Royals fans flood AT&T Park with Dodger blue

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They came down Third Street and up from the Lefty O’Doul Bridge, proudly wearing a shade last seen during the summer at AT&T Park. They didn’t know this was the dreaded Dodger blue — and they didn’t care.

“We are the loyal Royals,” said Amanda Powell, 39, who wore her blue jersey with blue jeans and blue shoes. Her friend Sara Payne, 33, wore a matching uniform, and between them they carried six signs, the most incendiary reading, “Royals A Roni: the San Francisco Defeat.”

“Hey, blondes, the circus is the other way,” barked a Giants fan in passing.

“You guys OK? You lost?” snapped another.

But Powell and Payne weren’t lost. They were exactly where they needed to be, outside AT&T Park five hours before the start of Game 3 of the World Series, waiting for the Royals’ team bus to pull in.

“We want to go to batting practice and see our boyfriend Eric Hosmer,” said Payne, who is from Kansas City, by way of Huntington Beach.

Jesse Tello of San Francisco shows his support for the Giants outside AT&T Park while Ron Johnson of Lafayette, hoping to buy a ticket, holds a sign backing the Royals before Game 3 of the World Series. Jesse Tello of San Francisco shows his support for the Giants outside AT&T Park while Ron Johnson of Lafayette, hoping to buy a ticket, holds a sign backing the Royals before Game 3 of the World Series. Photo: Mike Kepka / The Chronicle Photo: Mike Kepka / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 54 Caption Close Royals fans flood AT&T Park with Dodger blue 1 / 54 Back to Gallery

Payne had never been to San Francisco. There were things to see, but she and Powell, who comes from small-town Washington, Kan., were not interested in seeing them.

“I can always come back and sightsee,” Payne said, “but I can never do this again.”

“Never” might be an exaggeration, but not by much. It had been 29 years since the Royals reached the postseason, a point driven home by Mary Katherine Flanagan, who was born that year, 1985, in Leawood, Kan.

“In my lifetime, I have never seen the Royals in the playoffs,” said Flanagan, 28, who moved to California to get her MBA at Stanford. “I feel like I have been missing this experience my entire life.”

That pretty well sums up the general attitude toward the 110th World Series, where a recent poll pegged Royals support at 70 percent of the nation. Fans across the nation are apparently jaded by the Giants’ third trip to the Series in five years, and one authority estimated the crowd of rabid Giants fans in orange and black at “four people” when the series opened in Kansas City, Mo.

“The Giants fans are spoiled,” said Baird Fogel, a San Francisco attorney who moved from Kansas City six years ago. “It’s been 30 years for us so you will see a lot of blue out here.”

In his family alone are 15 in Royals blue, including 12 who came on a chartered jet from Kansas City on Friday morning.

Fogel regularly attends Giants games at AT&T Park and always wears his Royals hat. He has heard boos from behind and had to turn around to show the letters are “K.C.” not “L.A.” At which point every Giants fan has been polite — before Friday.

“They’re not going to be so nice,” predicted Fogel, 44, who brought his wife, Alissa, 43, and their son Andrew, 16, from their home in Lafayette, all fully colored in blue to match their 12 relatives seated farther down the right-field line.

It was obvious that Royals fans had no trouble getting to San Francisco. One team official stood at the corner of Willie Mays Plaza, looked up Third Street and said: “They’re coming. I can feel it.”

When they did, the most unlikely of Royals fans was probably Ron Johnson, a native San Franciscan who is now a pastor in Moraga. For reasons that can be traced to his worship of George Brett, he is as big a Kansas City fan as anyone from Missouri, where he has been just once, to see a game.

Johnson has been waiting to wear his colors here since 2005, when the Royals came out for interleague play. “I was here,” he said, “and that was a year when our team lost 106 games.”

Johnson had carved a wooden Royals sign in the shape of a crown and was standing outside the park, waiting to wave it inside. He did not know how long that wait would be, because he did not have a ticket, and his top price was face value, which starts at $150.

In two hours of standing, he’d had one offer. Negotiations broke off with a bottom offer of $500. There were still three hours to go, and he had not had to resort to prayer.

“It wouldn’t be the first time I have benefited from divine intervention,” he said.

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@samwhitingsf