Opinion: Why Being a Royals Fan is so Much More Brutal Than Being a Mets Fan
Last week, Vince Neilstein and I made a bet on the outcome of the 2016 MLB season-opening series between the Kansas City Royals and the New York Mets, who, if you didn’t know, played each other in the World Series last year. You know, if you can call the Mets’ effort in those five games playing. They made more errors in the World Series than an 18-year-old does the first time they visit a frat house, but I digress. The series was split with each team winning one game, and as a result both Vince and I will proceed to tell you why our respective fanbases have had to suffer through the most pain and brutality.
But to do that, we need to go back. Way, way back, all the way to the first time the Royals won the World Series in 1985. Until last year, that 1985 championship was the only thing Royals fans had; after the ’85 season, the Royals started to crumble. In 1995, Royals fans were doomed to suffer through what would become one of the worst stretches of losing seasons possibly ever… until 2013.
If you’re from Kansas City, you already know what’s coming, but for those of you who aren’t, let me enlighten you with some numbers. From the 1995 season through the 2012 season, the Royals posted a winning record ONCE. I repeat: once, and that one winning season they had was in 2003 when they finished with a record of 83-79, barely breaking .500. I was born in 1993 so up until 2013, the Royals had a whopping total of three winning seasons in my lifetime.
Does that sound completely abysmal? Well, it is. While I was growing up, the Royals were the embodiment of a hopeless sports team, more so than even the Oakland Raiders and the Cleveland Browns. Need a better example? Kauffman Stadium holds 37,903 people. When the Royals made the playoffs in 2014, that was the first time I had ever seen that stadium full in my entire life. On a good season, the Royals could barely fill the bottom of their stadium with fans. The last time I went to a Royals game, they played the Yankees in Derek Jeter’s final season and Jeter got more applause than the entire Royals team combined. It was a home game and I’m certain there were more Yankees fans there than Royals fans.
Need a better example? For a while in the 2000s, you could order a large pizza from any Pizza Hut in the Kansas City metropolitan area and get Royals tickets for free. FOR FREE. The Royals were so desperate to get people to come to their games that they started sending out free tickets when you ordered Pizza Hut. But what’s even sadder is that every single time that shitty Pizza Hut pizza was more satisfying than watching the Royals lose. Again. And again and again and again and again.
For almost my entire life, and for many others in KC, being a Royals fan was the definition of suffering. It even got so bad that for a while, the Royals’ slogan was “We Believe.” How you can tell when your team is colossally shitty? When they have to ask their fans to believe. Coincidentally, this slogan came in 2004, the first of three consecutive seasons in which the Royals lost 100 or more games. Adding up the fact that the Chiefs were irrelevant in the NFL post-season until 2015, THAT is why this World Series victory meant so much to Kansas City. New York as a whole is drowning in championships. KC sports have been a dumpster fire year after year with little or no reward up until now.
Prime rib tastes incredible on a bad day, but imagine how great it would taste if you had only eaten once in the past 20 years. The life has returned to Kansas City’s sports teams for the first time since the early ’90s, and after all that suffering, after all of the pain, the hope and the let downs, we finally have something to show for it.
Here’s Eric Hosmer’s face because Vince hates it:
