My First Day As Kansas City Royals Super Fan

Welcome to the KC Royals Super Fan Blog! This is the first day of the rest of my life being one of the biggest Royals fans on the planet. I will be posting all of my thoughts and analysis about my new favorite team here.

How did a I reach this point?

I grew up a Yankees fan watching games with my grandfather. I loved the great teams from 1995 - 2001. Crazy Paul O'Neil, Precocious Scott Brosius, Big Fat David Wells, and the rest. When I went to college in Boston I became a very reluctant Red Sox fan who at crucial moments such as Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS would crack and secretly hoped the Yankees would put the Sox away and continue their misery. In the years since I left Boston my loyalties have been adrift. The Yankees collected souless free agents and lost any sense of team chemistry. The Red Sox have become another team with a bloated payroll.

This has all led up to the Rays-Red Sox series. I was rooting for the Rays because I loved that they came out of nowhere from their eternal AL East basement purgatory. This support led to scorn and ridicule from my friends which could be summarized in these points:

- I am a bandwagon fan of the worst kind, jumping on the dangerously packed wagon at a ridiculously late date
- The Rays do not deserve to go to win the World Series because they have only existed 10 years and have not suffered enough yet.
- The people at the Rays games are not real fans as evidenced by their new style jerseys and the fact that they need piped in clapping to tell them when to clap.

My responses to these accusations. True. True. True.

So I decided I needed a fresh start as a fan. I needed a team that I could suffer with and agonize over, a team that has been down and out for a long time, a team that really needs fans. This team needed to be an underdog with a vanishingly small chance of success. A team that for a long time has approached each season with a sense of resigned futility. A team with incompetent management unwilling or unable to spend enough money to field a decent team. A team to root for that if somehow it ever were to become a contender it would be a highly satisfying experience. The other important criteria were that I needed to like the logo and colors, they needed to have had some history, and I had to like their ballpark. Tomorrow I'll have a run down of the methodology and decision making process.

-Elliott