Chiefs!

Okay, I get that Alex Smith is too expensive for the Chiefs to keep. And I'm psyched about Patrick Mahomes starting next year, I think he's the most promising thing I've seen in a Chiefs uniform since Dick Vermeil's years coaching here.

So they've traded Smith to the Washington Redskins, frees up umpteen million in cap space they desperately need to shore up an iffy defense (and I hope maybe upgrade their offensive line so the green quarterback doesn't get creamed too often).

But the Eagles this year illustrate how you can have a Super Bowl caliber team, a promising young quarterback and really need an experienced backup QB. Without Nick Foles, they don't go to the Super Bowl this coming Sunday.

I realized today that the perfect solution for the Chiefs would be Colin Kaepernick. He's had a year off to get healthy, he's a big, strong, fast quarterback with plenty of experience (and his talents are very similar to Mahomes' from what I can tell so he'd plug in to a Mahomes-centric system pretty readily), and he's unemployed.

The Chiefs already have a kneeler or two during the anthem, so I don't think that'd be an issue. And as far as reclamation projects, Andy Reid took fucking Michael Vick and gave him another chance, surely wearing idiotic Castro t-shirts isn't as bad as dog fighting.

And I think they could structure the contract in a way that would be hard to resist: say $2 million guaranteed, with incentives like $500,000 for each game he starts and another $500,000 for each game he stars and wins. So if Mahomes goes down in the preseason and Colin leads us to a 16-0 regular season, he would make $18 million, a very respectable salary for him and a very reasonable deal for the Chiefs. If he spends the season watching from the sidelines, he's got his $2 million, still healthy and fresh, and probably has better prospects of getting some team in the league to try him as a starter again.

Honestly, I don't know why the NFL hasn't given me a job making big money. I can figure this shit out on the fly.

How Many People Came to the Royals Parade? ALL OF THEM!

I think I saw that the 1985 World Series parade in Kansas City drew 300,000. That's a lot of people to line two and a half miles of streets and clog up the lawn of the Liberty Memorial (a venue that supports an annual music festival that sells 55,000 tickets). So when they said they expected 200,000 for the first one after a 30 year drought, one which featured a lot of years where the team was excrementally bad, followed by last year when we were painfully close to winning it all, well, I thought that was a low expectation.

Some sources said they expected more like 500,000 and that I could buy. It's a mess getting a half million people in and out of downtown Kansas City, but yeah, I could see that. Remembering how many people skipped out of school in 1985 (or pulled their kids), pretty much all the schools in town closed, and a lot of businesses followed suit, including my employer. Then add an amazing Indian summer day and yeah, that half million might be a low number. I've heard estimates as high as 850,000, and I'm skeptical of the high number by default but it was definitely packed.

I had apheresis in the morning, which I almost cancelled out on just so I could scope out a good spot. I could have seen a lot more of the actual parade up close had I done so, but I reasoned that I would probably be done at noon or thereabouts (sometimes, when the lovely and talented Nurse Jennifer has to stick me a few times, it takes longer), and with a bicycle to cut through the traffic bullshit, I'd be able to get from KU Med to the Liberty Memorial in about a half hour (normally that's more like a ten minute ride, but I knew it'd be crazy).

And the parade was scheduled to start at noon and finish at Union Station at 2:00 with a rally, so I figured that was good. I pictured being able to get closer to the route than I managed, so maybe I should have just headed straight downtown at 7:00 in the morning with a canvas chair on my bike rack and a picnic cooler of food and beverage, gotten a nice piece of sidewalk on Grand. Next time, I guess. Hopefully I won't be 76 years old next time (that'd be the same interval as this year and last time we had such a parade).

And damn it, we need the Chiefs to have a championship parade, too. Their drought is even longer in terms of championships, though they did have a lot of years with Schottenheimer and Vermeil where they at least reliably went to the playoffs. And I think Andy Reid is the coach to get us back to that level, where it's at least possible to make a run at a championship. If you didn't know, championships aren't something you can just order out of a catalog: there's hundreds of the most talented athletes on earth trying to stop you so they can have it, coached by the best minds in their sport.

