Twenty-seven years after his greatest triumph, and 19 after his death, Kauffman, the Royals’ founding owner, remains the patron saint of Kansas City baseball, the city’s guiding luminary as it prepares to host Tuesday night’s All-Star Game, its first since 1973.

In the last six years — or since Kauffman’s successor, David Glass, hired Dayton Moore as his general manager — the long-downtrodden Royals have built one of baseball’s best farm systems. With players like third baseman Mike Moustakas, first baseman Eric Hosmer and catcher Salvador Perez, the Royals are believed to be nurturing several future All-Stars. For now, they will be represented Tuesday by designated hitter Billy Butler, a six-year veteran and a rare organizational asset when Moore took over.

While the former Royals outfielder Willie Wilson laments the fact that “kids born in the ’90s have never even seen the Royals win,” many older fans like Mize, while hopeful that the young Royals are coming, remain tethered to the days when Kansas City was the small-market model, courtesy of Mr. K.

“It all felt so special, so local,” said Buddy Biancalana, who played shortstop for the Royals’ 1985 championship team and fondly recalled Kauffman and his wife, Muriel, poking their heads out of their suite and engaging the crowd during seventh-inning stretches.

The last time baseball’s best converged here, in 1973, the Royals were a fifth-year expansion team and moving toward the postseason, which they reached in 1976. During a decade-plus run of excellence, when fans packed what was then Royals Stadium to watch their pitching-rich team play speed ball on artificial turf, Kansas City produced or acquired George Brett, Hal McRae, Amos Otis, Frank White, Dennis Leonard and Bret Saberhagen.

With its crown-topped scoreboard and aesthetically pleasing outfield fountains, Royals Stadium had the feel of a big-league field of dreams.

“Once school was out, from 1977 to 1989 or 1990, every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night was sold out, didn’t matter who we were playing,” said Brett, whose entire 21-year Hall of Fame career was spent in Kansas City and who remains with the Royals as the vice president for baseball operations. “It became a destination for people from Nebraska, Kansas, from miles and miles away. They would go to amusement parks, take a little family vacation. We had turf for that reason. You’d get torrential downpours, but it could stop at 7, and we’d be playing by 8.”

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Back then, the Royals’ front office was expertly anchored by Joe Burke and John Schuerholz. The team was assertively managed by Whitey Herzog, Jim Frey and Dick Howser, who died in 1987. Kauffman, a billionaire pharmaceutical magnate and renowned philanthropist, generated fierce loyalty from those who worked and played for him.

“All I can tell you is that my father died when I was 4, and he was the father I never had,” said Art Stewart, who scouted for the Yankees 50 years ago, signing pitchers Jim Bouton and Doc Medich, before spending the last four decades with Kansas City.

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Stewart said that he had seen it all but that he had never known anyone in baseball quite like Kauffman.

“Talk to him for five minutes, and you’re ready to run through the center-field wall,” he said.

Before a spectacular crash, the Royals won six division titles from 1976 to 1985. They took the 1980 pennant, having lost three American League Championship Series to the Yankees, and won it all five years later after rallying from a 3-1 deficit to edge the cross-state St. Louis Cardinals in what was known as the I-70 World Series.

But Kauffman died in 1993, never to know of the two decades of woeful baseball that were to come in his baseball-loving hometown.

“Losing is contagious, and once they started, they couldn’t stop,” said Wilson, the former fleet center fielder who recently returned to live in Kansas City after spending time in Toronto. “It’s been sad to watch.”

The Royals became one of the majors’ most consistent ne’er-do-wells, losing 90 or more games 11 times and 100 or more four times. They have not made the postseason since winning the World Series in 1985, and only the Washington Nationals have gone longer without a postseason appearance (1981), dating to their time in Montreal.

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After Kauffman died, Glass, a former Wal-Mart executive based in Arkansas, led a board that oversaw operations while an owner was sought to keep the team in Kansas City, as Kauffman had formally stipulated when he put the team into a trust.

“We didn’t have an owner for seven years,” said Stewart, the scout. “That’s what killed us.”

But Schuerholz, who left the Royals in 1990 to build the Atlanta Braves into a National League powerhouse, said that anyone would have paled after Kauffman, who developed baseball’s first training academy (in Florida, producing White, a second baseman) and pushed for a baseball-only facility, next door to where the Kansas City Chiefs play football, at the dawn of the era of drab, multipurpose stadiums.

“His mandate for everyone he hired was to be dynamic,” Schuerholz said. “He was unique, a visionary, and he had to be to do what he did with an expansion team in that market. People like Mr. K pass our way very infrequently, and when you lose someone like that, the sky is going to dim.”

The $96 million — what Glass paid for the Royals in 2000 — question is whether their fate would have been different had Kauffman lived several years longer. His adopted daughter, Julia Irene Kauffman, suggested it might have been, noting that he considered Marion Laboratories to be the family business and the Royals his personal passion.

“This is how baseball happened,” she said. “He had some kind of a stroke over in Europe. The doctors ran tests; he had something — plaque — flake off and go through his brain. They told him to give up coffee, do some exercise and stop working so damn hard.”

