How Royals sweep of Orioles punctuates best 10 years in Kansas City sports history

When we moved to Kansas City in 2013, I had only a vague notion of the modern futility of the Royals and Chiefs.

While I knew the Royals hadn’t been in the World Series since 1985, I was stunned to realize they hadn’t even been in a postseason since. And though I understood the Chiefs hadn’t been to a Super Bowl since the 1969 season, I couldn’t believe they hadn’t so much as won a playoff game in two decades.

Those simple facts, though, didn’t remotely reveal the depths of pessimism in the fan bases.

Around every corner lurked another trapdoor over quicksand with an anvil looming overhead.

Here, hope sprang not eternal but infernal.

Sure, Sporting KC won the 2013 MLS Cup, and FCKC would win NWSL titles in 2014 and 2015.

But when it came to the two most established and high-profile franchises, many people I met or spoke with felt cursed or jinxed in ways I really couldn’t understand.

Then I covered my first Chiefs’ postseason game for The Star, the absurd one in Indianapolis in which the Chiefs botched a 38-10 lead and somehow lost 45-44.

I suddenly felt indoctrinated.

No wonder they say it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you.

As if out of nowhere 10 years ago this week, though, that constant dread was purged with the Royals’ preposterous comeback in the American League Wild Card game.

That enchanted night proved to be a portal to another dimension.

Not merely for the Royals, who went on to take the Giants to Game 7 of the World Series before winning it all a year later, but for the entire sports scene in Kansas City.

A few months after that 2015 World Series and the best parade ever, the Chiefs exorcised their own ghouls by winning a playoff game — the first of 16 now in the last decade, doubling the amount in their first 50 years.

And now … this:

As the Chiefs (4-0) seek to become the first team to win a third straight Super Bowl, the Royals on Wednesday in Baltimore beat the Orioles 2-1 to sweep their AL Wild Card series and advance to the ALDS against the Yankees beginning Saturday in New York.

No team in baseball history ever has lost as many as 106 games in one season, as the 2023 Royals did, and made the following postseason.

To say nothing of making it through a series.

So what’s already been the most momentous decade in Kansas City sports history — highlighted by the dynastic Chiefs and the 2026 FIFA World Cup host-city designation and the advent of the KC Current and the world’s first stadium purpose-built for a professional women’s sports team — keeps cascading into more.

It’s not just that this is only the second time in Kansas City sports history that the Royals and, presumably, Chiefs will be entering the postseason in the same calendar year. (The Current also are a playoff team).

Or just that the teams are led by superstars Patrick Mahomes and Bobby Witt Jr., two of the best players in their respective games and just the confident but humble personas you want to have identified with KC.

It’s that the bookend breakthroughs of the Royals and what the Chiefs have done in between — and likely beyond that span — has changed the way we look at our teams.

And, to some degree, even ourselves.

Where just over 10 years ago fans could only assume the worst and it hurt to hope too much, now you get nearly constant replenishment of why it’s safe to believe in believe, as Ted Lasso, aka Kansas City’s own Jason Sudeikis would put it.

“If you’re talking about the self-identity of sports fans from the Kansas City area, for a long time you could never say that winning is a part of your identity,” said Dan Wann, a devout Chiefs fan, professor of psychology at Murray State and co-author of “Sports Fans: The Psychology And Social Impact of Fandom.”

“Now,” he added, “it is.”

Wann told me that in 2023 for a piece on how the Chiefs had reset Kansas City’s self-image.

That’s both in the spirit of how we feel others might see us differently but also in how we see ourselves through what sports psychologists call “basking in reflected glory,” aka, BIRG-ing: The “tendency to enhance one’s self-esteem by heightening one’s association with a successful or prestigious group,” as the American Psychological Association defines it.

As Negro Leagues Baseball Museum president Bob Kendrick put it in 2023, “I think for those who don’t understand the power of sport and what it means to a city and to a community, you need look no further than the Chiefs. Winning permeates. Winning changes your mindset. Your disposition. And you don’t necessarily have to be a football fan. You’re still in the midst of it, and you’re feeling it.”

Case in point: After years of languishing in-between postseason berths, the Royals are only adding to the ripple effect ... especially since they have a nucleus of young players who figure to be able to extend this window beyond whatever they can achieve this postseason.

Meanwhile, no doubt fan appreciation is enhanced by some relatable DNA between the teams and the city they represent: a certain roll-up-the-sleeves resolve to punch above its oft-overlooked middle of the map profile.

Each team won its first titles in forever by way of a series of epic and unprecedented comebacks.

Each team now is winning by the most minuscule of margins, most literally when the Chiefs beat Baltimore in the opener by a toe or so and the Royals eked out a vital 10th-inning victory last week with their first run in 28 innings by way of an automatic runner and an error.

For that matter, the Chiefs have won their last 10 games by a total of 71 points; each of the Royals wins over Baltimore was by one run, and they’ve only mustered more than three runs twice in their last 13 games.

That plucky style embodies a mindset that goes back at least 140 years around here:

“The Kansas City Spirit,” a term most associated with the stirring Norman Rockwell work in the wake of the devastating 1951 floods but that is rooted in a much more foundational time.

That “get up and git” notion, as an 1889 ad in The Star put it, famously informed the city’s rapid rebuild of the year-old Convention Hall when it burned down just three months before it was supposed to host the 1900 Democratic National Convention.

When Carnegie Steel Co. declared supplying the necessary steel in time would be impossible, the rebuilding committee replied, “In Kansas City, we don’t know what ‘impossible’ means.”

At least in the context of sports, it was just the opposite for a long time before 2014 — when everything started being not merely possible but so often a reality that it’s hard not to expect more ahead.