Kansas City Royals: A Royals Fan In The Big Apple

General view of Citi Field – Mandatory Credit: Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports

After spending my entire childhood in Kansas City and as a Kansas City Royals fan, I’ve been on the East Coast for the past ten years. The most recent five years have been spent in New York City, or as I knew it better as this past month, Mets territory.

While I stream over 90% of KC Royals games throughout the season, my live action is usually limited to one trip home to Kauffman, and when the team visits the Bronx, or on even rarer occasions, Queens.

You can imagine my excitement as October unraveled  – it was a perfect postseason puzzle coming together right in front of me.  Let’s relive it, as I plan to do frequently for decades to come.

Chapter 1: The Series Begins

I was thrilled that the Royals would be playing the Mets.

I wasn’t truly thrilled until the Royals finished Game 6 against the Blue Jays, of course; but in the back of my mind there was a lot of excitement that the series had worked out this way.

I was petrified of the Blue Jays lineup – it was so simple for me to see its core launching balls out of Kauffman and Rogers Centre, never giving Kansas City a moment to breathe before having to pack up and head home to watch the Jays slay an NL foe. When we won Game 6, I was thrilled.

I was scared of the Cubs, too. They were playing with nothing to lose with a group of young sluggers of their own, and seeing Jon Lester and Jake Arrieta four times didn’t sound too appealing. Plus, outside of Kansas City, the whole world would be rooting for a curse-curing Back to the Future finish. Hey, any other year besides the last two and I would’ve been too.

The Mets didn’t strike fear in the same way.

I knew it was a crapshoot, of course, as the playoffs tend to be. Besides dynamite starting pitching that the Royals matched up well against, it was a lineup, defense, and bullpen that stood weaker than others in the playoffs.

Plus, as much as I tried to avoid thinking about things ending up like 2014, if they did, this would not be like losing to a large-market perennial winner. This was the Mets, a team with fans who I was always able to share my baseball misery, where the fans among my peers had also never been alive for a World Series victory, and whose genuine thirst for victory and success was palpable. In fact, this was a team that in 2015 actually had a smaller payroll than the typically micro-market Royals.

Yes, if we had to lose, this wasn’t the worst team to lose to.

Next: Chapter 2: Forgetting The (Recent) Past