The New Confidence of Kansas City

By Jason Kander

I asked my friend Jason Kander—attorney, author, veteran, podcaster, politician, adult baseball league centerfielder, Veterans Community Project president and defender of indefensible music tastes—to write a postmortem of the Kansas City Royals’ surprisingly wonderful season. He went bigger and wrote about the good vibes in Kansas City.

My friend Joe invited me to write an essay reflecting on the Royals’ season. I’m not sure what I’ve written is exactly what he had in mind, but when I sat down at my computer, this is what poured from my fingers.

This past Wednesday, the Kansas City Royals were eliminated from the playoffs by the New York Yankees. While that’s disappointing, it doesn’t change the fact that we* became the first team ever to lose 106 games and make the playoffs the following year. A statistic like that might lead you to think 2024 was a fluke. It might make you think we have no basis for optimism about next year.

*I’m a fifth generation Kansas Citian and my children are 6^th generation Kansas Citians, so, yes, I will use the first person plural despite not having a roster spot.

And if we were talking about any other town, or even this town at some other time in our history, I’d say your skepticism is warranted. But that’s just not how we do things in KC these days.

Oh, believe me, I didn’t used to have this type of optimism. Kansas City didn’t used to trade in such currency, but we are a grown-up town now, and we demand our seat at the table. In fact, we don’t even want the table to be round. We want it to be long and rectangular, like Bruce Wayne’s in the first Batman movie, so we can sit at the head of it where we belong.

But getting to this place of extreme confidence has been a civic journey. Let’s go back exactly 20 years. In 2004, Kansas City was described as a doughnut hole community, because nobody went downtown. Around this time, local attorney Sly James (who would go on to serve two terms as mayor) is rumored to have won a bet with friends by walking totally unnoticed across Main Street without a stitch of clothing.

In 2004, we were 11 years removed from the retirement of our baseball hero, George Brett, and the surreal experience of everyone’s football hero, Joe Montana’s, quixotic layover with the Chiefs. But our place within the American family was akin to an undersized, overlooked, afterthought third cousin.

We were still coasting on our 1985 victory over our nemesis, the St. Louis Cardinals. And when I say nemesis, what I really mean is that Kansas City and St. Louis were engaged in an epic rivalry that meant everything to Kansas Citians and was only vaguely known to St. Louisans.

We were—as a baseball team and as a sports town and as a municipality—in the doldrums. I grew up reading my favorite columnist in The Kansas City Star, Joe Posnanski, routinely try to bring it all to life, or at least try to give us a way to laugh about it. And he did that. Though I may never get over one of his final columns, in which Joe laid out what the Royals’ roster would have been had they been willing to reach the league average in payroll. What a gut punch that was.

Thanks in part to Joe’s entertaining missives and the spiritual nudging of Buck O’Neill and something about the spirit of a town that was founded in a somewhat arbitrary place by people who simply believed in the ground, Kansas City’s doldrums have always had a high floor.

And so, in 2004, we Kansas Citians had a glimmer of hope. Dangerous hope. The kind of hope Red warned Andy about in the second act of “Shawshank.”

The 2003 Chiefs had gone 13-3 under Dick Vermeil, the 2003 Royals had managed to finish above .500, and—to our shock and excitement—there was a weekly sitcom, “Married to the Kellys,” on network television SET IN KANSAS CITY!

That last bit is important. If you grew up in Chicago or New York or Los Angeles or Philadelphia or Miami or San Francisco or Dallas or Boston or even Atlanta, this won’t make sense to you. But if when you and your family went on vacation and people asked where you were from and you said Cleveland or Denver or Phoenix or Birmingham or Omaha, then you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about when I say it was thrilling to imagine other Americans knowing something about us. It didn’t matter that “Married to the Kellys” starred a lesser-known Breckin Meyer and most of the plot was about him adjusting to a place where all food groups are meat and everything stops for a few hours on Sundays.

In 2004, we started to feel like maybe when we traveled to other places we wouldn’t always have to explain to people that Kansas City is in Missouri and, yes, there’s also one in Kansas, but the Missouri one is the main one. And if that was too much to hope for, maybe they wouldn’t automatically assume we all walked to school from our farms.

