NEW YORK—Having capped off their championship run with a 7-2 victory over the New York Mets in Game 5 Sunday night, members of the Kansas City Royals expressed their delight at silencing the doubters who still happened to be paying any attention to the World Series. “It feels pretty great to finally shut up all the naysayers who actually continued following the postseason to this point,” said Royals first baseman Eric Hosmer, adding that the team rallied in the face of critics who—unlike the majority of baseball fans who immediately lost interest in the playoffs after the Yankees, Cubs, Cardinals, Pirates, and Dodgers were eliminated—claimed that the team would be easily swept by the surging Mets. “We heard it all: ‘The Royals don’t have enough star power to go all the way’; ‘Kansas City can’t compete with the big-market teams’; ‘Nobody gives a shit about the World Series this year or which team wins.’ But you know what, we never bought into that stuff. We always believed we could do it, and our win tonight speaks for itself.” Hosmer went on to say that the Royals’ World Series victory proved to the small number of Americans who still enjoy watching baseball that anything is possible.