So, why spend 4 days in my ostensibly Korean blog talking about baseball? I know from the traffic stats that the vast majority of you don’t really care about any of this. I get that. I do. But it’s important to me. Now I’m going to tell you why.
What follows below is a copy of a reddit post I made back in October, 2015. It explains the reasons I love baseball, and why I will always be a Royals fan. It’s not about the winning, for me (although it’s nice when it happens). No, for me, it’s about honoring the memory of those I love.
Back to Korea tomorrow, I promise.
Bit of a long story here, but honestly, it was more important that I write this than you read it. I’ll try to remember to throw in a tl;dr at the end out of courtesy.
Anyway, I’m a Kansas City native, born and raised. However, I have never, ever, ever, before last season, been a Royals fan. I only started liking them around the same time that they got good. It all started with my grandfather. He’d been a fan of the team ever since it was founded. Attended at least one game every year of his life, frequent season ticket holder, and, eventually, the mentor of his eldest grandchild – me. My parents and grandparents, in the misplaced hope that I could be taught to be a baseball fan, dragged me to game after game. I was loaded down with Monarchs and Royals paraphernalia. All my older relatives were baseball fans, and so I, as the first child of my generation in the family, would be too, dammit.
But I wouldn’t budge. The Royals were, frankly, terrible. Every game was a slow torture of dashed expectations, brief bursts of hope being met ultimately with disappointment. Around the same time I started bringing paperbacks to games, my family stopped dragging me along.
Until last year.
September of last year found me away from home, finishing my Master’s degree, and slightly homesick. My grandfather had been ill for weeks, and was about to undergo a dangerous surgery that promised to fix the problem. The Royals were hot ever since the All-Star break, but I couldn’t be bothered about that – it had been more than a decade since I had watched a Royals game. I was more concerned about Papa.
He and I were close, despite the baseball thing. He was one of the kindest, wittiest men I had ever known. I had never seen him lose his temper, never seen him treat any human being with anything but the utmost respect. He was still deeply in love with my grandma, took obvious delight in his large cohort of grandchildren, and in every way was the heart and soul of our clan – a true patriarch.
He was relatively young, only barely into his 70’s, and this surgery could give him potentially another twenty years. But, it was high risk – a 10% chance that he wouldn’t survive the operation, doctors estimated.
So, Tuesday, September 30 rolled around. Grandpa went in for his surgery. And the Royals, meanwhile, were going into their first postseason since 1985 – the first time ever in my lifetime. I was overwhelmed with worry for Papa, and then something odd happened. Of all things, I thought of his lifelong love of the Royals. I remembered suddenly all the discussion of their newfound ability, of Kansas City’s joy in having a team make the post-season for the first time in years.
And so I watched what we all remember was one of the best wildcard games, ever.
I was swept up in the magic and excitement of it. I replayed Perez’s game winning hit again, and again, listening to the deafening roar that swept the stadium as the crowd realized what had happened. It was electric. And, for one, brief, shining moment, I understood why my grandfather loved baseball.
Well, the Royals’ success on the field was not matched by success off it. My grandfather was one of the unlucky 10%. The best man I had ever known was gone.
But, the Royals weren’t. They crashed into the Angels, and before the best team in baseball knew what had hit them they were swept out of hte post-season. The Royals roared onwards, to Baltimore, and the most exciting series yet – and another victory.
By now the entire country was talking about the Cinderella team from Kansas City, /my/ Royals, the team I had watched as a kid with my grandpa. Every baseball fan in the nation was watching them.
And so was I, right alongside them. When the Royals were playing, it was like Papa wasn’t gone – I knew he was cheering himself hoarse right along with me, watching the team he had so faithfully followed for 40 years suddenly find success. I stopped hurting, a little bit, with every game.
It was like the games were a talisman, holding off and numbing my grief. And with every victory, the magic lasted a tiny bit longer, and the hurt got a little bit less, and I grew to love the Royals a little bit more.
Ultimately the ride ended, but not before we had given the Giants such a run for their money that nothing short of a superhuman performance by Madison Bumgarner could have stopped us. And when the 9th inning closed in Game 7, I felt something that I hadn’t since before Papa’s illness: contentment.
My grandfather might have been gone, but his beloved team wasn’t, and I still had the memories of those childhood games at his side. And now I would make new ones, watching with his spirit alongside me, and so preserve his memory a bit longer. I was a Royals fan for life, in my grandfather’s memory.
And so this season comes to an end. At the start the conventional wisdom said we couldn’t do it again, that last year was a fluke, that we were bound to regress back to somnambulant mediocrity. Well, here we are. So much for the conventional wisdom.
My grandpa’s team is respected again. No one laughs at us anymore (although some hate us – I guess I can live with that). And I’m onboard, every step of the way.
So, am I a bandwagon fan? You bet I am. I was not onboard this train before it left the station last September. But, now I’m on it, to the end. Because Papa never gave up on them, and in the end, they proved him right – so I won’t give up on them either. Call me a bandwagon fan if you like, but I’m a fan for life now. Thanks for listening.
Good luck tomorrow, and give ’em hell.
The Royals went on to win the World Series that year. The Royals won, Papa. You always believed.
Now I do, too.
Gwangju Dreaming 