Ned Yost’s yapper and the Royals’ attendance

Allow me to present my credentials for having an opinion on both low attendance and what it’s like to follow a soul-spindling disaster of a team before I write about Ned Yost and the Royals:

1.
I grew up going to Candlestick, but usually on Sundays. There were usually crowds on Sundays, even in the bad years. As I got older and started going to the park on my own, I started going to the night games. There were not usually crowds for the night games. This is because if baseball was the wondrous magic of the Star Wars universe, Candlestick Park was a tauntaun’s anus. Cold. Sticky. As unpleasant as anything in the known universe.

In 1998, I was a vendor there. This was a contending season, coming a year after a thrilling, unexpected division title, and my job was to sell Cracker Jacks. If it was a weeknight, there was no one there. I would start peddling my sugar corn two hours before the game. “CRACKER JACKS. CRACKER JACKS, HERE.” If there were no takers, I’d move on to the next section. “CRACKER JACKS. CRACKER JACKS, HERE.” If there were no takers, I’d move on to the next section. After 15 minutes, the entire stadium had made a decision on my offer of Cracker Jacks. But I had to start all over again and go back the way I came. It took me 30 minutes to communicate with everyone at a professional sporting event, and that’s if I was loafing, which I probably was. People actually used to yell back, “NO. I DO NOT WANT CRACKER JACKS.”

This Tuesday night game against the Expos had a listed attendance of 10,160. This was not the actual attendance, which I would have pegged as closer to 3,000. After the seventh inning, I kicked off and sat behind home plate.

It made me mad.

The Giants were contending. They were winning. They had Barry Bonds. And that was the best crowd they could muster. It was easy to get righteous when the tickets and parking were both free, and when I got 17 percent of every $3.00 Cracker Jack sale (less taxes, less union dues).

If Candlestick Park were around today, though, it’s hard to imagine me going there very often. Buying four tickets, loading two kids up, wrapping them in parkas big enough to stop a charging gnu, driving through rush hour traffic to sit in a concrete tauntaun anus, where the food was expensive and unhealthy, just to sit in traffic on the way home, why, that would take something awfully compelling. Once a year. Twice a year, max.

Kauffman Stadium is much, much nicer. Take the parkas and the tauntaun away, and replace them with the chewy, hot air of an August night. It’s still something that’s hard for a lot of people in a still-recovering economy on the first school night of the year.

The Royals are still up 1,600 people per game over last year.

2.
I’m a Golden State Warriors fan, but I missed the Chris Mullin, Tim Hardaway, Mitch Richmond years. I came later. The Erick Dampier years. That team, those teams, were appalling. Every year. The people who built them were stupid. Maybe not by IQ -- they all probably could have taken me in Scrabble -- but compared to the other 29 teams. What is a Vonteego Cummings? Why is Adam Keefe? Every danged year, there was something dumber than the last year. Over and over again. There was never any reason to hope.

Yet the Warriors still drew well enough. Even with the fans getting kicked in the ribs year after year, the Warriors still drew. Broadcasters from other teams would note this, describing the fan base as one of the best in basketball. They wouldn’t sell out unless it was the weekend or if Michael Jordan/Kobe Bryant were in town, but they still drew a moderately sized crowd for an awful franchise, and the fans were praised for it.

The total capacity of the Warriors’ arena is 19,596. The NBA regular season is just over half as long as the MLB regular season. A half-filled arena was something worth praising in the lean years. It still is around the league.

Which brings us to Yost and the Royals. The skipper made some poorly timed, oblivious comments about attendance on Tuesday night.

“I mean, what, 13,000 people got to see a great game?” he said in his post-game news conference.

...

”I know there’s different things you can do. You can watch it on the Internet. You can watch it on TV. But there’s a real need for our fans to be a part of this. We had a great crowd last night, and I was kind of hoping we’d have another great crowd tonight, and we really didn’t.

Ha ha, you can’t watch it on the Internet. Not within a couple hundred square miles of the ballpark, at least. But focus on the big picture. This wasn’t something that Yost thought of in response to a question. It’s something that bugged him all game. He went on an extended rant about it, and he wasn’t exactly forced to keep going. This was something that bugged him during the game. Something that bugged him so much, he was still thinking about it after the Royals won in the bottom of the ninth.

And it’s tone deaf in a couple different ways. The first is that it ignores the recent history of the Royals, the active disdain the franchise has had for putting a quality product on the field. The two decades of stutter steps and pratfalls, arrogance and incompetence. The Royals have been over .500 for about 400 days now. It takes time. It takes a lot of time. If you want 30,000 for a Tuesday night Twins games -- which are like the Tuesday night Twins game of baseball games -- then there will need to be a decade of winning. There will need to be season after season of rewarded faith, of good feelings and positive vibes reciprocated back into the stands.

After two decades, that’s not going to happen. You might get an average of 1,600 more fans per game, but only if it’s a great fan base. And, say, lookie there, that’s exactly what’s going on in Kansas City.

The second way Yost’s comments were tone deaf has to do with the semi-recent history of baseball. When Yost was a rookie with the 1980 Brewers, there were just nine teams that averaged more fans than the Royals are drawing now, all of them powerhouse contenders. Just eight teams finished over two million fans; three finished under a million. Don’t even get started on the ‘70s, when Yost was likely attending games as a kid. The 1979 A’s drew about three times as much over a full season as the 1915 White Autos drew for this game. How quickly we forget that 14,000 people for a Tuesday night game isn’t so bad.

To me, the story isn’t that the Royals drew just 14,000 fans on Tuesday night in a year where they’re finally contending into the last month of the season; it’s that they were drawing 13,000 on a Tuesday night when the Royals blew a 10-1 first-inning lead because Ambiorix Burgos and Joe Nelson couldn’t hold a save. The real story is that the Royals weren’t dead last in attendance when their hopes were resting on Dee Brown. Most of those Royals teams should have drawn one fan for every game. His name should have been Stan, and he should have held a sign that read, “YOU SUCK, ROYALS OWNERS.” Instead, they drew like a mostly normal team.

There will be apologies and backtracking for most of Wednesday, I’m sure. Yost is sorry/misunderstood/emotional/whatever. But the idea that something’s wrong with Royals fans makes me upset, and I have no stake in this. It’s been understood for years that the Royals were the one team that should have been abandoned, but weren’t. They never had the shiny new ballpark, just the baseball, which was bad. Yet Kauffman was never a ghost town. That deserved and still deserves praise.

It doesn’t deserve to be questioned because of a Tuesday night Twins game, a night after the Royals drew 32,000 for a Monday night Yankees game. Have some perspective.