Those Yankees-Royals Series

by Lincoln Mitchell

October 2024

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NOTE - This article comes from Lincoln Mitchell's Substack page, Kibitzing with Lincoln . Please click HERE to follow Lincoln on Substack. (This was originally published on April 7, 2024.)

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In the years leading up to Jim Rice’s election to the Hall of Fame, advocates for his candidacy sought to bolster his slightly less than Hall of Fame statistics by arguing that he was the most feared hitter of his era. I never understood that argument. I followed baseball very closely during the entirety of Rice’s career and because the Yankees have always been my American League team, I was very aware of Jim Rice. While I was never happy to see Rice coming up to the plate with runners on base, the American League hitter I feared most during those years was George Brett.

The Red Sox are the Yankees eternal rival, but periodically another team, for a emerges as a rival as well. During the late 1940s through mid-1950s, the Indians (now the Guardians) were the Yankees biggest rival. For most of the period since 2017, the Yankees have played their biggest games not against Boston, but rather against the Houston Astros. During the late 1970s and early 1980, the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry was intense, but the Yankees-Royals rivalry was no less so.That rivalry is weighing very heavily on some Yankees and Royals fans this week as the two teams are now in, fittingly, a best of five postseason series.

Kansas City and New York met in the ALCS in 1976-1978 and again in 1980 back when the ALCS was a five game format. The Yankees won the first three matchups, but the Royals got their revenge when they swept the Yankees in 1980. Overall the teams played 17 games with the Yankees winning nine and Royals eight.

I became a baseball fan in the mid-1970s. I remember some of the 1975 World Series, and although I was only seven years old, because I was on the west coast could stay up to the end of Game Six, still one of the greatest games ever played. However, the 1976 post-season was the first that I watched closely with a strong rooting interest and a reasonable understanding of the game.

By 1976, the Yankees had not won a pennant since 1964. Twelve years does not seem like a long time now-in fact it has been longer than that since the Yankees last made a World Series appearance, but in 1976 twelve years seemed like a very long time. The 1964 Yankees team had been led by legends like Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford who I had read about, but from my perspective might as well have been Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

The 1976 Yankees had won their division by 10.5 games, but they were not yet the star laden team they became in 1977-1980. In game one of the 1976 ALCS their starting lineup included journeymen Fred Stanley and Elliot Maddox. Nonetheless, that game kicked off one of the great mini-rivalries in baseball history.

One of the things that made that rivalry so intense was that because the teams played four ALCS in a five year span, the players were very familiar to fans and to each other. The bad blood between Graig Nettles and George Brett and between Hal McRae and Willie Randolph never fully faded away because the teams kept playing each other.

Ron Guidry, Willie Randolph, Graig Nettles and Lou Piniella were on all four of those Yankees teams, Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter, Chris Chambliss, Bucky Dent, Roy White and Mickey Rivers were on three of those teams. Larry Gura, Dennis Leonard, Frank White, Hal McRae, Amos Otis, Paul Splittorff and George Brett were on all four of those Royals Teams.

George Brett was the best of a very good core of Royals players, and he shone in those ALCS. Over the course of 17 games, he came to bat 72 times, hit six home runs, and slashed .358/.389/.639. Brett’s home run off of Yankees closer Goose Gossage in the 7th inning of  game three in 1980 is one of the most famous home runs in Royals history, but only the second most memorable home run of those series.

Chris Chambliss’s walk-off, a word we did not use back then, home run in the bottom of the ninth of the fifth and decisive game of the 1976 ALCS was one of the handful of biggest home runs in the Yankees long history despite being quickly overshadowed by Bucky Dent’s home run against the Red Sox in the one game playoff in 1978. Chambliss’s home run announced to the baseball world that the Yankees were back after being in the doldrums for a dozen years.

Those series featured fights between the teams, feuds between Reggie and Billy, 1970s style trash-talking from Dock Ellis and some of the best players of that era, but as a young baseball fan it was also fascinating to see the players move through their careers and then play each other seemingly every October.

In 1976, George Brett was still a young and relatively unknown star. By 1980 he was the best hitter in baseball. Similarly, Willie Randolph was a rookie in 1976 and by 1980 an established star on his way to a borderline Hall of Fame career. During those same years, Ron Guidry matured into a star while Dennis Leonard and Paul Splittorff had entered their decline years by 1980, while Royals stalwarts Amos Otis and Frank White seemed to just put up solid numbers and play great defense throughout every year.

The late 1970s are, to most fans, ancient baseball history, as many years removed as Babe Ruth’s called shot was in 1978 when the Yankees beat the Royals in the ALCS for the third consecutive time. However, the shadow of those series still lingers over this ALCS-and not just in the form of George Brett frantically cheering for the team with whom he spent his entire career.

If this series goes all five games, whoever gets that winning hit, whether it is in the form of Aaron Judge breaking out of his postseason slump with a colossal home run, Anthony Volpe, a young player whose connections to the Yankees are multi-generational, lining a double down the third base line to clear the bases or somebody else, will become part of a baseball story that goes back almost half a century.

That series winning hit, even if it is off of a Royals bat against Gerrit Cole, will also provide another key piece of the sinew that keeps baseball alive in the minds of so many baseball fans who still spend more time than they will admit thinking about those series and can remember the starting lineups from those teams-and that is what makes postseason baseball so fun even for a cynical curmudgeon like me.