The distraction of baseball

Lets get something straight, I love the Royals. I wouldn’t spend my periodic free time watching and stressing over a team that is below .500 for the eighth season in a row if I didn’t. Furthermore, I wouldn’t spend my even less frequent time writing for free about the goings-ons around the organization if the same wasn’t one-hundred percent true. You know this because you’re reading this and you care just as much as I do.

For me, baseball has always been something I use to play, casually watched and enjoyed thoroughly. I never thought of it as anything more. It just seemed silly to do so. But things changed somewhere along way. At some point the seriousness of life became an inadvertent gateway to a passion for the sport that runs deep in my veins.

It could have been the very moment that I was called into the living room by my parents along with my siblings and heard a word associated with my mother that I didn’t fully understand, but I knew it wasn’t a good thing: cancer.

Bad things happen in life and it’s human nature to distract ourselves from it. Everyone has an outlet, I chose sports and in this case baseball.

When you’re eight-years old you don’t know what to do when you get bad news. Hell, when you’re 22-years-old you don’t know what to do when you get bad news, so you revert to a distraction—a comfort of sorts. The Royals weren’t ever good when I started following them. But that’s what made them so intriguing, thus, so distracting. I expended part of my energy each baseball season hoping and quite literally praying for the Royals to be good.

I was a real-life version of the kid in “Angels in the Outfield”—without the incentive of my family getting back together. It frustrated me and angered me beyond what I perceived as nadir to watch my favorite team struggle year in and year out, but more importantly—it distracted me.

I could look at trades like Jermaine Dye for Neifi Perez—essentially straight up—and read the backlash from people in the know and realize that I should be just as mad at the move, even though I was only 12 years old.

There have been a lot of bad trades made by the Royals, but my lord, that one still takes the cake for me. 

You see that’s the beauty of sports. They serve as a get-away from the realness of life. Instead of sulking over a recent personal-life incident that landed me smack-dab in the middle of a mopey mindset, I decided to focus my attention on work—Which consists of following and writing about sports and I’m still amazed that I get paid to do that.

When I wasn’t distracted by work I spent my time following up to the minute drama of the Royals negotiations with an 18-year-old kid who has much more athletic ability than me. It seems silly that I and many Royals fans/bloggers were so wrapped up in this thing when it’s put that way.

But you know what? Who cares. The way I see it, it was a potential cornerstone player of a franchise that has the looks of actually being a contender when he is ready to play in the big-leagues.

By the way, I’m talking about Bubba Starling in case you are a straggler or someone who was looking for late-night romance and your computer guessed the wrong URL and you decided this looked interesting enough for a read. (Think about it) In that case, welcome new Royals fan!

I’ve had this thought from the moment I read about the legend of Bubba Starling a little over a year ago that he could be the Royals’ Joe Mauer. It doesn’t take much for the comparison to take shape. A local kid who has top-five draft pick potential in baseball and is also really freaking good at football—quarterback as well—and plays basketball in his free-time, which he’s also not too shabby at.

So when the Royals were actually able to draft this local phenom, I was giddy with joy and my mind skipped to 2015.

I envisioned it being late August with the Royals six games up in the AL Central fueled by Eric Hosmer who was in the midst of an MVP season at first base, but would most likely lose out to teammate Alex Gordon, whose woes before 2011 seemed like decades ago. Alcides Escobar was going for his third consecutive gold glove and Mike Montgomery was helping anchor a pitching staff that hadn’t been great, but was good enough for the best offense in the league.

Then there was Bubba. Starling was putting up huge numbers in triple-A to begin the season and had been an early July call-up. The rookie looked like a natural in centerfield. Gliding back to easily gather deep fly balls and blistering extra-base hits to the large gaps that exist between the friendly confines at Kauffman Stadium.

Yes, it seemed so real and it was absolutely gorgeous.

**Snap back to reality**

None of that dream exists, yet. But I could see it the night of Aug. 16 when Starling signed with the Royals for a surprisingly cheap $7.5 million. The wheels to an exciting future of a potential star were set in motion. And the difference between Starling and past Royals “saviors” is the likeliness of the scenario that played out in my head. Starling won’t have to be a savior or even a star right away. He’ll have other former “saviors” surrounding him that look likely to produce consistently for a long time.

He could be arriving on a team that has already buried the long post-season drought that has plagued this franchise and lingered in its fan’s heads for nearly three decades.

Just maybe.

That’s the beauty of uncertainty, it keeps us curious and guessing at what’s next.

In the meantime I have my own problems to worry about. Which…..you know, come to think of it, I’m not sure what those were.