FanPost

An Ecstatic Thaw to the Ice Age

The Glass Turtle - Ed Zurga

It weirds me out when sports are compared to things like war or post-industrial agriculture, so I'll say that for long stretches of their 29-year playoff drought the Kansas City Royals have been one of the most awful pizzas in the history of pizzas. Worse than any pizza you might eat at a gas station or out of a dumpster and even more terrible than the pizza you found underneath a couch covered in cat hair. Unlike those pizzas, nasty but made and eaten by well-intentioned individuals, sometimes it seemed as though the Royals' pizza was the creation of an evil pizza chef. A diabolic pizza chef who secretly and silently collected all the nastiest skin shavings from all the stray dogs the chef could entice, piled them high on a thin wheat crust and put them in the oven. With the exception of a couple of undercooked cheese pizza seasons, a pepperoni pizza cut short by the strike, and last year's supreme pizza in this alternative Royals-baseball-as-pizza universe, the Royals have hand-tossed years and years of dog-scab pizza pies. When the dog-scab pizzas start to pile up, commiseration becomes the cornerstone of your fandom.

Kauffman Stadium has been a lukewarm ember, a weakly glowing coal compared to the firehouse days of the ‘70s and ‘80s. With the exception of Opening Day, T-Shirt Tuesday and Buck Night Kauffman Stadium has been like going on an American League camping trip: a great time for reflection, solitude, and seated observation of a professionally manicured lawn. Meanwhile George Brett has partially morphed into a very public oracle. All year, every year, poor George Brett wanders the city and the countryside, trying to remind people that the Royals used to be good. As the keeper of memory, he has been tireless in his effort to convince people that the 1985 World Series really happened. Whenever ESPN, the MLB Network, or any unfamiliar television camera accidentally wandered into Kansas City, George Brett was always the first one they'd see at the airport telling them, "I swear we used to be good." Apparently George Brett has been mailing Bob Costas postcards for years. I found one at a thrift store one day. It said, "During the 1980 season I had hemorrhoids. But if I knew hemorrhoids meant hitting .390 and winning the pennant, I would've injected myself with hemorrhoids every year. Did you know I was friends with Huey Lewis?"

There has been no rest for the tireless advocate. In 1996 George Brett flashed his World Series ring at Johnny Damon in a Royals promo. The establishing shot shows George Brett and Johnny Damon lounging in overstuffed leather recliners watching Royals' highlights. Typical George Brett grabs the remote control from Johnny Damon. Damon says, "Hey! I was watching that highlight of myself swinging the bat one-handed!" George Brett turns to him and smiles, "You've got to get one of these!" And he waves his World Series ring right in Damon's face. The tilted zoom of the jewelry on Brett's hand looks as explicable as a gnarled curl of Roswell crash debris. Johnny Damon's reaction shot is priceless because Damon's not an actor. His face hardly registers a façade of believability, and everyone within 100 miles of that commercial knew Damon would have to leave Kansas City to get his own pile of debris.

For decades every Royals fan knew that Johnny Damon and every other talented young Royals player had been drafted on a bad day. The approach of free agency and salary arbitration was like watching the annual release of prized pigeons from asphalt caked rooftops.

"Go Jermaine Dye go! Spread your wings! Live your best life!"

It was for the best. We knew that elite players were never a part of the plan. Elite players were bad. They were bad because they were too expensive. Our owner David Glass said so and when a trillionaire does anything their every movement is directed by the lambent glow of the most stalwart and altruistic intentions. Ask any economist worth their salt and they will tell you that the path to a trillion dollars is paved by the cobblestones of civic duty and guided by the eternal handrails of socio-economic health. Especially our turtle-faced trillionaire. David Glass used to be the CEO of Wal-Mart, America's all-time leader in turning plastic bags into kites. In fact when our Glass turtle first started plucky little Wal-Mart was the Bentonville, Arkansas sales champion in two categories: church pantyhose and orange slices. By the time our magical Glass turtle left, Wal-Mart had become the sales leader in everything except horses and imitation horse livers.

