Postseason Debut

My first playoff game.

I’m not a great photographer, but this was a special scene.

Last week, I revisited the six MLB games I attended during the 2024 regular season, but they were all just a prelude to game seven. The fountains of Kauffman Stadium are a familiar sight to me. I’ve sat in the bleachers at historic Wrigley Field, amongst other storied MLB sites. I’ve frozen at Arrowhead, and taken in several games at the cathedral of basketball, Allen Fieldhouse. Hell, I’ve even made the road trip to the House that Rockne Built in South Bend, Indiana. But until last October, I had yet to personally set foot in the postseason.

When the Royals reached the World Series in 1985, the idea of attending a game didn’t even cross my mind. True, I went to my first game that summer, and I was thoroughly invested, watching the games from my spot on our living room floor. But at six years old, baseball was still an abstract thing to me, and the World Series was downright surreal. I might as well have been watching the moon landing. It was something huge and far away. The notion of buying a ticket was inconceivable.

By the time the Royals made it to the postseason again in 2014, twenty-nine years later, a lot had changed. I was an adult, and I would have given almost anything to watch them in person as they made back-to-back runs to the Fall Classic, cashing in for the title in 2015. Unfortunately, a postseason ticket was just as unattainable then as it had been when I was six.

I was going through a divorce in 2014, with two young kids to support, and I was living paycheck-to-paycheck as I tried to straighten my life out after a decade of indulgence and irresponsibility. I stamped down my jealousy when friends and family posted their pics from the K on Facebook, having casually dropped a grand for tickets in the upper deck, and focused on enjoying the ride from my own vantage point at home. That wasn’t too hard to do. The 2014-15 Royals were one of the most fun teams I’ve ever followed in any sport, and it wasn’t worth getting upset over, because I sure as hell didn’t have a thousand bucks to spend on baseball tickets.

Besides, I was confident it wouldn’t be another three decades before they gave me a second chance to watch playoff baseball in Kansas City.

The Royals flirted with the playoffs in 2016 and 2017, but came up short. Then, after the core of that team broke apart, the Royals reverted back to the ineptitude of the 2000’s. They lost one hundred games in three of the next six seasons, a stretch that included the shortened sixty-game Covid season of 2020, and bottomed out with a truly depressing 2023 campaign, arguably the worst season in franchise history. The 2005 Royals were just as bad in the standings, but 2023 was somehow worse.

The franchise was supposed to be past all that nonsense, but even with Bobby Witt Jr. emerging as a generational superstar, they still managed to suck nearly every last drop of enthusiasm from their long-suffering fanbase. I started to think I might not see playoff baseball again, after all. Then, owner John Sherman let General Manager J.J. Picollo spend some money on pitching, possibly in a cynical attempt to influence the vote for a new stadium plan (but who cares?), and the 2024 Royals surprised everyone.

They got off to a hot start, but I was cautiously optimistic. I’d seen way too many Royals teams sprint out of the gate, only to come up lame by Mother’s Day, but this team kept it rolling. By midseason, it was becoming evident they were for real. To paraphrase Bobby Baseball and the t-shirts he inspired, “the boys were playing some ball.”

Witt put together a spectacular season, the kind of year that would usually result in a runaway MVP, if not for Aaron Judge topping it with a season for the ages. Salvador Perez looked rejuvenated playing for a team that was actually in contention, and Vinnie Pasquantino rounded out a formidable trio that would have posted 100 RBIs each, had he not broken his thumb on a fluke play and missed the final month of the season.

Perhaps more importantly, the newly renovated pitching staff, led by new acquisitions Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha, and headlined by Cole Ragans, gave the Royals a chance to win every night. The bullpen was a rollercoaster, but after trading for Lucas Erceg to be the new closer, it finished the season as a strength. By the end of the August, the Royals were tied for the division lead, and a postseason berth appeared to be inevitable.

But this is the Royals, so nothing could be that easy. Pasquantino got hurt, the offense went catatonic, and they recorded two separate seven-game losing streaks in the final month of the season. Not exactly the kind of resume you expect to see from a contender. However, thanks to an even bigger collapse from the Twins, the Royals clinched their first playoff bid in nine years on the final weekend of the season in Atlanta.

Of course, that didn’t guarantee playoff baseball at the K. The Royals were a wild card, the fifth seed, which meant they would have to go on the road in the first round, and win a best-of-three series against Baltimore if they hoped to host a game in the ALDS. Understandably, after they finished the season with a whimper, many Royals fans were skeptical of their chances of advancing. I wasn’t risking it though. I bought my tickets for Game 3 of the ALDS shortly before the first pitch of Game 1 in Baltimore.

The offense continued to scuffle against the Orioles, but the pitching held up its end of the deal, and Witt stepped up in the clutch to deliver two game-winning hits. The Royals advanced without subjecting me to a nerve-wracking third game. That was fortunate, because my blood pressure meds were being pushed to the limit, and I had no fingernails left.

This set up a long-overdue resumption of their historic postseason rivalry with the Yankees. We had tickets to a Sporting KC game at the same time as Game 1. The soccer game was a school event for my son, so I went along, but I had my earbuds in and the Royals on my phone throughout the first half. Kansas City made some uncharacteristic mistakes on the mound, and didn’t get any help from some questionable calls by the umps, and lost a tough one, 6-5.