“Married to the Kellys” made it 22 episodes before it was unceremoniously cancelled. And just as the Royals’ 2004 season began, I headed off to Army officer’s training at Fort Lewis, Wash., where I wouldn’t be permitted to call home or access any news of the outside world for several weeks. But I just knew the Royals and their young star Carlos Beltran would build on the previous year’s greatness. I was still on a high from witnessing the first Royals winning season of my adult life!

On June 25, 2004, my platoon went through chemical warfare training, meaning we walked into a gas chamber in full chemical suits and then were ordered to remove our gas masks. Naturally, once you do this, you keep your eyes closed and you hold your breath, which is why a drill sergeant who hasn’t removed their mask stands in front of you and yells at you to look them in the eyes and recite your social security number and birthday until it’s obvious you’re about to die of asphyxiation and misery if you’re not permitted to leave.

I emerged from the gas chamber struggling to clear the stinging tears from my eyes, fighting to extract from my sinuses more mucus than I knew my body could produce, and gasping for oxygen. That’s when one of the drill sergeants said, “Hey Kander, the Royals are in dead last and yesterday they traded Carlos Beltran.”

And you know what? I wasn’t even that surprised. None of us were. Disappointment was just a part of loving Kansas City and all her teams during those years when the most exciting thing at the stadium was a Lemonade vendor. He walked up and down the stadium stairs singing, “Lemonade Leeemonade Leeeeemonade Whoooooooo!”

Witt didn’t relish how the postseason ended, but he expects to be back. (Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

Which brings me to 20 years later. Today, well, we’re a different city. We won the 2014 AL Wild-Card game, which was probably the most exciting baseball game ever played, lost the 2014 World Series by a whisker, and just like in “Rocky II,” we won the title a year later.

Our downtown is gleaming with pride, its streetcar is teaming with people, and someone would definitely notice if you tried to cross Main Street naked. We have led the nation toward solutions for veterans’ homelessness. We were the first city in America to make all public transportation free.** We are the beloved hometown of Ted Lasso and Antman and we host stuff like the NFL draft and the World Cup and (most years) the AFC Championship.

**Like many American cities, we also have a serious violent crime problem and a housing crisis and we continue to struggle with income inequality. But we’re working on that stuff and this essay is about optimism.

Our MLS team, Sporting KC, has won championships and our NWSL team, the KC Current, is electric to watch. They’ve turned me into a soccer fan and—get this—they play in the world’s first stadium ever built solely for a women’s professional sports team. They’re called the Current because the stadium sits on the riverfront that city leaders have been talking about developing for roughly 100 years. And now it’s happening, because these days, in Kansas City, we take big swings.

A friend of mine likes to say that “global attention is the currency of the realm, and the pilot light is lit in Kansas City.”

Our quarterback is a member of the TIME 100 and he keeps winning us Super Bowls. The world’s biggest popstar—who happens to be a very kind, thoughtful, Kansas City-type person—spends a good deal of time hanging out here, because she’s in love (as is the rest of the world) with our likeable, talented, charismatic, Midwest-made tight end.

There are about a dozen apparel brands in this town dedicated exclusively to making shirts and hats and jackets that feature “Kansas City” or “KC” insignias. You know those stores you see in airports that sell tourist garb featuring the place you’re leaving? You buy that stuff to wear at home, not for when you come back to town, because you don’t want to look like a tourist, right?

Well, we all wear that stuff in our hometown. All of us. All the time. In Kansas City, we locals dress like tourists.

So, when I reflect on our improbable 2024 Royals, including our elimination at the hands of a team with a payroll 17,000 times our own, I don’t shake my fist at the system. I ponder which corner outfielder we’ll pick up in free agency to add power to the fifth spot in the lineup and which reliever we’ll get to set up our already fantastic closer. But I do not hope we make these moves, I know we will, because we have removed doubt from the equation and replaced it with unnatural, outsized confidence.

In the clubhouse after Wednesday’s season-ending loss, Bobby Witt Jr. said he now expects to make the postseason every year. And to the rest of us, that makes so much sense it feels nearly obvious.

Because we are Kansas City. We are the center of the known universe, we are just getting started, and next year we’re gonna win the World Series.