Here’s the situation. There are two teams, one from San Francisco and one from Kansas City. One team is trying to end a 29-year championship drought, while the other is trying to win its third title in five years. But enough about the 2014 World Series.
This joke circulated the baseball Twitter-verse when this year’s Super Bowl matchup was officially determined. The San Francisco 49ers will take on the Kansas City Chiefs in Super LVIII in Las Vegas with an eerily similar narrative to the 2014 Fall Classic, which featured the San Francisco Giants and the Kansas City Royals. The Royals and 49ers were/are looking to snap an almost-three-decade stretch of championship-less seasons, while the Giants and Chiefs were/are looking to enter their names into the “Dynasty” category of sports history. Luckily for Taylor Swift, it was the Giants that won the 2014 World Series over the Royals in a dramatic seven-game set that, when looking back, encapsulates a lot of my early baseball viewing and bridges it to my blossoming into a true baseball fan.
I became a baseball fan in 2007. After stumbling upon the Joba Chamberlain playoff gnat game (yeah, that’s the first baseball game I ever watched), my grandparents took me to GameStop to pick out a video game. I selected MLB Power Pros 2007 for the Nintendo Wii and was hooked from the beginning. That’s how I got to know the next couple of World Series champions in the '08 Phillies and '09 Yankees, two powerhouse teams that plowed their way through October to capture championships that felt long overdue. Well, “overdue” might not be the best word, considering the champion of three of the next five World Series, the Giants, hadn’t won a championship since 1954! Now, that’s what I call “overdue”. The Giants’ even-numbered-year dynasty (besides 2014, they won in 2010 against the Rangers and 2012 against the Tigers) isn’t quite the same as the Astros’ or Dodgers’ dominance of the last seven years because while the Giants did come out on top three times in five chances, their teams never felt like consistent winners, but that was kind of the fun of it. Brandon Crawford and Brandon Belt were in the infancies of their careers when the Giants won their ‘chips. Those teams were actually anchored by names like Pablo Sandoval, Hunter Pence, Aubrey Huff, Buster Posey, and Melky Cabrera. And how could you forget pitchers like Matt Cain, Tim Lincecum, Barry Zito, Madison Bumgarner, or Brian Wilson? This wacky combination of almost-stars will stick in my brain forever because they maintained a level of excellence in October that led to championships, plain and simple.
But those Royals teams, the 2014 pennant-winners and the 2015 champs, were no slouches. They were the upstarts when they made the 2014 playoffs, but boy, were they a fun team to watch. Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Alex Gordon, Lorenzo Cain, Alcides Escobar, and others led KC on a furious effort to get back to the Fall Classic for the first time since 1985, and they delivered, setting up a series for the ages. While it doesn’t stack up to the 2016 World Series that saw the Cubs end the Billy Goat Curse, the 2014 edition brought all the heat, all ending on a Pablo Sandoval pop fly catch with the Royals 90 feet away from tying Game Seven in the bottom of the ninth at Kauffman Stadium.
While that Panda catch symbolized the end of the Giants’ run of quasi-dominance for the first half of the 2010s, it also closed the chapter on an era of baseball watching for me: my first dynasty. Is it a great first dynasty? Eh, not really. My grandparents had the Gehrig-to-DiMaggio-to-Mantle Yankees, while my dad and uncles had the Reggie Jackson A’s and the Big Red Machine, which are infinitely cooler first dynasties. But in a way, the scrappiness of those San Francisco teams makes my baseball consumption unique. There are many definitions of “dynasty”, after all. And as for the Royals? Well, they became a juggernaut after dismantling the 2015 Mets for the franchise’s first Commissioners Trophy in thirty years. In all honesty, though, that wasn’t a tall task. Never had I seen a team trip and fall into the World Series like the ’15 Mets.
“But the Matt Harvey game!” You mean the Royals' clincher?
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