Royals fans can’t seem to wrap their head around this season

The Kansas City Royals have been a very interesting sports team to root for. On one hand, they’ve had a lot of great postseason moments. The franchise has two World Series wins–as much or more than 15 other franchises–and is one of very few teams in recent memory to boast back-to-back league championships victories.

On the other hand, the Royals have often been truly awful. The team has lost 90 or more games 14 times since the turn of the millennium, with seven of those seasons at more than 100 losses. That’s a lot of losing.

But this year, the Royals have been a secret third thing: mediocre. The Royals have been above .500, below .500, and at .500 all season, and have settled into a playoff longshot at about one-in-eight odds. That’s not great, but it’s not zero, and there’s still something to be said about relevance late into the season.

Fan reactions to this mediocre team with modest success has been…bizarre. I know that sports fandom is illogical and that talking about sports online is an exercise in passion and as much venting as anything else. Still, the amount of folks who are talking about the team like they’re the Colorado Rockies right now is way higher than you’d think, and fans seem to be particularly emotional and shortsided.

It seems to me that fans should be happier. Don’t you think fans in one of those 14 90-loss campaigns would have killed to have a one-in-eight shot at making the playoffs in mid-August? But I can explain it, I think, with three reasons.

First, and biggest, is that Royals fans have had so little experience what a run-of-the-mill, mediocre team looks like that everyone is sort of shorcircuiting trying to comprehend what’s going on.

There’s no official designation of what “mediocre” is, but I think I’ve got a pretty good definition: a mediocre baseball team is a team that ends up between 78 and 84 games. In winning percentage, that’s between .475 and .525. These are teams that generally don’t sell at the trade deadline, still have some sort of chance at the playoffs in August, and have sustained flashes of talent throughout the year but don’t make the playoffs.

This year marks the 31st Royals season since the 1994 strike. The “mediocre” range is very common, and on average, about a quarter of teams end up there every year. But if this year holds as a “mediocre” season, it would only be the sixth such season in those 31 years, and more poignantly, would only be the third since 2003.

The Royals just aren’t in this position very often. Historically, their season has usually been over by Memorial Day. And when they’ve been good, they’ve been good enough that Royals fans haven’t been too concerned that the Royals would miss the playoffs. So fans haven’t been in this position. They don’t know what to do with their hands. Can you blame them?

Second, I do think that there is a sort of Kansas City Chiefs effect here. No, not all Royals fans are Chiefs fans. But a lot of Royals fans are Chiefs fans, and the Chiefs have been nothing short of a dynasty with some of the best football players at their positions of all time. With the Chiefs, fans expect them to, at minimum, make it to the conference title game. I don’t think that expectation slides over to baseball. But I do think those feelings can seep into baseball, especially during the period of time when the two seasons overlap.

Third, it seems to me that fans are just scared. For pretty much anybody born in and after the 1980s, rooting for the Royals has meant that success is fleeting and that losing is quick to return. The Royals have only posted three consecutive winning seasons on three occasions in the last 45 years (‘79 through ‘82, ‘87 through ‘89, and ‘13 through ‘15). The Royals have gone through rebuild after rebuild. They’ve been bad so often.

In other words, I think Royals fans are waiting for the other shoe to drop, because in their lifetimes, the other shoe has always dropped. For every 2003 comes a 2004, so to speak.

I want to be clear here that I’m not telling fans to cease being critical or being positive or whatever it may be. You do you. All I’m trying to do here is to explain a trend. Hopefully we’ll all be more used to mediocre teams and good teams in a few years and we’ll be able to calibrate our excitement levels to be a little more healthy.