Also galling for Kansas City fans was the Cardinals’ success — they have appeared in three World Series since 2004 and won two — in St. Louis, which has a smaller city but a larger metropolitan-area population.

“I own a lot of apartment developments in both cities, so I know the demographics and economics, and they’re quite similar,” Fogelman said. “I’m not going to get into it other than to say that it’s an astute analogy.”

In the trust, Kauffman had stipulated that a new owner could not quickly profit by reselling the team — a provision intended to prevent the franchise from being flipped. Lou Smith, who was on the board with Glass during the trust years, said that the profit resale ban had expired but that it might have factored into Glass’s reluctance to invest in baseball operations sooner. “He is a very smart businessman, and I think he was operating in a difficult situation,” Smith said. “But I do think he always had the intention of fulfilling Mr. K’s wishes and to keep the team in Kansas City.”

For his part, Glass has publicly acknowledged some regrets and mistakes from the early years of his ownership. Early this season, he denied renewed speculation that he was exploring a sale, telling The Star: “Everybody in baseball knows that I’m committed, and my family is committed, that we’re going to own the Royals, and that the Royals are going to be in Kansas City and that we’re going to make the team a contender again.”

Glass rarely does interviews and declined one for this article while attending a home series against Milwaukee in mid-June. Before the Royals faced Greinke in the opener, he watched batting practice behind the cage, chatting with Moore, the general manager, who, it has turned out, has become the Royals’ best pitchman since Mr. K. Industry colleagues told Moore that he might be committing career suicide if he accepted Glass’s offer in 2006 to run the Royals. It made little sense to them that one of baseball’s bright young executives, who had already turned down a similar deal with the Boston Red Sox and was comfortably entrenched as Schuerholz’s protégé in Atlanta, would work for someone with Glass’s track record.

But Moore, who grew up a Royals fan in Wichita, Kan., took the same long view he had as an 18-year-old on Oct. 27, 1985, when Saberhagen and the Royals demolished the Cardinals, 11-0, to win the World Series.

“I was right up there watching the game,” he said while sitting in the dugout, pointing beyond the left-field fence. “I was up on the I-70 ramp — seemed like 400 to 500 people. You could see everything but Lonnie Smith in left field.”