It’s been 44 years now since the riveting Royals-Yankees postseason duels came to their fascinating finale, George Brett knows, and 41 since the feud’s indelible encore in the Pine Tar Game.

That’s such a long time that Brett actually has developed relationships with such former mortal enemies as Goose Gossage and Reggie Jackson — men he absolutely hated and now calls among his “best friends.”

While he’s never spoken with Graig Nettles in the nearly 50 years since Nettles kicked him in the face and Brett slugged him to ignite a brawl in Game 5 of the 1977 American League Championship Series, Brett would shake his hand and maybe hug him if they met again now.

And he laughs as he remembers how Spot-Bilt, which sponsored both Brett and Nettles at the time, soon put out a poster of Brett punching Nettles ... emphasizing their shoes. The tagline: “At least they agree on one thing.”

“I have no ill feelings about Graig,” Brett said.

But Brett still rages about the Yankees institutionally as the Royals prepare to play New York in the best-of-five American League Division Series beginning Saturday in New York — preparation that Brett planned to fuel with some history.

Brett’s main plan for Friday afternoon and Saturday was to share that past and rekindle the fire among a group of players who weren’t born for years after that time.

“I will remind them at the workout today and tomorrow that … this is not just a playoff game,” he said in an interview with The Star on Friday morning from the team hotel in New York. “This is the frickin’ New York Yankees. And we have a history with these guys. And we’re going to kick their ass.”

Not in that berserk Pine Tar Game kind of way. But with the sort of seething that animated those spikes-high, literal-hard-knocks four postseasons — the ones that first marked perpetual frustration for the Royals before the nirvana of the 1980 breakthrough.

The vibe that almost feels like present tense to Brett, who recalled recently being interviewed with Gossage about the Pine Tar Game.

In that span, Gossage almost immediately reverted to talking about how much he hated Brett and wanted to hit him in the neck or even kill him. Brett might have gotten a little heated, too, before coming back to the present.

“That’s the way it was,” Brett said. “It was hatred; it really was. We despised them, and they despised the Royals.”

The fearless loathing was perhaps most visible in “the slides, or lack of slides,” as Brett put it, in those games.

Including the Royals’ Hal McRae knocking Willie Randolph into center field, Nettles barging through Frank White and former Royals teammate Lou Piniella going a few feet out of his way to try to spike Brett as the third baseman went up the line for a relay.

But it also was constantly bubbling in less apparent ways.

Like trash-talk between the teams, which at one point included Royals manager Whitey Herzog referring to the Yankees front office as “cockroaches.” Irascible Yankees manager Billy Martin screamed at Brett before some games.

Then there was the contrast in the dynamics between an upstart, small-market expansion team taking on the most storied team in Major League Baseball history in the media capital of the world.

Speed and defense vs. power. Doing more with less vs. an infinite payroll. And then some.

“A tale of two cities, I guess,” Brett said.

A tale that lives on through Brett.

That’s why he once told former Royals general manager Dayton Moore that he wouldn’t be heartbroken if a bad Royals team lost 156 games ... but won six against the Yankees.

And it’s why — if the Royals prevail — Brett said “I’m going to have the exact same feeling I had in 1980.”

That thrill wasn’t just about the moment itself. It was about all that had preceded it.

Not just the nastiness, but the fact the Yankees had ousted the Royals in 1976, 1977 and 1978.

Each of those felt different, Brett and Royals Hall of Famer Frank White said in interviews this week, but no doubt there was a cumulative effect.

When Chris Chambliss snuffed out the Royals in 1976 with a walkoff homer in Game 5, for instance, Brett in hindsight recalls the feeling being, “We’ll get ‘em next year.”

Similarly, White thought about how impressive it was for an expansion team to have made it to the playoffs ahead of schedule, and that the club’s nucleus promised more ahead soon.

White was right … which only made the next year harder. The Royals won 102 games in 1977 but were knocked out by the Yankees 5-3 in Game 5.

“It was kind of traumatic in a way,” said White, now the Jackson County executive. “I just really thought if we were really going to cross that threshold (into the World Series), that was our year. That was crushing … It was (a) ‘How much do you have to do?’ kind of thing.”

Then came 1978, when the Yankees eliminated the Royals in four games and won their second straight World Series.

By then, who knew if anything would ever change?

To White’s way of thinking, the Royals seemed to just not have the finances to keep up with the Yankees — who essentially were able to stack their team with All-Stars. There was virtually no margin for error.

“We always had to do everything right,” White said. “We couldn’t make a mistake.”