When David Glass first became owner of the Royals, I don't know if he knew that running Wal-Mart was different that owning the Royals. He didn't seem to realize that doing business on the cheap wasn't that great of an idea when you're not selling tube socks or that it was important to be associated in public with the American League team you own. For the first few years, David Glass only gave our GM Allard Baird one minute of face time a year and that minute was shared through the glass of the family helicopter on the Truman Sports Complex helipad. When Baird would beg and plead for cash in spring training, Glass would hire his son Danny to deliver it. That was Dan Glass's chore for the year: ride his scooter from the Truman Sports Complex helipad to the Royals' front office to hand General Manager Allard Baird an envelope packed with twenty one dollar bills and a note that said,

"Get some players. Save the receipts. I'll be at the Cardinals' game if you need me. XOXOX DG"

What does it look like when a franchise is a handed a comic payroll, a depleted farm system, and no support from ownership? Sometimes it looked like nine innings of Waiting for Godot. Numbers can be pinched and pulled like taffy, but dendrochronology doesn't bend in the light: in seven out of the ten seasons from 2000-2010 the Royals lost 90 games, including a five-year stretch from 2002 to 2006 where the Royals lost 100 games four times. The tone of that time was such that success was far more perplexing than the Royals' failure. Somehow in the heart of that cave of a decade, the Royals scratched out 83 victories in 2003. The mystery will plague ancient alien scholars for years. Was it Michael Tucker? Jose Lima? Ken Harvey? Kevin Appier? Garth Brooks' magical visit to spring training? Tony Pena should get a large share of the credit, but his tenure with the Royals was like watching the dad who wants to throw his kids a great birthday party on a budget. Everyone admires his enthusiasm for the successful Cheez-It scavenger hunt, but everyone wishes they had left when dad melts denim to his thighs trying to light his farts on fire.

In 2004 Tony Pena started trying to light his farts on fire. After a bad loss, he hopped into the shower with his uniform on and lathered his scalp. Although the Royals remained locked in the cellar throughout the season, Pena incessantly predicted that they would turn it around and win the AL Central. They didn't. They lost 104 games. And when Tony Pena quit in early 2005, the Royals looked as rudderless as a high school marching band that had lost its affable but listless band teacher-a marching band where Zack Greinke, the talented sophomore flute soloist, took the news poorly and was discovered wandering the streets of Toronto alone in the rain.

Of course the Royals replaced Tony Pena with Buddy Bell. At the press conference, Buddy Bell seemed to know exactly what he had inherited. Bell was hired to manage a Blockbuster, and the Royals' roster was a Netflix queue. Bell was the sober Charon ferrying the franchise across the river Hades. Fittingly Buddy Bell was able to galvanize the despair of the team into a single quote. This quote is important to note because it is the only real quote in this farticle. When asked about the chances of the Royals turning it around while in the middle of one of their losing streaks, Bell said, "I never say it can't get worse. This game is too hard to play. There's always something lurking around the corner."

Let's be brief and say that things were bleak in 2005. The Royals lost 106 games. They put together an impressive 19-game losing streak, and the Royals finished a smooth 43 games back in the AL Central. Bleak, but very boring. On the other hand, 2006 was super exciting. Obviously I'm biased because my expectations for the team were so low heading into the season that any improvement was poised to incite a great delirious clamor. Box scores and gamecasts were grazed over with the sort of excitement usually reserved for the purchasing of a new box of trash bags. Not those thin trash bags that always rip, but the large trash bags that were built with extra thickness to provide odor control and to prevent trash juice from leaking onto the floor. Along those same lines it felt like 2006 was full of accomplishments.

Sure Scott Elarton was the opening day starter, but we saw career years from three Royals. Mark Teahen cranked 18 dongs in 108 games, Emil Brown had 41 doubles, and Mark Redman was selected as the Royals' representative in the All-Star Game. Some critics might say that it wasn't that great of a season because Mark Redman finished the season with 5.71 ERA or because Ryan Shealy was a fluke or because the Royals lost 100 games or because they finished the season 37 games behind first place. Others might point to a sandlot game at the K against the Indians where the Royals' lost a 10-1 lead. But if the baseball critics would put aside their objectivity and take off their nerd glasses and slip on a pair Royals despair night-vision goggles, they would have seen that 2006 was the impetus of 2014 because in 2006 our trillionaire Glass turtle went down to Atlanta, Georgia and kidnapped Dayton Moore in the gift shop of the Coca-Cola factory.

