FanPost

How I became a Royals Fan

Peter G. Aiken-USA TODAY Sports


If anybody was destined to become a Royals fan, it was me. We moved to KC when I was 5 in 1979. Obviously, those were the glory years for the Royals. My Dad took me to Chiefs and Kings games as well, but the sports I really loved were baseball and soccer. (As a side note, I was a huge KC Comets fan as well as the Royals, for those of you who remember those days.) Both of my grandfathers lived in rural Missouri and were big baseball fans who never missed a game and that helped me develop knowledge and appreciation for the game as well. We lived on the KC/Raytown border less than 2 miles from the stadium. On a quiet night, we could occasionally hear the roar of the crowd as we played wiffleball in my yard. My best friend's Mom was a relative of Satchel Paige and she told me stories of the Negro League games that she attended as a child. Back then, outfield bleacher seats were $1.50 and parking was $3.00 so my whole family could go to a game for $9.00 and we would go about 20 games a year. We also occasionally got tickets right behind the Royals dugout from a woman who worked with my Dad. He always assumed her husband pulled in big $ to be able to afford such great season tickets, but it turns out, it was later discovered she was embezzling money from the company he worked for so she could afford such great season tickets. In that environment, I don't see how I had any choice but to be a Royals fan. We moved away from KC in 1983, but I never gave up on the Royals. I would even wear Royals gear after 1985 to piss off all the Cardinal fans in west central IL where I lived. My high school math teacher would make me sit in the hallway because he refused to look at me wearing a Royals shirt 10 years after the I-70 Series.

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