The Royals became so much her father’s pride, she said, that he threw parties after the 1985 World Series in which the championship trophy was displayed like a pagan centerpiece. Until his death, Ewing Kauffman watched tapes of the Series while musing aloud, “I wonder if we’re going to score here.”

Julia Irene Kauffman sat at the head of a long table decorated with a bowl of baseballs, and with a miniature replica of the 1985 World Series trophy encased in a corner of the conference room at the headquarters of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit group that supports education and entrepreneurship.

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There is another family foundation in the name of her mother and Ewing’s second wife, Muriel McBrien Kauffman, focusing on the arts. There is also the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Kansas City and the sprawling Kauffman Gardens across the street from the foundations’ building.

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The K in Kansas City does not stand for Kauffman, but still, as Julia Irene Kauffman said, “he touched a lot of lives here.”

In addition to overseeing her father’s foundation, she has a seat on the Royals’ board of directors. But her exposure to baseball is limited to attending board meetings, raising a few questions about expenditures and collecting stories around town about the glory years when even she addressed the boss — in the workplace, at least — as Mr. K.

She had not heard the one about how her father brought the free-agent pitcher and Kansas City native David Cone into his office before the 1992 season and offered him a $9 million signing bonus to return to the organization in which he had started his career.

Ewing Kauffman told Cone that he regretted trading him to the Mets, because Cone was a local boy. “He wanted to make up for it,” Cone said. “He opened his checkbook and said: ‘This is coming out of my account. I’ll write you the check right now.’ ”

Julia Irene Kauffman laughed, smacking the table with her palm. “What a salesman,” she said. But it was true, she added, that in the Royals’ heyday, Kauffman willingly tapped his personal fortune in his continuing pursuit of George Steinbrenner’s Yankees.

On principle, Kauffman was generally loath to playing the free-agent market as it developed from the mid-1970s. In his office at the Royals’ stadium, Brett said he believed the Cone signing, as well as some others in the early 1990s, more reflected Kauffman’s desire to keep the Royals in contention when he became ill with bone cancer.

“I mean, if you’re going to give as much as he did to charity and you’re as competitive as he was — and if you ever played golf or gin with him, you’d know — it’s a good question what he would have done had he lived longer,” Brett said. “Would our payroll be $150 million if he were alive today?”

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Avron Fogelman, a Memphis-based real estate magnate who purchased almost half of the team in the 1980s and was being groomed as Kauffman’s replacement, said the mere suggestion that Kauffman would have gone anywhere near the financial level of where the Steinbrenner family took the Yankees was absurd.

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“Ewing and I had discussions about it all the time, and he could see where it was going and that the economics of baseball were only going to get worse,” Fogelman said in a telephone interview. “He didn’t want to leave the team to his estate; he believed it was time to get out.”

Fogelman’s plan to buy out Kauffman disintegrated with heavy real estate losses, and he sold his share in 1990. With the payroll growing and the Royals operating in the red and fading in the standings, Kauffman was one of the earliest owners to rail against the revenue disparities between big and small markets, which would carry the sport to its calamitous players’ strike in 1994 and force the cancellation of the World Series.

“Nobody wanted to buy the team,” Julia Irene Kauffman said. With his time growing short, her father created the trust, handpicking Glass as its overseer, a choice probably related to Glass’s experience at Wal-Mart, long considered to be an enemy of organized labor.

Much as he loved his players, Kauffman, like Glass, was no great fan of their union.

“Never had one at Marion — he was proud of that,” Julia Irene Kauffman said. “He said if you take care of your people, you don’t need it.”

But what happens when the company can no longer compete in the prevailing market? It was with that question that the beloved Mr. K made his exit and the newly appointed board — with Glass as its chairman and each of its well-leveraged members investing money for operational expenses — took a figurative cleaver to the payroll.

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With what he called his succession plan, Kauffman in a sense set up Glass to destroy the Royals, with the long-term goal of saving major league baseball in Kansas City. When Glass formally purchased the team in 2000 — with net revenue going to charity, as mandated by Kauffman — he made as much an attempt to compete with the ghost of Mr. K as with the rest of the American League.

“He wasn’t around much; it was mainly his son,” Wilson, the outfielder, said, referring to Dan Glass, who is the Royals’ president. “It was kind of run like a corporation.”

In the early years of David Glass’s ownership, the Royals not only lost most of their quality talent, including Johnny Damon and Carlos Beltran, but also let their farm system badly deteriorate. They invested little in the fertile territory of Latin America.

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In a 2011 article, former employees told The Kansas City Star that scouts and others were denied basic equipment, even company cellphones, as the Royals cut costs. Brett, who fronted a group that failed in a bid to buy the team, said he had heard that the Royals, in the early 2000s, would pay no more than a $1,000 signing bonus to any drafted player taken after the fifth round.

“Not going to find many good players to sign for that,” he said. “You just don’t need bodies; you need players.”

