Kansas City Royals: Are the Cardinals considered a rival to Royals fans?

The Kansas City Royals finished up their first of two series against the across state Cardinals. Despite playing every year, are the two teams considered rivals?

The I-70 Series consisting of the Kansas City Royals and St. Louis Cardinals is taking place this week (well, at least the first of the two for the season) and every year when the two teams play, it brings up a lively debate. Is there a rivalry between the Royals and the Cardinals?

Most of the time when these two teams are being discussed, the 1985 World Series is the first thing to come up in the conversation. The two squared off in that fall classic with the Royals winning the title in seven games.

While there’s debate as to if a certain call favoring the Royals in Game 6 was incorrect, the Cardinals had an opportunity to win it all in Game 7 and lost 11-0. That should be the end of the story when it comes to the 1985 World Series conversation, but it’s continued to be a hot topic for Cardinals fans.

I posted a poll on the KC Kingdom Twitter account asking if the Royals and Cardinals are rivals and the results were pretty close (see below). Ultimately, fans leaned toward the answer being no, that the two teams are not rivals.

I see both answers here. While I loathe Cardinals fans, I don’t think the actual TEAMS are rivals. I don’t think they get fired up to play each other, even if it is an annual series. This isn’t anything close to how Cardinals fans feel about the Cubs or how Yankees and Red Sox fans feel about each other. THOSE are rivalries.

The Royals and Cardinals “beef” is mostly the fans from one side bragging about championships that happened long before they were born and the other side wishing their team hadn’t been irrelevant for nearly 30 years. It usually only pops up when the two are playing each other and this year, there’s been little to no buzz from either side.

The Cardinals have been the more successful franchise between the two, there’s no debating that. They haven’t been as good in the last few years, missing the playoffs in each of the past two seasons, but before that, they went just to the postseason about every year. In fact, the Cardinals playing in October was almost a given.

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The Royals, as we all know, had a rough patch for nearly three decades. They lost 100 games in three straight seasons and never seemed to be able to get a winning product onto the field. They went 29 years without making it to the postseason.

With the two teams on completely different paths for a long period of time, there really weren’t a lot of meaningful games played whenever the two were squaring off. The Cardinals usually whooped up on the Royals and filled Kauffman Stadium with red. That was a big reason for Royals fans to hate the Cardinals, but it still wasn’t considered a real rivalry because the games weren’t competitive or meaningful.

So, if it were up to me to decide whether the Kansas City Royals and St. Louis Cardinals are true rivals, I’d say no. I dislike the Cardinals, but it’s because of my experiences with their fans in college. They were awful, awful people to anyone who didn’t root for their precious baseball team.

Don’t me going on that again or I might not stop.

Sharing a state with the Cardinals has made this a bit of a forced rivalry, but at the end of the day, is it really a rivalry? What do you think?