All of that informed the intense meaning of taking them on again in the 1980 ALCS. when White said he felt “probably the most pressure I ever felt as a player.”

Not at the stadium, but from the community in which he’d grown up.
“You just felt that weight of this whole city on your shoulders that you had to break though,” he said.

White was too antsy to sleep the night before. So he want to the stadium around 7 a.m. for the 2 p.m. start and eased into sleep on a training table.
“That’s where I needed to be,” White said.

The team, he recalled, was less playful than normal for that series, because it was so focused on the moment and the mindset of “we just can’t let them get away with this again.”

Behind Larry Gura’s complete game, two RBIs apiece from White, Willie Wilson and Willie Aikens and a home run from Brett, the Royals won the opener 7-2.

A day later, they won 3-2 with eight innings from Dennis Leonard, a save by Dan Quisenberry and a three-run third — two more RBIs from Wilson and another from U.L. Washington.

Then it was on to a potential knockout game in New York, where a White home run gave the Royals 1-0 lead in the fifth before Rick Cerone drove in two to give the Yankees a 2-1 lead in the sixth.

Bring on Brett for a sublime moment in Royals, Kansas City and even MLB history, because of the stature of the Yankees.

“You know it’s going to get world-wide attention with the Yankees,” said White, referring to both now and then.

With two on and two out in the seventh inning against Gossage, Brett lashed the first pitch into the third deck of the iconic stadium to give the Royals a 4-2 lead they’d hold through Quisenberry’s 3.2 innings of relief.

“Probably the most meaningful hit of my career,” said Brett, who recalled it as “the best swing I’ve had in my life.”

That’s saying something for the man who had 3,154 hits in his National Baseball Hall of Fame career.

As he stood in the on-deck circle that day, Brett was conscious of the booming noise, and even taunts, from what he almost precisely recalled as 56,000 people (56,888) at Yankee Stadium.

But when he entered the batter’s box, it all went mute to him. As usual.
At that pinnacle of concentration, he said, “you don’t feel the cold, you don’t feel the heat, you don’t hear the noise.”

Just the same, as he went around the bases, he thought about how amazing it was just how quiet that many people actually were.

Although the Royals went on to lose to the Phillies 4-2 in the 1980 World Series, that’s almost just a footnote to Brett now.

Finally beating the Yankees then and that way, he said, “was like winning the World Series. The feelings were just the same (when the Royals did win the 1985 World Series).”

He added, “I’ll never forget Game 3; I’ll just never forget it as long as I live.”
That’s why he wants those days, of not backing down to the behemoth, to be coursing through this Royals team, too.

Days that still feel vivid to anyone who experienced them or, heck, even watched from afar.

A sensation only further stoked by the 1983 Pine Tar episode, when a livid Brett went on a rampage he remains proud of. Because it was principled against Martin and the Yankees’ insinuation he was cheating the game through a rule that was only about trying to avert stained balls.

All of which explains why Brett figures he’d best “be as incognito as I can” among Yankees fans this weekend, even as he hopes to instill a fighting spirit in these Royals — who no doubt have a burn to win of their own.

And why you can bet he’ll want to be in on the clubhouse celebration once more, like after the clinchers in Atlanta and Baltimore, if they pull through against the Yankees.

“It probably will matter more to me,” he said, laughing, “than to them.”

BALTIMORE -- On the day the Kansas City Royals resuscitated a rivalry that has lain dormant for nearly a half-century, the man who embodied the team in the 1970s strolled by the one who personifies it today.

"You think he's any good?" George Brett asked.

He was looking at Bobby Witt Jr., the hero of the Royals' Game 2 victory that expelled the Baltimore Orioles from the American League wild-card round -- and the hero, to be more accurate, of the baseball renaissance currently taking place in Kansas City.

"He's got a chance to be a good player," Brett continued, and Witt flashed a knowing grin in his direction. As Witt has inherited the mantle of face and voice of the franchise, he has grown to understand Brett's import -- not just as the Royals' lone Hall of Famer, but as its swaggering, swashbuckling avatar, a role best expressed as perpetual tormentor of the New York Yankees.

Over a six-year stretch from 1976 to 1981, the Yankees and Royals ruled the AL; they met four times in the ALCS. Though the Yankees won the first three series, Kansas City swept New York in 1980. And perhaps the most famous incident of Brett's career -- charging to confront an umpire after being called out for using too much pine tar -- came against the Yankees in 1983. In his playoff career against New York, Brett hit .358/.389/.791 with six homers and only two strikeouts in 72 plate appearances.