They bounced back in Game 2. New York pitcher Carlos Rodon showed them up after striking out the side in the top of the first, so Salvy set the tone with an epic blast off of him in the fourth. The Royals then kept the line moving, chasing Rodon from the game in the same inning, and taking a 4-1 lead. They held on for a 4-2 win and sent the series back to KC.

Naturally, the game was on my youngest son’s birthday, because that’s my luck. Money isn’t as tight these days, but buying him a ticket too would have been pushing it, especially because his two older brothers would have insisted on going as well, and hey, I ain’t made out of money. Perhaps I’ll be able to afford the family package the next time the Royals make the postseason, but it wasn’t happening this time.

Before you call child services on me, it was a Wednesday night. His birthday parties (yes, plural, one for friends and one for family) weren’t until the weekend, so I didn’t skip out on my son’s birthday festivities to attend a baseball game. I’m not saying I wouldn’t,* but I wasn’t tested on this occasion.

*Kidding. Mostly.

I went to the game with my cousin, Scott, my usual go-to companion for these sorts of events. Traffic getting to the stadium was surprisingly good, but the Truman Sports Complex was a sight to behold. I’ve been to sold out games before, but they were nothing like this. Both the Kauffman and Arrowhead Stadium parking lots were filled with tailgaters and media. A wave of blue enthusiasm carried us through the maze of smoking grills and tossed bean bags to the front gate.

Our seats were in the upper deck on the left field side. The price we paid for them would have gotten us in the Diamond Club for most regular season games, but nobody complained. We had a good view of the field, and I would have hung from the light fixtures so long as it got me in the building.

The seats filled in quickly. In perhaps the least surprising development ever, I was seated next to a pair of Yankee fans on one side. Thankfully, they weren’t of the obnoxious variety. We did have to deal with one annoying Yankee fan. In the ninth inning, a drunken woman wandered into our section and belligerently ordered us all to pay our respects to Aaron Judge. She was shouted down, but for the most part, the atmosphere was pro-Royal, and the buzz was positive.

And there was most definitely a buzz running through the place. A saxophonist performed the national anthem without any of the annoying showboating that often goes into those performances, and a flyover with a sonic boom drowned out the annoying thing Kansas City fans do when they replace “home of the brave” with “home of the Chiefs.” Rally towels swirled across every level, people were high-fiving and hugging total strangers in the seats around them. The closest I’d ever experienced to something like that in Kauffman was a late season win against the Orioles during the 2015 championship season, when the Royals were rolling and clicking on all cylinders. That wasn’t the case in this game.

Yuli Gurriel doubled to the left field corner in the second inning, but it came to nothing and the Royals offense continued to slump. The Yankees took a 1-0 lead when Giancarlo Stanton doubled in Juan Soto in the top of the fourth, and they added another run in the fifth. Seth Lugo did his best to limit the damage, and in the bottom of the fifth, the lid finally came off.

After Clarke Schmidt retired the first two Royals, Adam Frazier reached on a single. Kyle Isbel then came to the plate, and the light-hitting centerfielder, known more for his glove than his bat, brought the crowd back to its feet with a double to left, cutting the Yankee lead in half. Michael Massey was next, walloping a ball to deep right, narrowly missing a go-ahead homer. Instead, he settled for a game-tying triple, and the place exploded.

We jumped up and down in our seats, and then the CrownVision cut to Patrick Mahomes doing the same thing in his suite and everybody lost it all over again. I’m usually a fairly quiet, reserved guy, but I’d been screaming all night, and this was the point in the evening where my voice checked out for good. My wrist was sore from waving the souvenir rally towel they gave us at the front gate, and I couldn’t hear what my cousin was saying right next to me. The K was more ecstatic than I’d ever experienced it before, and it felt like nothing that was going to stop us from beating the Yanks.

Alas, baseball can be a cruel sport. Massey was stranded on third after a Witt walk, and the Yankees took the lead for good when Stanton got hold of a Kris Bubic pitch in the top of the eighth and drove it into the seats in left field. The game ended with a Tommy Pham groundout, and the Yankees ended the Royals’ season the following night in another hard-fought game.

When I captured this unlikely shot of me with a halo before the game, I thought for sure it was going to be our day.

We shuffled out of the K that night to impatiently wait for the sea of traffic to clear, disappointed, but not disheartened. Our team proved they belonged, and we took some solace in knowing that our boos had at least affected Jazz Chisholm, regardless of what he claimed afterwards. We took home keepsakes that will undoubtedly fade with time, and memories that hopefully won’t.

With any luck, the Royals can build on their magical 2024 season and get back to the postseason in 2025. Then maybe I can see my first postseason win. From there, it’s on to my first ALCS game, then the World Series. After getting my first taste, I’m hungry for more fall baseball.

For now, however, with temperatures hovering around freezing and pitchers and catchers reporting soon, I will gladly settle for the approaching promise of spring.

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Thanks for reading Powder Blue Nostalgia. Did your team make the playoffs last season? I want to hear about the playoff games you’ve attended, whether it was in 2024 or any other season. Share your stories in the comments.