Celebration of Lorenzo Cain is reminder of both magical era and how Royals have fallen

If you could apply a light meter or app or some other way to measure the radiance and infectiousness and sheer charm of a smile, Lorenzo Cain’s would be right at the top.

The exuberance, especially as so often coaxed by Sal Perez’s antics, in many ways was the face of a joyous era for the Royals, peaking with back-to-back American League pennants and the 2015 World Series triumph.

When Cain was named most valuable player of the 2014 ALCS after hitting .533 and making breathtaking plays all over the field against Baltimore, then-teammate Mike Moustakas had it about right when he playfully interrupted an interview with Cain a locker away.

“I’m Lo Cain, that’s why everybody loves me,” Moustakas said. “Look at my smile, look at my smile. It’s so biiigggg.”

So we knew he’d be beaming on Saturday at Kauffman Stadium, where he punctuated his recent retirement announcement by signing a ceremonial one-day contract that would allow him to leave the game, as he put it, “forever Royal.”

What we didn’t expect was that Cain, who spent the last five seasons with Milwaukee, would spend much of the 25-minute ceremony on the field overwhelmed with emotion.

After walking out to a rousing ovation and being surrounded by family and friends such as former manager Ned Yost, coach Rusty Kuntz and teammate Alex Gordon, Cain alternately bowed his head 15 seconds or so at a time, sniffled and rubbed tears from his face.

“I didn’t think it would be this hard,” he managed to get out, a point he confirmed with his words and red eyes after he came off the field.

He was so overcome that at one point his mother, Patricia, felt compelled to get up from her chair and go to his side to hug him.

“That’s my baby,” she said with a smile in a hallway afterward.

Part of the infinite appeal of Cain, no doubt, is the story of how she toiled to raise her baby after his father died when he was 4 years old.

And part of his story is that she wouldn’t allow him to play football.

Which finally led to him playing baseball for the first time — as a sophomore in high school — after he was cut from the basketball team.

Maybe you know he didn’t so much as have a glove at the time and didn’t know how to hold a bat and essentially only was allowed to join the team, as he told the story again before the ceremony on Saturday, to salvage the junior varsity roster.

“So I kind of made it by default,” he said. “But, you know, weird things happen.”

Weird things do happen.

That brings us to another element of what made Cain so revered — and helps speak to why 29,549 fans came to The K on Saturday in 90-plus degree heat with the current club sputtering at 8-25 before losing to Oakland 5-4.

Cain in so many ways was the embodiment of those resilient and improbable teams that made an art of rallying — the “comeback kids,” he called them. That group captured the imagination of fans in a rare and, alas, fleeting way.

So the ceremony that incorporated trophies from the AL championship, Cain’s ALCS MVP honor and the World Series celebrated not just Cain but that magical time entwined with his prime.

“I’m getting goosebumps thinking about it right now,” he said.

That stands as a harsh contrast to what’s happening now, with the Royals quite evidently in the embryonic stages of a rebuild that we’d all have thought would have reached fruition by now.

But it’s also a reminder that these things can work in mysterious ways, bubbling beneath the surface in ways we can’t know until we do.

Cain was a 17th-round draft pick in 2004, after all, so late that he once joked he didn’t even know the draft was still going.

As of 2010, he’d appeared in all of 43 major-league games when Milwaukee dealt him and shortstop Alcides Escobar to the Royals for Zack Greinke (among others involved with the trade on both sides).

No one would have guessed then that the trade was one of the most crucial in Royals’ history, providing two pillars of the glory years.

Not that it happened overnight even then.

Through “injury after injury,” Cain said, he “wasn’t sure if I was going to make it or not.”

But Yost and then-general manager Dayton Moore kept believing in him — something for which he thanked Moore with a hug a few weeks ago at Cain’s induction in the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame.

That approach with a number of core players enabled The Night Everything Changed: the 2014 wild-card win over Oakland that in turn led to stunning sweeps over the Angels and Orioles.

He was everything everywhere all at once against Baltimore, so much so that I remember feeling like he’d been casting holograms of himself around the field.

When he was named ALCS MVP after the final game, Cain stood on the field cradling his son, Cameron — who had been born to Cain’s wife, Jenny, just over a week before. He’d spent only a few hours with him before the flight to Baltimore to open the series.

“I remember just crying before I got on the flight,” said Cain, who said Saturday that missing him was “a huge part” of how he played against the Orioles.

“I got to the point where I played angry out there.”

In some ways, that seems like yesterday. It’s so easy to visualize the highlights and the vibe as the Royals entered their first World Series since 1985 and took it to Game 7 before falling to the Giants.

But considering Cameron is now 8 and has two younger brothers who joined Cain as he spoke Saturday, it also feels like forever ago.

Especially since the Royals have lost an average of 98 games in their last four full seasons (excluding the pandemic-shortened 2020 season in which they went 26-34).

That stretch began with a 58-104 plummet in 2018, a season marked by the losses of Cain and Eric Hosmer to free agency instead of to trades before then. Based on a belief they could still compete in that window, that dynamic more broadly played into the Royals’ downfall since.

“Unfortunately, we all became free agents at the same time; I think that’s what made it tough for everyone,” Cain said. “And you can’t keep everybody.”

It was tough to move on, he said.

But he also knew where his baseball home was the following April, when he returned here with Milwaukee and was deeply moved by an ovation when he hit a home run.

“You don’t see that often,” he said.

You also don’t often see what those Royals had.

Something that shows what’s possible from what seems like out of nowhere but also to be cherished for its singularity.

Something to still smile about even through the tears.