Oct 18, 2014 3 min read

The Kansas City Royals are going to the World Series.

And baseball fans in Southwestern Pennsylvania should be rejoicing.

No, we’re not suggesting all those black and gold baseball caps and jerseys should be exchanged for the Royals’ blue and white, or followers of Andrew McCutcheon and Josh Harrison should switch allegiances to Omar Infante and Salvador Perez. But Pittsburgh Pirates fans should be cheered another small-market team that was out of contention – way, way out of contention – for all too many years managed to ascend this year to the top of the Major League Baseball pyramid.

One has to go back to the 1990s to understand just how unlikely it once seemed the lowly Kansas City Royals would ever be able to, once again, become one of professional baseball’s heavy-hitters. The franchise was competitive in the 1970s and 1980s, going to the postseason seven times between 1976 and 1985, representing the American League in the 1980 World Series (they were bested that year by the Philadelphia Phillies) and winning it in 1985 in a seven-game skirmish with their cross-state rivals, the St. Louis Cardinals.

However, in the decades since, the Royals became one of baseball’s perennial basement-dwellers, a team where mediocre players went through their paces before embarking on careers in other fields, talented players showed off their skills before being poached by more robust competitors and the once-talented put in their time before retreating to the autograph tables at baseball card shows. For most of the last 20 years, the Royals endured one losing season after another, playing to, at best, half-full houses of dejected die-hards.

Sound familiar?

The parallels extend all the way to the fact the Royals lost 100 games in 2002, just one year after a certain team that nowadays plays in a stadium along the Allegheny River also lost 100 games.

Though some of the woes of the Royals and the Pirates could be blamed on managerial and ownership blunders, both teams seemed unlikely to ever be contenders simply because of baseball’s prohibitive economics. As player salaries crept skyward, it was the teams in the biggest markets, whose owners had the most plushly lined wallets, that were able to stay above .500 when the leaves were falling and the frost was on the pumpkin. Between 1996 and 2003, the New York Yankees went to the World Series six times, and won it four times. The Atlanta Braves, when they were owned by free-spending media mogul Ted Turner, went to the World Series five times between 1991 and 1999 (but only won once, much to the chagrin of the tomahawk-chopping faithful).

Storied teams like the Royals, the Pirates, the Milwaukee Brewers and the Baltimore Orioles seemed condemned to offering fans little more than celebrations of past glories. Yet, this year, all those teams had winning records, with the Royals, Orioles and Pirates making it to the postseason. The Yankees and the Braves, meanwhile, were out in the cold. Some of this must be credited to luck, and some of the credit must go to revenue-sharing deals that have given teams in smaller markets a slight leg up.

But for anyone who once despaired of seeing teams other than the Yankees or the Braves making it into the Fall Classic, this is a moment to savor. Now, we can only hope in 2015 the Pirates will be the World Series’ Cinderella story.