If your favorite baseball team’s season is over and you’re still looking for a current playoff team to root for, might I be the first to suggest the Kansas City Royals? What’s that, you say? I am definitely NOT the first person to make this suggestion? Okay, fine, well I’m suggesting it now. This team and its fans are great and it’s about time we all got involved.
The Royals first arrived on my radar as a team to root for back in early August during the Sung Woo Lee week. Lee is a devoted Royals fan from South Korea who essentially has (or had) no connection to the team other than the fact that he rather inexplicably became a fan 15 or 20 years ago and has been a loyal follower ever since, even as the Royals have been awful year in and year out. During the beginning of the team’s stretch run in August, he was flown to the U.S. for the first time and was essentially given the key to the city for a week. As of this writing, the guy’s got over 18,000 twitter followers and as a result of his small rise to fame here in the states, he is also now a minor celebrity back home in South Korea. My favorite little side note about Sung Woo Lee is that he’s married. I’m trying to imagine what my own wife would think if fans of a professional baseball team from South Korea flew me overseas on their own dime in order to throw out some first pitches, go on a couple local sports radio and news programs, and be paraded around town for a week. Would there even be a way to explain that in a way that made sense? Would it even make sense to me? I honestly can’t figure out how it could. But if the Royals win it all, you can be sure Sung Woo Lee will make it on the Championship video as the narrator says something like “and then the Royals regained their poise”. Championship seasons need a little bit of silliness to make it fun and memorable, and that week in August certainly fit the bill in that regard. It was a week Sung Woo, as well as most Royals fans, will remember forever. And depending how the rest of this month goes could very well could be the turning point to something great.
It’s also helpful to have players worth rooting for. Thankfully for Royals fans, they seem to have that as well. Early on Monday morning after the Royals won Game 3 of the ALDS to advance to the Championship Series against Baltimore, 1st baseman Eric Hosmer went on Twitter to invite fans out to the bar with members of the team to celebrate. Once there, Royals players ended up picking up the entire $15,000 bar tab. Doesn’t that bill seem kind of low within the context of what was involved? Then again, this could be just one more reason to get behind this team, this city, and these fans. An entire bar can celebrate with their team’s players at a bar with an unlimited amount of alcohol for only $15,000.
These are the type of people we should be celebrating. Get involved, America.