"Hatred," Brett said. "If you talk to anybody that played in the '76, '77, '78, '80 playoffs, it was hatred. I mean, you despise them, you abhor them. Does abhor mean hate?"

Yes, he was informed.

"You abhorred them," Brett continued. "And they abhorred us."

Now the rivalry is renewed, with Witt looking to take on Brett's role at the center of it. After a pair of hard-fought, one-run wins in Baltimore, the Royals are in the Bronx to face the Yankees in Game 1 of the AL Division Series on Saturday. Witt drove in the only run in the first win, and in a postseason career that is two games deep, he owns two game-winning RBIs. The last person to plate the go-ahead run in his first two career playoff games was Jimmie Foxx -- an inner-circle Hall of Famer who did it almost 100 years ago.

None of this registers as particularly surprising, because the 24-year-old Witt has spent the 2024 season vaulting himself into the sport's tippy-top echelon. The objective attributes scream superstar: the .332 average that won him his first batting title, the second consecutive 30/30 season, the Gold Glove-caliber defense at shortstop -- whatever you add to the list, if it has to do with baseball, he's good at it.

His desire for more evinces itself with every meaningful game Witt plays. And there is substantial meaning to these, not only because they're the first postseason games for the Royals since they won the World Series in 2015 but because they herald one of the great turnarounds in baseball history. Last year, the Royals lost 106 games. Now, they're trying to mimic their neighbors at the Truman Sports Complex.

"Seeing what they're doing across the street with the Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes, I'm just trying to do my part and bring back what Kansas City needs and what they love," Witt said. "You see it with the Chiefs, and you saw it with what the Royals did in '14, '15. We want to create our own legacy."
The Venn diagram of these Royals' legacy and Witt's is a circle. He joined the organization as the No. 2 overall pick in the 2019 draft, blew away the team's executives at Kansas City's alternate site during the COVID-19 shutdown, won every Minor League Player of the Year award in 2021, hit 20 home runs and ripped 30 bags as a rookie in 2022, flashed superstar bona fides in 2023 and put himself in the best-player-in-baseball conversation with Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani this season.

And in his first opportunity for postseason baseball, he shone. In the bottom of the fifth inning of Game 2, the Orioles tied the score on a solo home run, then loaded the bases. Royals manager Matt Quatraro went to the mound to make a pitching change, and the team's infield gathered on the mound. Witt said, very simply, "This is our game." By the end of the mound visit, all of them were saying it. They believed.

They escaped that half-inning without ceding another run. And in the next, Witt came to the plate with runners on the corners and two outs. He hit a 109 mph pea up the middle, only for Baltimore second baseman Jordan Westburg to dive and snag it. Westburg sprung to his feet, made an excellent throw -- and Witt still beat it by more than a step for an infield single, scoring a run that would be the last of the game.

"The reason we won the game is the Kansas City Royals played baseball the right way," Royals reliever Will Smith said. "Bobby booked it out the box, and his speed took over. He could easily have coasted. But he didn't."

Smith is 35 years old and holds a special distinction among his peers: an incontrovertible winner. Smith captured a World Series with the Atlanta Braves in 2021. He was traded to the Houston Astros in 2022 and got another ring. He signed with the Texas Rangers on the eve of the 2023 season and, yup, a third consecutive championship. And now this, where he gets to bear witness.

Witt can only dream of such a résumé, for now. He's in his debut, still green, feeling privileged to have the opportunity to face a team like the Yankees in an MLB postseason. He liked the spirit at Camden Yards, has discovered a signature style for his postgame celebrations, donned after their clinching game and the wild-card win: ski goggles over his eyes, one Bud Heavy on either side of his head -- held by the goggle strap -- and a cigar hanging from his lips.

"Excitement, electricity," Witt said. "Even here, it was great to hear the boo-birds, hear 'em yelling at you, getting on you. You just learn to be comfortable and live in that present moment and enjoy it."

Witt and the Royals will enjoy taking the field behind Michael Wacha, one of their tremendous free agent signings, in Game 1. Ace Cole Ragans -- who shut out Baltimore for six innings Tuesday -- is lined up to pitch Game 2 as well as a potential Game 5.

For all of the pitching the Royals have between their starters and a bullpen that has morphed into among the hottest in baseball, it comes back to Witt. And now, he has taken them to the most storied stadium in baseball with a chance to become the latest Kansas City team to come out of nowhere, introduce itself to the world and do exactly what Brett seemed to do every time the Yankees and Royals got together: fight.