Which is why I'm so totally in love with the 2015 Royals. As was pointed out at the rally, Cy Young winner, not on our team, but we beat them. League MVP, not on our roster either, but we beat them. We have All Stars, we have Gold Gloves but we don't have some superstar who carries the team on his shoulders, we have a lot of really good baseball players who all contribute significantly to the team's success and don't think it's all about them. And that's so charming, a half million plus people will drop what they're doing and muddle their way in and out of downtown to be a part of it.

I know if you want to get technical about it, Sporting KC got a national championship last year and didn't get a parade as far as I know. And that's fucked up if you're a soccer fan, though I suppose MLS to soccer what the Nippon League is to baseball: they're quite good, better than minor league, have quite a few fans in their local country, but their best players get siphoned off to play in the real deal elsewhere.

And soccer is growing in popularity here, it can still have it's day, it just wasn't November 3, 2015. That day was for a city to shut down and tip its hat to a team that used to lose as many games in a season as we won this year, a team so bad it didn't take a team photo the year before Dayton Moore was hired because 'nobody wanted to remember that group.' Just under a decade later, a mostly homegrown group took the crown with such a diverse set of contributions the MVP wasn't an obvious vote: you could make the case for Salvy (who got it), Escobar, Moustakas, Hosmer, Davis, Volquez, Zobrist (does he know how to hit anything but doubles?), etc. Or Alex Gordon, clearly the best player on the team, but the overall team was so good that even without him for two months they still ran away with the division title.

Framing all this, besides my apheresis therapy, I had to take one of our cats, Bulldog, to the vet. Abscess tooth. They gave him a big antibiotic shot, a big pain shot, and a plan to pull that tooth for almost $500 over what they charged for the shots. I dunno, Corinna is going to get a second opinion from another vet, but given all the cats that need homes, and I threw good money after bad trying to save Jello who was much, much younger than Bulldog (he's already had a few molars extracted), while the Humane Society is turning cats away, this might be the end of the line for my gray tabby friend.

Ooops, party foul on me. That's a downer.

Anyway, a good time was had by all, though it was exhausting getting in and out of there even by bike. The fact that I only saw a dozen or so bicycles, well, that's where we have some serious educating to do. Folks, don't try to take your car with you when you're going into a super dense situation like this, but you don't have to hoof it. A bike is about five times as fast for the same effort as walking, but takes up a fraction of the space of even a compact car. I didn't set out for the parade until 12:15 and I was back at the vet to see about my sick kitty before 4:00, and I guarantee you nobody driving a car to the parade could say anything like that (witness the fact that it took me 90 minutes to get home from the vet once I was in my car, a trip that would normally be about fifteen minutes by car).

I hope Glass will spend the money to keep Gordon and Zobrist. I know we didn't grow Zobrist and I know Gordon can probably get insane money as a free agent, but putting a winner on the field put fans in the seats in a big way (record attendance), and that as well as post season games make the team money. And you've got a winner here, and hopefully more winners in the pipeline of the farm system. Baseball doesn't quite have revenue sharing the way the NFL does, but they've moved away from a model where only five or six teams are ever in contention, and there's no reason we can't be forever Royal, always going into April thinking maybe this year we can make a run at a title, not thinking maybe we'll lose in triple digits and trade away our only decent players.

Next year? I dunno, it's hard to repeat. When we got to game seven last year and lost, the idea that we had unfinished business and would come back, well, that gambler who bet $100,000 grand on it, he got $2.5 million in payoff because that's how slim the odds of that are. I just hope we can get back to it before there are people who were born, grew up here, went to college, started families and still hadn't ever known of a championship. There were a lot of those twenty-somethings in the crowd today, and for perspective, 30 years ago, when the Royals last won it, the team was only 16 years old (and had recently been to a World Series they didn't win)

But this was a peak experience for me. I've never seen so many people come together for something like this. Would the world be a better place if they came together this way for something that mattered more than a baseball game? Sure, fair enough. But you could cancel the World Series and it's not going to change how many earthquakes, wars, other natural disasters the world has to cope with, and in the meantime, Lets Go Royals!