Teams like the Oakland Athletics, the Minnesota Twins and the Tampa Bay Rays cultivated young talent, or acquired it for veterans, and were able to win for sustained periods in markets or stadiums less attractive than Kansas City’s. Criticism mounted that Glass was mainly interested in profiting from baseball’s growing revenue-sharing program, designed to encourage small-market teams to invest in talent.

In 2011, Forbes magazine pegged the Royals’ worth at $351 million — 26th out of the 30 major league teams but far more than Glass had paid 11 years earlier. Forbes added that the Royals were “among the biggest recipients of welfare from the league’s richer teams” and were likely to turn a healthy profit after payroll reductions. That came after $225 million in taxpayer-financed renovations to Kauffman Stadium in 2009.

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.”

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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.”

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Moore had rationalized turning down the Red Sox by telling himself that they had already done the once-in-a-generation thing in 2004, winning the Series after an 86-year wait. Staying in Atlanta to succeed Schuerholz seemed like the safe, comfortable track. But what more could he build? Where was the challenge?

Hence, the old Royals fan was drawn to Kansas City. Moore had heard all about the passionate Royals fan base from Schuerholz and thought: Why not try to do something special? Why not build from the ground up?

Moore recalled Schuerholz telling him: “I have no doubt that you’ll build a system because you know how to do it. But at some point, you’re going to have to win at the major league level.” Moore needed to know that Glass understood how long a process it is to develop potential into major league talent.

Five amateur drafts later, Baseball America ranked the Royals’ farm system No. 1 in the majors. Moore said Glass kept his promise to spend on development, open a new academy and bulk up international scouting.

Position players have surged through the system, some more rapidly than others. Raving about Perez, 22, a Venezuela-born catcher who last month came off the disabled list to hit at a torrid pace, Stewart, the scout, said, “If he doesn’t go to the Hall of Fame, I’ll go into the furniture business.”

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Keeping an eye on his hometown team while broadcasting Yankees games, Cone said, “Their pitching prospects haven’t really come through yet, but their young position players are some of the best in the game, in my opinion.”

Yet the Royals lost 91 games last season, and this season began with a record of 0-10 in their first homestand, making their marketing slogan of “Our Time” sound embarrassingly premature. Arm injuries to two of their more heralded young pitchers, Danny Duffy and John Lamb, have not helped.

Nor has Jonathan Sanchez, who has gone 1-5 with a 6.75 earned run average since being acquired from San Francisco for outfielder Melky Cabrera. (Cabrera will return to Kansas City as an All-Star for the N.L.)

Moore said that Schuerholz’s warnings of impatience have not materialized.

“Our owner has been very supportive with what we’ve had to do,” he said, adding that he had told Glass that the Royals could be a .500 team this season “if everything goes right,” which it has not.

But on the night the Royals faced Greinke, handing out promotional “Hometown Heroes” T-shirts to fans, Glass watched them play a crisp game, winning, 2-1. The next night, with the Royals trailing by two runs in the ninth inning against the Milwaukee closer John Axford, the homegrown infield corners Moustakas and Hosmer were on base with two outs. Shortstop Alcides Escobar was at the plate.

Escobar, 25, came in the Greinke deal, along with outfielder Lorenzo Cain, pitcher Jeremy Jeffress and a top pitching prospect, Jake Odorizzi. With Escobar entrenched at short and hitting .307, Moore hopes the trade will eventually be viewed as the kind of chicken salad made by the shrewdest small-market general managers — his Billy Beane baptism.

Against Axford, Escobar tripled in two runs, and the Royals won the game in 11 innings, celebrating at home plate as if they had clinched a divisional title. By the end of June, they had surged to four games below .500 before dropping back to 10 under going into the All-Star break.

“There’s no doubt we’re making progress, and everybody knows it,” Butler, an All-Star and a veteran of more losing baseball than he cares to remember, said in the postgame clubhouse. “We have so much talent up here and more coming up that we didn’t have before.”

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If and when that talent matures, the question will be to what extremes Glass will go to retain it. Moore acknowledged that the market size would preclude keeping everyone and that it would be up to the scouts to keep the assembly line moving.

For now, he gauges the Royals’ progress as much in perception as in reality.

“One thing that’s occurred — and it’s the best feeling I’ve had since I’ve been here — is we now have young kids in Kansas City between the ages of, say, 5 and 13, who, if you ask, want to have lunch with Brett and White or Salvador Perez and Mike Moustakas, they’re going to choose one of those young guys,” Moore said. “And that’s the key thing that’s happened here and what it’s all about for us, to move beyond what was here in the ’70s and ’80s, beyond Mr. K.”

Last year came reports that Glass was considering peddling corporate naming rights to the ballpark that was renamed for Kauffman one month before his death in 1993. How that revenue-generating strategy, common elsewhere, would play in Kauffman-loving Kansas City remains to be seen.

In the meantime, while the young Royals and their long-suffering fans wait for their time, memories of the good old days and Mr. K still shimmer like twinkling stars across the nighttime Midwestern sky.