Royals fans hoping for more Game 6 magic, just like 1985

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Nobody here is worried, at least not the people who know better. It is worth worrying about a baseball team without an owner, as the Kansas City Royals subsisted for almost seven aimless years. It is worth worrying when your first baseman lacks the fundamental awareness to realize he is about to hit his own pitcher in the face at point-blank range with a throw. Trailing the World Series three games to two with the most energized fan base in baseball awaiting Game 6 does not constitute reason to worry.

"I'm certainly not," Elliott Hollub said. "I've seen too much to worry about this."

In the fall of 1968, before the Kansas City Royals officially existed, Ewing Kauffman sent a letter to the leading businesspeople in the city. The owner wanted his baseball team to be a public trust, and that meant involving entrepreneurs in something far more quaint than the sponsorship that passes for support today. Kauffman asked them to sell tickets.

Hollub was 29 years old, a stockbroker – "and I was not one of those people who got a letter," he recalled with a laugh Monday. One of the higher-ups at his firm did and knew Hollub was a huge baseball fan, a kid who growing up in Chicago cut school so he could sneak into Wrigley Field for an afternoon game. The letter made its way to Hollub. Anyone interested could attend a September meeting downtown at Union Station.

Hollub showed up and was transfixed. Kauffman introduced a program called the Royal Lancers. To qualify, a person needed to sell 75 season tickets. The perks included an expenses-paid four-day trip to spring training and the sort of access to the team and players unavailable otherwise.

"I came back and told my wife this is right up my alley," Hollub said. "I love baseball. I get to go to spring training. These guys aren't much older than we are. It was like I was 6 years old and offered a bunch of candy. I bit hook, line and sinker."

One pair of season tickets Hollub sold was to himself – and 45 years after the Royals debuted in 1969, in the midst of their first playoff run in nearly three decades, with the sixth game of the World Series set for 7:07 p.m. CT on Tuesday at Kauffman Stadium, Hollub still owns the pair.

He's one of just 161 accounts still open from that 1969 season, some of which surely have been passed down through generations. The original season-ticket holders almost surely number fewer than 100, and considering the Royals' history, the survival of any is a simultaneous testament to resolve and madness.

How Hollub weathered the 28 years between 1985 and 2014 – when the Royals were a cumulative 409 games under .500 and hit the cutoff man in the back because he was turned the wrong way and dropped cans of corn like twitchy grocery baggers and conspired on a nightly basis to set the sport back a decade through sheer force of their institutional ineptitude – is rather simple.

"I love baseball. I love baseball," Hollub said. "Here's the thing: When we were winning from '76 to '85, people would call me and congratulate me, like I was the owner. They knew how involved I was. So now here comes '86 and beyond, and those same people would call me and ask me what's wrong with your team. It's always my team. And I grew up that way, with Mr. K telling us, the Lancers, this is our team."

For years, Kansas City didn't see the Royals that way. They were the city's embarrassment, its perpetual disappointment, like the child that doesn't learn from its mistakes. They pulled the same nonsense season after season, particularly after Kauffman died in 1993. From the awful free-agent signings to the busted draft picks to the meager budgets, the Royals were a minor league franchise with major league designation. If the baseball season was a strategic campaign played over the course of six months, the Royals strolled in annually with a plastic sword, armor made of cardboard and a couple "Magic: The Gathering" cards.

Fandom is particularly cruel in that way. The truest of the sort, like Hollub, do not abandon their teams, even when their teams' fortunes actively encourage as much. The plight of the Royals' fan is rather well-established by this point, though it bears noting that since 1985, the Royals have cobbled together just nine winning seasons, meaning for 20 years, Elliott Hollub and his family rooted for teams that couldn't even muster average.

Perhaps crueler is the involvement of that family, the bequeathing of Royals fandom from one generation to another, like a bad gene. Only the fiercest of masochists actually chose to root for the Royals. Consigning oneself to sporting misery is no way to live, particularly when 29 other choices exist, nearly all of which would've been easier to stomach than rooting for the Royals.

And then came this year. Hollub is quick to say it's more fun than any of the past ones because it wasn't expected. Used to be that spots in October were birthrights for the Royals, that rooting for them was easy. At one point, being a Royals fan was like being a Yankees fan or Red Sox fan, a place where frontrunners went because the organization embodied excellence and class.

The Lancers were part of that. When Hollub was president of the group in 1975, commissioner Bowie Kuhn addressed them. About a dozen of them celebrated inside Kauffman's suite at Yankee Stadium when George Brett took Goose Gossage into the upper deck to win the American League pennant. Nothing beat that, though the wild-card game this season came close.

And so did one other event Hollub could remember: Oct. 26, 1985. Kauffman Stadium. Game 6 of the World Series. The Royals trailed the St. Louis Cardinals three games to two. They were down 1-0 going into the ninth inning. Todd Worrell, the rookie closer who had allowed one run all postseason, entered. Don Denkinger blew a call at first base. Dane Iorg looped a two-run single into center field. The Royals' impossible comeback became possible. They blew out St. Louis in Game 7 for their only championship.

"I've seen this before," Hollub said. "That's why I'm not panicking."

So he'll be there, Section 234, Row EE, the seats he and his wife Kathy have shared for years. Others will be there, too, original ticket holders who braved the lean years for a moment like this. They'll see the 100-mph-throwing rookie Yordano Ventura on top of the mound opposing the wizened Jake Peavy. And the Giants' lineup that has dropped 16 runs over the past two games against a Royals group held scoreless for the past 15 innings. And all the other intricacies and tactics a World Series game provides.

Hollub is 75 now, far from those early Lancer years. The group isn't as vital as it used to be, not with big sales staffs and dynamic pricing and the secondary ticket market going wild. It serves as a reminder that all those dire years weren't for naught, that no matter how miserable the franchise, salvation exists somewhere.

Maybe even, like 29 years ago, in Game 6.

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