Crowned

I'll be going to the parade tomorrow, I missed the one in 1985 due to bad decision making (I asked Mom for permission, should have just done it like I did most stuff she didn't think I should do).

In the meantime, I'll just leave this here. To their credit, while I don't see the kind of chemistry the Royals clubhouse has among the Mets, when one of Murphy's teammates was served a gold-plated opportunity to throw the error-prone infielder under the bus, he instead said, 'We wouldn't even be here without him.' So that's a start: Murphy's bat is formidable, and his fielding can probably be improved with coaching, and if they have each other's backs, who knows, maybe the Mets will improve as much after a World Series loss as the Royals did and come back to take it all in 2016. Then again, since Murphy is a free agent widely expected to leave the Mets this year (as is Cespedes, who was picked up much the way the Royals picked up Zobrist and Cueto), the chances of getting the band back together seem slim for the long suffering team from Queens.

I hope the Royals can keep their band together, IMHO Glass has the money to retain Alex Gordon and Ben Zobrist, make another run at this thing. Cueto, given how inconsistent he was since we got him (though he was damned brilliant when he was on), I'd let that go given how much starting pitching commands a premium in the league. But Gordon and Zobrist, don't let them go over money, you're making it hand over fist with record attendance, post-season appearances and merchandise (merch you couldn't give away ten years ago). I'm sure there is more to come from this farm system, but don't revert to letting your best players go to the Dodgers, Yankees and other teams with more salary than sense.



I'm glad they gave Salvy the actual MVP trophy, there's no one player on the Royals team that really stands out as MVP, they all contribute significantly (it's their greatest strength), but Salvy takes the biggest beating by far, and has the most irrepressible personality. By definition, at that position, you're part player part coach, you're destroying your knees (and he's done more innings in the past two years in that awkward pose than anyone in the history of the sport), getting nailed by ferociously thrown balls, clipped by bats, beaned by foul balls. I wouldn't stand there while the likes of Ventura and Cueto threw if you gave me a sumo suit on top of the rest of the armor (hell, I don't think I'd be brave enough to stand in the batter's box).

How Much Fun? ALL OF IT!

I don't own a TV. When I tell people this, they often look at me with pity, as if I was somehow to poverty stricken to find one of the free non-flat TVs people put out to the curb when they get an astonishingly cheap flat screen with higher resolution and stunning picture quality. If you can't afford a TV in America today, you probably can't afford the ketchup packets by the trash can at McDonald's.

You get the same reaction when you commute to work by bicycle—if you only had a car, right? But no, I have a car. I really like my car, it's sexy with pink polka dots, gets great mileage, it's paid for and it's roomy too boot.

But that's not what I came to talk to you about, as Arlo would say. I came to talk about baseball. The only reason the TV thing and the bike thing is even vaguely relevant is the Royals are in the World Series for the second year in a row and I am loving it. And since I don't have TV at home, I tend to watch the games in bars, mostly bars I ride my bike to.

For so many years, rooting for the Royals (and for that matter, my NL crush the Pirates), has been like watching Star Wars: A New Hope and rooting for Alderaan.

After deciding Chicago's wasn't my bar to watch sports in after the NL Wildcard, I started casting around for a new place to watch the Royals in the post-season. My first attempt was a bar that will remain un-named in Lobsterland. When I walked in, I smelled the distinct aroma of Mom's house, which is to say cigarette smoke. Actually, more like when my Mom's sister and my Uncle Vick used to visit and the three of them would get chain-smoking for a few days. The smell of me in my twenties, actually, when I smoked like I was afraid they'd shut down North Carolina if I didn't do my part. But I quit that nonsense twenty years ago (I'm certain I'd be dead if I hadn't), so all those smoke-free laws they've passed, while the libertarian in me thinks such laws are bullshit, the human who likes to breathe is fine with that.

I wondered, after a while, this place, the bartender was smoking, there were ashtrays on the bar. And I thought about how when I smoked I thought second hand smoke as a health hazard was bogus, but I could feel it at work during a single baseball game. I wondered if KCK's no smoking law had some exemption for tap rooms, a bar with no grill. Not inconceivable, the Dotte was pretty much the last one to even drift towards such policies when they started sweeping through. I thought, Well, if you can't smoke in a bar in the Dotte, where can you smoke?