My mind bears to speak of forms changed into new bodies

Book I: Ovid's Metamorphoses

Before I elevate my Pindaric salute to the Dayton, I acknowledge that baseball is a bunch of millionaire dudes playing stickball on short grass. There is a definitive intrinsic glow of it being a leisurely echo of America's agrarian roots, but no portion of my devotion to the sport goes ungoverned by the law of diminishing returns. The more I invest in baseball, football, curling, rolfball, and the ponies, the less I have for the essential relationships and connections that warm and sustain the rubbery cockles of my heart. But just because I know a thing is trivial does not mean I am able to keep from attaching a profound meaning to its outcome. There have been plenty of reasons to stand aloof from the Royals, and I can pretend that I was only following the Royals ironically for the duration of the Mike Sweeney contract, but in truth I have never found a way to stop living vicariously through the Royals' wins and losses.

I got into the Royals when I was four years old. I brought a Willie Wilson card with me to kindergarten. I showed it off secretly to the other kids like I didn't want the other pickers to know I had found gold. The card got destroyed when my jean jacket got washed. I was devastated. I thought I'd never see a Royals card again. When I got a Royals Bob Boone card a few months later, I screamed for days. A few years later, when Bob Hamelin started doing his thing, my mom took me to get his autograph. We stood in the rain in Liberty waiting for the chance to pay Bob Hamelin ten dollars for his autograph. The Royals got worse. When I was in junior high, the crowds were so thin that if you got general admission tickets for a day game you could put gummi worms on the seats in front of you, and you could just watch them melt while hoping that Gary Gaetti would break the Curse of Balboni. If I had been old enough to go after a doctorate in the late ‘90s, I would have loved to have written a thesis on how hard it was to find Royals shirts in a mall. The whole thesis would be a single pie chart mapping the number of White Sox, Yankees and Royals pullover jackets available for purchase in the Kansas City metro area at that time. The pie would be equally divided between the White Sox and Yankees because you couldn't find any Royals pullover jackets.

What I am trying to say is that in the wake of the Royals' 2014 postseason run, I have started to run a new script of the Royals' past. Nothing will be the same moving forward, and nothing will be the same looking backward. Once the ball deflected off Donaldson's glove and squirted into left field, it was as there had been a major override of my critical faculties. Right now I can't judge any member of the Royals team or organization or shade them in a negative light now or in the immediate future because if I'm honest with myself I'll admit that they have taken me to places that I never thought would be possible as a Royals fan. I think it's important to celebrate this moment, this year, and all it has meant to the fans and the city for the last month. And for me a big part of really enjoying the celebration starts with revising Royals' history, starting with the arrival of the Dayton Moore in 2006.

It was a starry eve in 2006 when the Dayton Moore first went to work for the Royals, and we knew that all of his work would be subtle as a rugged wolverine's. He immediately began to import the greatest minds and players the game had to offer. Trey Hillman. Jose Guillen. Kyle Davies. Joey Gathright. Tony Pena Jr. If you think players like these grow on trees, why don't you shake the branches of an oak and scream Ross Gload's name. I've done it, and I promise that if you do it will give you chills up and down your spinebones. Many Royals fan hoped that the Dayton Moore would bring an OBP-blowtorch to the Royals' ice age. Some foolishly thought that the Glass turtle would slide the Dayton a 100-million-dollar bill across the table. And they were the even greater fools because the Dayton and the Glass had a plan. Together they made a tremendous plan. If the fans wanted a blowtorch, the Dayton would be content with a lukewarm waffle iron, somewhat recently unplugged. And the Dayton and the Glass swore upon the blood of Sluggerrr that in eight short years they would finally make it to the World Series and lose in Game 7 to a cyborg southpaw to be determined and created at a later date.

This FanPost was written by a member of the Royals Review community. It does not necessarily reflect the views of the editors and writers of this site.