Despite a lifetime of losing, a lost era of Royals fans still cheer
The men and women in the lost generation of baseball fans are in their mid twenties now. Has it really been that long? They are grown adults who’ve seen nothing to cheer for. But do it anyway.
They come with blind pride, unreturned loyalty and hope for better days but no real explanation for continuing to care about a team they’ve never seen win. The whole thing defies both logic and the short attention spans of the MTV generation.
How to explain a Royals fan who can’t even call on 1985 as a memory?
“This is a marriage,” says Adam Hance, born in December 1985. “You don’t leave just because your wife let herself go.”
You could point out here that the country’s divorce rate is near 50 percent, but that would be pointless and maybe even rude. This is a lasting partnership built on eternal faith and not much else.
This month makes 25 years since the Royals won their only World Series championship, and the team has young fans anyway, a generation that knows winning baseball only through old stories and grainy video.
Their fathers’ heroes are George Brett and Frank White and other men with championship rings. Their own heroes are Mike Sweeney and Zack Greinke and other men who’ve played on 100-loss disasters.
These are graduate students and young professionals, some with marriages and mortgages, who’ve only seen the Royals as perennial losers and national punchlines. Yet they still cheer.
“Do I get my therapy paid for?” says Brandon Henderson, born in November 1985.
•••
Frank White sits in the Royals dugout, preparing for another broadcast and talking about what Kansas City will be like if its baseball team turns into a winner. This is personal for White.
He grew up in Kansas City, and the story has been told many times how he worked on the construction crew that built Kauffman Stadium and made the big leagues through the old Royals Academy.
White’s No. 20 is retired now, and he’s inducted in the team Hall of Fame. The Royals named one of their spring training fields after him. He is an enormous part of the Royals’ proud past.
Someone mentions to him that one sign of the Royals’ progress will be once the focus is no longer on the minor-league prospects.
“I’ll take that one step further,” White says. “Not talking about 1985. You want to get these guys to develop their own winning attitude, and set standards for the young fans to have a chance to see them play now, and not have to Google guys on the internet. That’s being a little too honest, probably.”
Actually, it’s a pretty good description of this lost generation of fans.
•••
They are a self-deprecating group, mostly out of necessity. The fat guy at the beach knows where he stands, right?
So they make jokes about their parents’ unfortunate timing or the line in their 2003 high school yearbooks about the Royals being winners or that Stockholm Syndrome is the only way to explain their continued love of a team that’s lost more than 90 games in all but four of the last 14 seasons.
Their memories are not George Brett off Goose Gossage or Bret Saberhagen in ’85 but Mike Sweeney’s back giving out again or Carlos Beltran being traded to Houston.
Two friends have a $10,000 bet on whether the Royals will win a World Series in their lifetimes. If one dies, the wager is to be placed in their will.
Mario Cancilla was born in June 1987 and his first Royals memory is Brett kissing home plate after his last game in Kansas City. It’s been all downhill since, but this is a resilient bunch, and Cancilla found himself listening to the June draft at work.
Nick Blevins, born November 1985, is @SorryRoyalsFan on Twitter. Stephen Peel, 21, lists his religious views on Facebook as “Zack Greinke.” Dylan Tucker was born in June 1986 and says he won’t ever give up on the Royals, but “at some point I will have to seriously evaluate my investment in them.”
They all love the Royals for different reasons. Some of it is geography and family and some of the same memories their fathers may have had, like sitting in the old G.A. and getting sprayed by the groundskeepers on a hot day or trying to get a beer with a fake I.D.
So maybe Hance is right. The relationship of fan and team is like a marriage, only the bond can’t be broken just with paperwork.
“Even though I hate almost every player on the team and I hate watching us lose, I continue to watch,” writes one fan.
He signs his e-mail:
“Kill Me Please,
-- Spencer.”
Spencer Moore was born in December 1987.
•••
Lauren Cage owes the Royals for her relationship with her father. Teenage years are always tough, and she didn’t talk much with her dad back then.
Except they always had baseball. They always had the Royals. He taught her the difference between a curveball and a slider, when to steal a base, and told her stories of when the Royals were good.
She was born in December 1986 and sometimes asks her father why the heck he had to raise her a Royals fan, but she knows she wouldn’t trade it for anything. When she calls home during a game, mom hands the phone straight to dad.
“I just think you should root for the team that’s closest to where you grow up,” she says.
•••
The oldest in the group were 8 years old when the 1994 strike killed a Royals season that many thought would end in the playoffs. They were 18, graduating high school seniors, during that 2003 season that felt magical at the time but looks so flukey in hindsight.
The rest of their memories are mostly losses. They remember Beltran running down balls in the gap, but also Kerry Robinson climbing the wall for a ball that bounced in front of him. They remember Johnny Damon stealing bases, but also Desi Relaford being picked off after losing his balance and falling off first.
Their hope remains, their passion sticks, even at the end of another miserable season like this one — and that’s the whole point.
You don’t need championships and star players for hope. The smell of freshly cut grass and the crack of a wood bat and all the other clichés can wipe out Ken Harvey taking a relay throw off his back and a routine fly dropping between two outfielders jogging toward the dugout and all the rest of the embarrassing list every Royals fan has on instant recall.
Sports, and maybe even baseball in particular, can be such a cool thing this way. The Royals’ last moment of real glory came 25 years ago this month, in a time these fans can only read about or watch on technology that didn’t exist back then.
They want their own memories, their own celebrations, and maybe those better times are coming. But even young in life, they’ve been disappointed before. They feel certain to be let down again, and certain that it won’t stop them from cheering for another 25 years.
“It isn’t so much that I am ever hopeful about the Royals becoming a winner again,” says Barry Grass, born September 1986. “It is that I would hate myself if I slip away and they become a winner later on. Fear of betrayal and fear of being a fraud compel me to stay passionate.”