I inquired of a woman who was practically lighting one off another, is there some sort of loophole? She took a drag and exhaled a raspy, 'The loophole is don't tell on us.'

I will never rat you out. I will also never try to watch a game at that bar even if they did have cheap pitchers and the game on. The place is a last haven for the handful of hardcore nicotine addicts who won't switch to vaping, can't relax without their smokes, and don't think that means they should sit at home in solitude. I can dig it, though I want to borrow Walter White's respirator next time I watch a game with those people.

So my next try was Johnnie's on 7th. And we have a winner. The place is elbow-to-elbow Royals fans, most sporting the blue, all of them into the game. Loud bars are generally a turnoff for me, but this is more like a tiny stadium except you don't have to pay to park or get in and the beers are two bucks. A bartender periodically will jump up on the bar and shout, 'What are we watching?' and everyone shouts 'ROYALS!'—to which he asks, 'How much fun are we going to have?' which earns a chorus of 'ALL OF IT!' People who live near this joint who aren't baseball fans had to be distressed on Tuesday's Game One of the World Series, which went fourteen innings and finished after midnight (resulting in the Royals becoming the only team in history to win two World Series games on the same day).

One game I drove to the bar, had to meter my consumption very closely because, driving. I've been scolded by naysayers who insist you can get a DUI on a bicycle, but it's not a motorized vehicle. Maybe you could get charged but I doubt you could get convicted. Public intoxication, sure, disorderly conduct, possibly, creating a public nuisance, I suppose. But DUI is not an issue when you pedal home from the bar.

The fourteen inning marathon that was Game One, a friend of mine commented that everyone leaving the K was sober by the time it was over. They stop selling beer in the seventh inning. At Johnnie's, the effect was counter to that for a lot of folks. People who were hammered by the eighth inning and just kept drinking, well, one of them decided I was wearing a Hawaiian shirt not because that's all I generally wear, but because I didn't have a Royals blue Johnnie's on Seventh t-shirt. I tried to tell him I wasn't that much for t-shirts, but he wanted to know my size. I said a 3XL, he said the biggest they had was a 2XL, and the next thing I know he's handing me one.

I wore it, under an open Hawaiian because really, when I went back for Game Two. I asked him if he remembered buying me the shirt, and he said, 'There's a lot of last night I don't remember, but I do remember that. It looks good on you.'

And then Johnny Cuedo threw nine innings, allowing only two hits and one run while we lit up the Mets' pitching staff like the Las Vegas Strip. How much fun did we have? All of it.

Blue October

I'd kinda forgot how to care about baseball. I was terrible at it the limited amount of my childhood I pretended to play it, and that put a damper on my enthusiasm but for as long as I've been old enough to be aware of baseball, I've been rooting for the Royals and the Pirates. Royals is obviously an accident of geography, if I were born in Spain my first allegiance would probably be to some soccer team. Bucs I can't explain, I've never even been to Pittsburgh.



But growing up, Royals and Pirates were good teams. Great players. My teams won and lost the World Series back than. Then came a 25+ year stretch where if either developed someone even modestly talented, they ended up playing for the Yankees, Redsox, Tigers, the teams that spend like there's no tomorrow because there wasn't one today.

I've long wished for a Royals-Pirates World Series, this is the first year in my adult life where I can say it without cracking up, blowing soda out my nose.

It's a long road ahead to the World Series, I know. Pirates are a wild card, though this year (unlike the past two) they host that wild card game, and while home-field is a modest advantage in a series, it's epic in a one game shootout.

I know I lot of folks want an I-70 series rematch, but I find St. Louis annoying both as a Royals fan AND as a Pirates fan, so I want them to go down to the Pirates after my Bucs win the wild card tomorrow night.

Gotta quit this ranting and hit the sack so I can ride to work tomorrow, watch the NL Wild Card game at Chicago's, ride home, ride back Thursday and then catch the Royals on their first playoff game Thursday night. I try to get enough sleep, but I think MLB is about to make that freaking impossible.