I confess that the past few weeks have been a blur. I’ve been out of town Monday through Wednesday each week, and have felt one step behind. The first trip was to Conception Abbey to spend a few days in discussion with Ian Cron… will blog about that later. The other trip was to Durham and Duke University to the Hauerwas/Willimon event. Both trips were definitely worthwhile. But they are not the reason for the blur.
I confess that the 2014 Royals baseball season has been sheer magic. Over the past week my boys and I spent several evenings cutting out newspaper clippings, taping them up on the wall. We were reliving our favorite moments from the season, laughing and telling stories, completely blown away by what this team has accomplished. Baseball is one of those sports that can really go either way. It can go big market, glitz and glamour, with a celebrity culture and verve to match the most nauseating of professional sports. It can also brim with nostalgic memory of a society that still has time to stop and watch a game and eat peanuts and talk and laugh and tell stories and enjoy the passing of time together.
There’s no clock in baseball, this is key. Time is not kept. Time passes. You cannot tell the game when it should be over; the game will tell you. Baseball is one of the few popular cultural moments where waiting is still part of the deal. 27 outs per side, it might be two hours it might be five; it might go nine innings it might go 12; in my case I might be awake when the game ends, or I might have fallen asleep, but there will be no rushing baseball. There’s a lot of talk in professional baseball about how to speed up the game. I hope nothing comes of it. Baseball might be the last American past-time that can teach us how to be patient.
I confess that I have not always been patient during the last 29 years of waiting for the Royals to get back to the playoffs. After the ’94 strike I took a couple of years off from watching or listening to baseball. Money was changing the game, and I could hardly recognize it anymore. Small-market teams were at a significant disadvantage. The game just didn’t feel fair. I had to sit and watch the New York Yankees–the team we used to battle with year after year–win pennant after pennant, fielding a roster which was tantamount to playing pros against college kids. It tripped my justice meter, and mostly just pissed me off. Small-market teams simply could not compete.
I tried to come back to baseball a few times. In 2003 the Royals got off to a blazing start and sat alone in first place for much of the season. We all knew that they would come back to earth, but held out hope they would still make the playoffs. When the inevitable late-season slide took them out of playoff contention, the season ended as it always did, in disappointment. The next year they traded Carlos Beltrán for Mark Teahan, John Buck, and Mike Wood. It was proof that the problem wasn’t really small-market versus big-market. The problem was the teams management was inept.
When the Royals hired Dayton Moore I got excited. He talked about pitching as the currency of baseball. He got the Glass family to invest in the minor-league system. He was building the franchise from the ground up with a solid foundation. I started to believe again. I had stopped saying “they” and started saying “we” when talking about the Royals. In 2010 my family spent the summer in Cape Cod while on sabbatical. The Cape Cod league is a wood-bat league for college standouts. Pro scouts lined the backstops at nearly every game with their radar guns and clipboards. We watched a game in person almost every night. We chased foul balls and ate Crackerjacks. We had baseball fever.
The next spring we were still susceptible. So we decided to give the Royals another shot. The rest is history. For the past three seasons we have followed every single game. Our family checks the standings each morning in the newspaper. All summer long the boys stayed up late to watch the end of games. When school started, Kristin and I would record the end of the previous night’s game so we could show the deciding moments to the boys the next morning. When it came down the stretch during the end of the season, I kept wanting to lose heart, mostly out of sheer habit, but the boys wouldn’t let me. I was becoming emotionally invested. I was starting to believe. The gut-punch of the last series against Detroit was almost more than I could bear, but this gritty team kept battling.
Then came the wild-card game against Oakland… It was 1:30 in the morning when I finally came down off the adrenaline and went to bed. I half expect them to come out flat in the next series, nursing a wild-card hangover. But, we swept the Angels, while the Orioles took down the only team that could stop this run–Detroit. We swept the Orioles, my emotions and hopes building with every game. What was happening to me? I was so used to hedging, and holding back–thirty years of disappointment will do that do you. I was starting to say something out loud, and I can’t believe I was actually saying it and believing it at the same time: “I think we’re going to the World Series.”
I’m all in now, fully emotionally invested. If we don’t win it all I will be heartbroken. And you know what? I don’t care. This season is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. Do you believe in miracles? Yes I do.
I have Royals fever, and the only solution is: the Royals in 6. That would be perfect… seal the deal at home where we could really celebrate.
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