The Royals Role

Time for the World Series.  It is possibly my favorite sporting event as nothing really is like post-season baseball.

With due apologies to the major TV networks, the sad reality is that they have to drag their cameras, announcers and crews and try to find Kansas City on a map. (It's in Missouri.)  And yes, you must broadcast the series, even if the Yankees are not in it.  Also, with apologies to the Giants and their fans, this World Series is all about the young Kansas City Royals.  They are charged with a feat far larger than winning 4 games in the next week.  Their role, is to save Major League Baseball - if only for a while.

Baseball has a few enemies starting with themselves.  No salary cap and the desire to proote only the major TV markets has made it an extreme unfair playing field for all other teams.  The sports media -Who insist on simply covering every aspect of the league as it pertains to the Yankees, Red Sox, and the..well.....Yankees and the Red Sox.   The new fan -  who has become a front runner.  Rooting for only teams that win.  Foregoing the home town team, because of their inability to compete.  And it's understandable, as all they know is that all the great players want to play in about 6 cities, none of them theirs, and getting huge money to do so.

I have always maintained that nothing can galvanize a city like a winning MLB team, and I stick by it. It's the every day of it, the drive to the playoffs and making a deep post season run.  Enter the Kansas City Royals.  No one is going to sit here and tell you these guys make minimum wage, of course they are making good money, but in a baseball sense they are not the Yankees by any means.  They are team that built themselves, with their own farm system, and added a few unnoticed pieces here and there pulling guys off the baseball scrap heap, making bold trades and doing frankly, what they had to do to survive.  The hope was to contend.  Instead, the Royals have now hypnotized a nation.  Winning this series will give the nation and the sport a much needed lift.

They have a ton of guys you've never heard of who play the game the right way.  They play 15 miles east of one of the great Mid-American cities we have that no one knows about on I-70.  They play in a facility that has been recently revamped, but seriously was LIGHT YEARS ahead of its time when built originally in the 1970's. They get zero credit, and deserve it all.  They were he precursor to every single new ball park (including our beautiful park) 20 years before Baltimore's Camden Yard which gets it all - and it's not accurate.  Kansas City built the first fantastic ball park 42 years ago! And BTW - it has hosted 73 MILLION fans since.

If the Royals can finish this off, not only will they capture the hearts of Americans, at least for a little while.  They can also give hope, real hope,  to the dozens of other MLB cities that think they will never have their say in the big show.  That the World Series is not only for the Yankees, Red Sox, Tigers, Dodgers, Giants and Cardinals.  Yes, the Royals climbed this mountain in 1985 with a world title, but it's different now by a mile.  There is a lot riding on this for the fans mind set for the immediate future and well being of the game. 

This is a team and an organization that once was mighty when the game was smaller. Then fell victim to the game and money growing out of control.  And just when the league and the media was hoping they would simply bow down, or go out of business, the Royals have scaled the summit again, and are on the precipice of restoring order to the baseball world that has tried everything to rid itself of such small market pests. 

The Royals role is of course to win this series, but it's really beyond baseball.  It's to win it for millions who feel that the world is sometimes a bit too big, and score one for the little guy.  And give hope to baseball fans and to to those not mesmerized by baseball, that good things can happen to good people who spend their lives doing things  - the right way.