berra.
“He was sort of goofy then,” Boardman said of the iconic, malapropic Yogi. Then he laughed. “He said a lot of silly things. But he could hit.”
Sid would follow the Kansas City Athletics, a major-league outpost that for much of its short layover in the Midwest functioned largely as the Blues had before it, perched between Bronx feeder and Yankee purgatory. As a reporter with the Kansas City Star, Boardman later helped to chronicle the triumphs of the expansion Royals, a franchise founded on community, family, and innovation, one of the fastest baseball start-ups to ever find the playoffs and its respective feet.
But this? Brother, he ain’t seen nothing like this.
“I think it’s probably the most enthusiastic ever,” the 91-year-old Boardman noted. “You’re seeing Royals shirts all over the place. And I’ve talked to people who haven’t really been great baseball fans, and now they are, because of the Royals.”
In Kansas City, rarely has such a communal feeling of blue been so utterly, unabashedly joyous as hell. The Royals on Friday night punched return ticket to the World Series – back-to-back Fall Classics are a franchise first – by virtue of a six-game knockout of Toronto in the American League Championship Series. If the scrappy Royals were the Cinderella of the previous autumn, riding the wave of a killer bullpen, airtight defense and unapologetic swagger from an insane wild-card comeback win over Oakland to near-immortality, this fall they’re Cassius Clay: Kansas City posted an American-League best 95 victories, notched its first division title since 1985 (the year of the club’s last Series win) and took no guff from anyone, opponents or pundits, lest they looked upon the magic of 2014 as a fluke, more bottle than lightning.
“Had the wild-card game (in 2014) turned out different and they lost, I think there wouldn’t have been any expectation,” offered Jim Eisenreich, a former Royals outfielder (1987-92) and native Minnesotan who found his swing in Kansas City and eventually raised a family here. “We would’ve said, ‘We got a great game, we’ve only been (to the postseason) twice in 29 years.’ It might’ve been different.
“When they took the field this season, it was a different mindset. I think we, as fans, and especially when they started out hot and weren’t taking any crap from any other team, right or wrong, they (determined) as a team that they were going to win … they believed in themselves. And we believe in them.”
When it comes to baseball, this place is smitten. Serious smit. Deep smit. Pepe Le Pew smit. A football market falling back in love with its baseball roots. Kansas City is a major-league town with a minor-league ego; a tapestry of burnt ends, lavish fountains and big hearts; one of the biggest small cities in America. A place where grandmothers look into the eyes of the local athletes and see their grandsons, where players go to live after their careers go to die, where legendary quarterbacks (Chiefs Hall-of-Fame signal-caller Len Dawson) become legendary sportscasters, where heroes for one generation become neighbors the next.
“It (had been) so long, last year,” Eisenreich observed, “the run that the Royals had kind of left the Chiefs on the backburner, so to speak.”
From 1994 to 2014, the Royals never ranked better than 10th among American League clubs in terms of average home attendance (only four winning seasons and one postseason berth over that stretch didn’t help); this summer, they were sixth out of 15 (33,439 per home game), the franchise’s highest standing in 25 years. Kauffman Stadium saw a club-record attendance of 2.7m this past summer, an increase of 9,285 per date – tops in the majors, and nearly twice the improvement of the franchise that saw the second-biggest attendance jump in 2015, the National League champion New York Mets (an increase of 5,197 per contest).
“Expectations were to win, win the division, home-field advantage, the whole nine yards,” said Eisenreich, a career .290 hitter over 15 seasons with the Twins, Royals, Phillies, Marlins and Dodgers. “I don’t think it would be considered a failure if they (didn’t) make it, didn’t win the World Series. I hope they don’t think that. Baseball is baseball, and any team can beat any team. They expect to win and we’re having a blast watching them.”
More to the point, Eisenreich is having a blast watching his kids, Kansas City kids, fall madly for the Royals all over again. They’d grown up around baseball, grown up around the postseason, but those games were largely work trips: In Philadelphia, where Dad played in the ’93 Series with the Phillies; or Miami, where he won a ring with the ’97 Marlins. And yet Eisenreich still gushes about last 30 September, when he took three of his children, then between the ages of 23 and 13, to the Royals’ epic extra-inning win over the Athletics in the 2014 American League wild card game, the first of eight straight playoff victories.
“I’ve never seen my kids’ faces (like that),” the ex-Royal said. “It was so much fun. I got to play in two World Series-ending games, but the (AL) Wild Card game last year was probably the most exciting game I’ve ever seen and been a part of. What was really cool was watching my kids.
“It was their team. We died with that pop up (that ended a Game 7 defeat to the San Francisco Giants last October) just like everybody else.”
To understand the joy, you have to first understand the recent history – or rather, the lack thereof. From 1973-93, Kansas City made the playoffs seven times and won at least 88 games on nine different occasions. Like the powerful Negro League Monarchs that once called the city home, the Royals became the model small-market franchise, building a base of smart, aggressive, hungry players – George Brett, Frank White, Willie Wilson chief among them – tailored to a gap-friendly, expansive home park.
From ’94 through 2012, the club lost the plot – and game after game after game, piling up at least 90 defeats 12 different times and 100 games four times, a stretch nearly two decades long wandering the baseball wilderness. During a two-decade stretch from 1994 through 2013, Kansas City produced just one All-Star starter (Jermaine Dye in right field, 2000) and averaged 1.2 selections per Mid-summer Classic. Star position players such as Dye and Johnny Damon teased greatness, only to hightail it out of town in trades that brought diminishing, and often embarrassing, returns.
“A whole generation of our kids never saw anything here,” Eisenreich sighed.
But in baseball, old trends sometimes have a crazy way of cycling back. In a post-Steroid-Era world where quality pitching and run prevention would again become the coin of the realm, Royals general manager Dayton Moore shrewdly piled up pieces – drafting Hosmer and Mike Moustakas, trading for Cain and Alcides Escobar – that could congeal in a stratum where small-ball was cool again.
“I always made my home here, so the Royals are always in the deepest part of my heart, even though I played for the Phillies and Marlins and Dodgers and grew up in Minnesota,” Eisenreich said. “And as a competitive person, we like to see our guys play and play well. And for my kids, this was their team. But their team wasn’t that good when they were younger.”
Now it has expectations, champagne celebrations and caviar dreams. But mostly, a desire to finish the job, to close old wounds opened by Giants ace Madison Bumgarner, the one man that stood between the Royals and last year’s World Series title.
“I think right now, I’d say (people) more fired up now than ever,” said Boardman, who retired from the Star in 1989, toward the tail end of the last Royal renaissance. “I mean, you see more people wearing Royals shirts than ever before. I think they had so many lousy years that once they started winning, it really served as an impetus.”
An impetus and a fuse. Television ratings for Royals games on FOX Sports Kansas City set an all-time high of 12.3 locally during the regular season, up 84 percent off a healthy 2014, the highest mark recorded by any MLB market since 2002. Even more telling: On 3 September, a Thursday evening Royals-Tigers matchup drew a 15.5 mark in Kansas City; the Chiefs’ preseason finale at St Louis registered a 15.3 that same night.
“In ’85, when they won the World Series, beat the (St Louis) Cardinals, that was a great year and they had some pretty darn good players,” Boardman said, then gave a considered pause. “It’s sort of similar. Although right now, I don’t know — I just have a feeling that more people are involved, people that didn’t know much about it at one time.”
If it’s a bandwagon, then everybody’s jostling to try and ride shotgun, hearts on their collective sleeves, bracing for the trip of a lifetime. Again.
