There was a time in my life when once football season started, it was all that mattered. Baseball was fun and I went to a lot of Royals’ games over the summer but, once that football went in the air, I honestly couldn’t tell you much about what happened to the Royals as they wheezed into another 100-loss season (in most years anyway). This year, however, has been much different.
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As the home season wound down for Kansas City, I got to Kauffman Stadium twice, a personal record for games attended after football season began, and I have watched the Royals on TV, in several cases over a football game on another channel. I don’t really feel like I need to tell anyone why this year is different.
The first of the last two Royals games I went to, Mike Moustakas homered and Eric Hosmer won the game with a walk-off hit in the ninth. In the second, Hosmer was 5-for-5 with a homer and Luis Mendoza, the Pacific Coast League’s Pitcher of the Year, picked up the win on the hill. The young talent everyone was fawning over in spring training is as good as advertised and boy are these guys fun to watch, no matter how far below .500 the Royals are.
The season isn’t even over yet and already I find myself counting down the days until Opening Day 2012 (by the way, it’s 196 days as of now). Sure I realize there are still some growing pains to come in the future, but the time these guys have seen in the majors this year has gotten the majority of those issues out of the way.
All the excitement and anticipation takes me back to high school when the winter was in its final stages and my friends and I would bust out the notebooks in history class and start writing down our predictions for the Royals’ upcoming season. Gilman City High School was really not the most strenuous place to get an education. Our predictions were always absurd and never came close to coming true. One guy once predicted Michael Tucker would hit 30 home runs in a season and I, regrettably, once claimed Runelvys Hernandez and Jeremy Affeldt would combine for 35 wins. It may have even been 38, I can’t remember for sure, but either way it didn’t come close to coming true.
I’m not making any bold or unachievable predictions for this group, but I will say this these guys in the organization right now are on a whole different level from the guys Kansas City trotted out on a daily basis back then. If Moustakas, Hosmer and this generation would have been playing, our predictions would have had a much better shot of coming true.
The Royals farm system has won championships on every level in the past three years, Wilmington (A) in 2009, Northwest Arkansas (AA) in 2010 and Omaha (AAA) this year. Why not Kansas City for the World Series in 2012. I realize the odds of that are pretty high and I won’t be disappointed if they don’t win in 2012.
I will say this, though: the talent level is as high as it has been in the lifetime of my fanhood. The Royals may not be World Series champs in 2012, but that year will be the start of a long run of success for this franchise and a future World Series title is certainly a goal for that stretch.