I am a lifelong New England sports fan, and my wife is a Kansas City sports fan who grew up in that area. I've spent a lot of time in the KC are over the past 24 years. I think Kansas City sports fans are the most appreciative of success, in a grateful sort of way, that I've seen anywhere.

Royals fans are fully aware that their franchise has sucked most of the last 30-something years, and they don't like it, obviously. But the way they talk about it is so different from here in New England, where there is an edge - people take it personally.

In KC, it is not personal, but to hear a Royals fan talk about the 70s-80s great Royals team, culminating in the 1985 World Championship, it's like the fan base is grateful to have this wonderful set of memories that sustained them through the middle of the 2010s, when a similar set of memories for a new generation was cemented.

I was in the KC area for about a week during their championship run in 2015, and it was pandemonium. The grocery stores were transformed into Royal blue everywhere. It was all my extended family wanted to talk about. George Brett was suddenly showing up all over the place. It was awesome.

If you look at that 2015 roster, it is pretty obviously that this was not a superteam - they were a good team, with an amazing bullpen, a healthy starting rotation, and a number of above-average position players. But you get too much blame when things go poorly, and too much credit when it goes perfectly. Good for Ned Yost - he pushed all the right buttons at just the right time in 2014 and 2015, and Royals fans will have amazing memories because of it until 2040 or whenever they next win the whole thing.

Royals fans seemed to populate online sabermetric writers rooms back in the 90 and aughts. Perhaps it was just because Bill James needed interns but there was a lot of them. They all seemed to hit a wall in the mid 00s with their team losing

Royals fans are fully aware that their franchise has sucked most of the last 30-something years, and they don't like it, obviously. But the way they talk about it is so different from here in New England, where there is an edge - people take it personally.

I think there's a built-in acknowledgment of resource disparity out here in fly-over country that the bigger, richer coastal teams don't assume. The facts of revenue sharing may change over time, but most Central time zone folks (Chicago and Texas aside) start from a position of assumed poverty and go from there. St Louis might put themselves in another category just as San Diego somehow felt poor until this owner, but by and large we spend a lot more time waiting for planets to align, windows to open, lightning to strike, etc than richer franchises. There's less entitlement when you have less money.

I think there's a built-in acknowledgment of resource disparity out here in fly-over country that the bigger, richer coastal teams don't assume. The facts of revenue sharing may change over time, but most Central time zone folks (Chicago and Texas aside) start from a position of assumed poverty and go from there. St Louis might put themselves in another category just as San Diego somehow felt poor until this owner, but by and large we spend a lot more time waiting for planets to align, windows to open, lightning to strike, etc than richer franchises. There's less entitlement when you have less money.

Back in the late eighties I had a co-worker from the Cleveland area. During this time the Indians had been pretty much irrelevant for a quarter-century or so, and they had been mediocre or worse for all of his conscious life. He still was a fan, even though he pretended to be indifferent. I remember this exchange with him one morning:

Me, checking the sports page: "Cool, the Orioles won last night."

He: "I've pretty much stopped worrying too much about pro sports. It's just background noise to me. But how did the Indians do?"

Me: "Ah, they lost."

He, turning red: "THOSE F$%&KERS;!!!!"

Boy did he enjoy the Indians' run in the 90s when they turned things around. He told me a couple of times how weird it felt to root for a team that was *expected* to win. I wish they'd won a ring, and I rooted for them in 2016.

We remain in touch, thirty-something years later.

Royals officials called him while he was in his skid steer

Having no idea what a skid steer was (Wiki: "A skidsteer is any of a class of compact heavy equipment with lift arms that can attach to a wide variety of buckets and other labor-saving tools or attachments"), I thought it said, "he was in his kid sister".

Welp.