KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Anyone who tells you baseball is dying hasn’t spent much time in Kansas City lately.
Obviously, the Royals are in the World Series for the second straight year, and some portion of every city would embrace a baseball team in that spot. But what’s incredible, from an empirical standpoint, at least, is how widespread and unifying this town’s love for the Royals appears to be: The bikers at the bar are talking about the Royals. The hipsters on the street are talking about the Royals. The cashiers at the supermarket in the middle of the night are chatting about Lorenzo Cain’s range in center field.
It’s everyone, and it’s everywhere. It feels like you can’t pass four people on any street in Kansas City without spying at least one Royals cap, if not more.
I try not to make bold and speculative claims like the one in the headline above without ample evidence to back them up, but I can attest that I’ve spent time in all 30 MLB cities and never seen anything like this before. Naturally, I haven’t necessary spent that time in all those places in championship seasons, nor have I done so in the last couple of months: It’s been a minute since I’ve been to Milwaukee, for example, and maybe the Brewers now seize Milwaukee in some powerful way I cannot conceive.
(PHOTO: Christian Petersen/Getty Images)
And then, if you spend enough time piecing it together, there are some incorruptible bits of information that support the idea. Start with an astonishing fact:
Seventy-eight percent! More than three out of every four televisions in Kansas City were tuned to the Royals game on Tuesday night. This is not the 1960s, when people had one or two other options for evening programming. This is the era of the cable-TV explosion, when we can flip between hundreds of options, sitcoms and dramas and mysteries and tough-guy chefs yelling at underlings and bleating prospective homeowners demanding something more open-concept.
Then there’s this, too: Royals fans are the same that nearly voted eight players to the A.L. All-Star team, and a club that ranked 10th in tickets sold in 2015 despite playing in the league’s second-smallest metro area.
That size, I think, contributes to the phenomenon. I am trying my best not to sound like the snobby lifelong New Yorker that I realize I very much am, but cities like New York, L.A. and Chicago just have way too many people to ever seem to universally dedicated to baseball. People come from too many different places and their interests are far too varied, and so in a place like New York, you’re always going to get some huge portion of the population that prefers other things to baseball. At least I think that explains it.
Throw in the Kansas City’s rich baseball tradition, as celebrated at the beautiful Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and the way baseball fandom in this town seems to span people of every color and creed, and I feel it’s a pretty compelling case: Kansas City is the best baseball town in the country right now.
