“More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood.”

– Thomas Boswell

Baseball has inspired more than one hundred years of eloquence from a legion of truly great writers. I am not one of them. But the Kansas City Royals just won the World Series, and I have some things to say.

My love affair with baseball did not begin in my childhood, as it does with most fans of the game. I do remember my first baseball game. I was about seven, and my dad took me and my brother to see the Astros play the Cincinnati Reds at the old Astrodome in Houston. Nolan Ryan was pitching, and Pete Rose was “Charlie Hustle,” not the disgraced, bow-tied .gif we saw all over social media during the postseason.

We moved to Kansas City in February, 1986, when I was nine years old. The Royals had just won the World Series and were revered. George Brett and Bret Saberhagen were gods to the kids I grew up with. But I came just a few months too late and missed all that. From the time I arrived in KC until a little more than a year ago, the Royals were…sad. The farm system produced some fantastic players who promptly bailed the second they could cash in. Who could blame them?

So, mired in all that disappointment, how did I turn into a die-hard baseball fan? First and foremost, I married a guy who was eight years old when the Royals won the pennant. That is an age at which allegiances are cemented for life. My husband loves baseball with his heart and soul. As a kid, he tagged along with his grandma’s senior citizens group to baseball games. It was a two-and-a-half-hour bus ride each way, longer if you counted the stop at Furr’s Cafeteria in Olathe on the way home. To this day, if he has to choose a number for any reason, it will always be George Brett’s number 5. Always.

We’d been married about a year when I went to work at the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City’s historic 18th & Vine district. AJM shares a building with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and Kauffman Stadium is a short, straight shot up I-70 from the museum complex. Working there, I learned about the history of the game from the Negro Leagues perspective. Buck O’Neil stopped by almost daily. I didn’t know much about baseball back then, but I knew I was in the presence of greatness when I had the privilege of seeing Buck.

My husband and I started going to Royals games together. He would drive to KC from his job in Topeka, pick me up at the museum, and we’d go to the game. Afterward, he would take me back to my car at the museum and we’d drive home separately. We were broke newlyweds and sat in the cheap seats, but it was fun. Tony Pena was the team’s manager, and the slogan that year was “We Believe.” I think I still have the t-shirt I caught between innings.

And so my baseball education began. Baseball has a steep learning curve. One of the best quotes in Bull Durham – a movie full of great quotes – is this gem: “This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.”

That’s true, at the most basic level. You cheer when your team catches the ball. You cheer when your team hits the ball. You cheer louder when one of your team’s players crosses home plate. If you stick with the game, though, you start to pick up on all the nuances and strategy. And that’s when baseball really gets fun. People who think baseball is boring and slow just don’t know what they’re watching. Baseball is not a game for stupid people. It requires an encyclopedic knowledge of rules. Anticipation becomes a big part of the experience. The teams are anticipating each others’ moves. As a fan, it’s exciting to try and anticipate how the players, the manager and even the base coaches are going to respond.

Baseball is not a game you can learn quickly. I still feel like a novice most of the time. It isn’t until I explain the game to others that I realize how much I’ve learned. For example, last night during Game 5 of the World Series, a friend messaged to ask why the commentators were saying Wade Davis would only be available for one inning. She wanted to know why he couldn’t pitch more innings. Another friend wanted to know why we cheered at a sacrifice fly. “The batter didn’t get on base. He got out. Why are you cheering?” Because he did his job. He got out, but he advanced the runner. He did what was best for the team, at his own expense.

Which brings me to another thing I love about baseball. Even the best player can’t carry an entire team. Just ask Bryce Harper and the 2015 Nationals. There are no Bryce Harpers on the 2015 Royals. The World Series MVP was Royals catcher Salvador Perez, because he is the heart of that team. He is a cheerful workhorse who took blow after blow and just kept getting up. The Royals won because they were a unified force with extraordinary command of the fundamentals of baseball. The mantra became “Keep the Line Moving.” They played as one.

We have what I jokingly call “dual fanship.” We cheer for the Kansas City Royals and the Washington Nationals. We say it’s okay because we have an American League team and a National League team. It’s only a problem every three years when they play each other in inter-league games, and it would be an issue if they ever met in the World Series. The Royals are nostalgic. The Royals are my childhood. Even though I wasn’t a baseball fan as a kid, the Royals are woven into the fabric of my upbringing. The two are inextricable.

If Kansas City is my hometown, Washington DC is my home. We love it here. The Nationals are a huge part of that. We have season tickets. I’ve stopped going during the week because keeping my son out until 10:30 or later when he needs to be up for school the next morning would be poor parenting. I miss it, though. I love Nats Park, and the wonderful people who work there and have become mainstays in our lives.

My love of baseball is my love of my little family. My husband and I are opposites in many ways, but even if it feels like we have no common ground at a given moment, we always have baseball. Every year before the beginning of the season, he watches Ken Burns’s documentary “Baseball.” It used to be nine innings/hours long; it is now ten. It spans the entire history of the game and is fascinating. After many, many viewings (or at least hearing it playing in the other room), I can practically recite it by heart. My favorite part, by the way, is Buck O’Neil singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” which you can (and should) watch here.

My son was born in February, and I was on maternity leave during spring training and the first month of the season. I remember being in that exhausted twilight of new motherhood, watching spring training games on TV. We took our son to his first game at Nationals Park when he was seven weeks old; he went to his first Royals game at Kauffman Stadium when he was ten weeks old. Some people may find that questionable and possibly even irresponsible. Here’s the God’s honest truth: We would have taken him sooner if the season had started any earlier.

Baseball is what we do. It’s who we are. There is order in baseball. Baseball is simple, and it is complicated. Baseball is steeped in tradition and history, for better or worse. Baseball doesn’t try to pretend it’s something it isn’t or ignore its past. Baseball tries to learn from its mistakes, from segregation to steroids. And now our 2015 Royals, with their late-inning magic, are part of that history.

So what now?

In the words of Rogers Hornsby:
“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”