I’ve struggled writing this.
It’s true. I’ve sat in my apartment almost all day contemplating while staring at my computer screen. The words come, but slowly in small bursts followed by long sighs and forlorn looks at the wall or my phone.
How do you say goodbye when it’s over? Saturday evening, I tried.
I made the 90-minute trip up to Kauffman Stadium to see the Kansas City Royals play in their second-to-last game of the season versus the Arizona Diamondbacks.
First baseman Eric Hosmer, third baseman Mike Moustakas, shortstop Alcides Escobar, and centerfielder Lorenzo Cain will be free agents when you read this. Odds are maybe one of them will be wearing a Royals uniform come spring training next year.
For fans such as myself, this date has been marked on our calendar ever since 2014. It didn’t sneak up on us. Throughout the division titles, American League championships and World Series Championship in 2015 we knew that eventually, all good things come to an end.
Thus, I felt duty-bound to pay tribute one final time before teams with bigger war chests took the authors of the greatest baseball memories of my lifetime to other cities to play for other fans.
I was born in 1994, the year of the baseball strike and the last year until 2014 that the Royals were seriously in the playoff hunt (they didn’t make it). I spent 20 years without seeing Kansas City win more than 85 games in a season, let alone make the playoffs.
Nevertheless, I was raised a Royals fan and instead of jumping ship, almost every year when I became old enough to appreciate it, I saw the Royals play either at the K or abroad. I wore my shirts, hats and visors with pride and even at their worst point never hesitated to mention that I loved the worst team in baseball.
Then the 2014 and ’15 seasons happened and, led by the four players whose contracts are now up, a whole different life was blown into the fanbase. It’s hard to even imagine what it was like just four seasons ago. The wanting, the waiting. The constant frustration and disappointment in what at times felt like Stockholm Syndrome.
That’s why I felt beholden to see them off one final time. Royals fans will be indebted to those four players as well as those who will still be here next season like Salvador Perez and Alex Gordon and those who have already moved on like Ben Zobrist, Edinson Volquez, Raul Ibanez, Yordano Ventura, Jarrod Dyson, Wade Davis, Greg Holland and many others. It truly is an end of an era, even if the era lasted just a couple years.
No column, article, book or library could ever express the amount of gratitude deserved for bringing us all those memories.
Maybe the Royals will return to the playoffs soon and maybe they won’t. Maybe it will be another 30 years or longer.
Regardless, we’ll have the come from behind win over Oakland in the wildcard, we’ll have the irrational hate of Joe Buck and Madison Bumgarner in the 2014 World Series, we’ll have the fights in 2015, we’ll have our collective mourning after the death of Ventura earlier this year and the jubilation of winning the world series in 2015. We’ll have so much.
Agents, salaries and large market teams will never be able to take that from us.
Next year will be different. The Royals will still play baseball just off of I-70, they’ll still wear blue and they’ll still be mine and many other people’s team. But Sunday was the end of something special, and I for one was glad that I was there to see it.
END OF AN ERA: In honor of the departing Royals
