I didn\u2019t care for baseball as a young child. I knew the Royals were in the World Series, but I was more enamored with the guy in the red uniform doing backflips when he ran on the field than I was with any Royals players. At school, we were asked to draw a picture of our favorite Royals player. I asked my teacher who played left field for the Royals, since that was the position I played in t-ball (reflecting my playing ability at the time). She told me Lonnie Smith. I didn\u2019t know what he looked like, so I drew a white guy with curly blonde hair. Lonnie Smith is not a white guy with curly blonde hair<\/p>\n
But in 1987, my next-door neighbor set up a small TV in his garage and we watched the American League Championship Series between the Twins and Tigers on that thing. The Tigers are my ancestral team – my dad grew up in Detroit (attending Al Kaline camp!), and I was born there before we moved to KC when I was a tot. So I was rooting for them and slowly getting hooked on baseball. That offseason, I read everything about baseball I could get my hands on, and when the next season rolled around, I was a rabid fan.<\/p>\n
I am pretty certain I could name every player on the 1988 Royals from memory, from Bo Jackson and George Brett down to Rey Palacios and Jos\u00e9 de Jes\u00fas. It was a fun team to follow with Bo becoming a superstar, George still in his prime, recognizable vets like Willie Wilson and Frank White, exciting young players like Danny Tartabull and Kevin Seitzer, and a terrific pitching staff with Bret Saberhagen, Mark Gubicza, and quirky submarining closer Dan Quisenberry.<\/p>\n
But they floundered around .500 much of the year and were overwhelmed by an emerging mini-dynasty in Oakland, the \u201cBash Brothers.\u201d They won 84 games, finishing a distant third place, 19.5 games back.<\/p>\n
Still, I had watched as many games as I could (it was like 30-40 games on TV back in those days, kids!) and listened to the rest on my radio, sometimes cradling it in bed for the late-night West Coast games, drifting off to sleep as Denny Matthews described Charlie Leibrandt\u2019s battle against Claudell Washington. I read the Star sports section on a regular basis – Dick Kaegel, Gib Twyman, and Jonathan Rand in those days. I asked for Royals Starting Lineup figures for Christmas. I got a Bo Jackson poster in my room. I got my first Royals cap.<\/p>\n
That was my first season following the Royals. What was yours? What was the team that got you hooked?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I didn\u2019t care for baseball as a young child. I knew the Royals were in the World Series,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":596619,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2387],"tags":[5,936,2123,55,77247,2596,2595,4,252,72937],"class_list":{"0":"post-596618","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-kansas-city-royals","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-kansas","10":"tag-kansas-city","11":"tag-kansas-city-royals","12":"tag-kansas-city-royals-discussion","13":"tag-kansascity","14":"tag-kansascityroyals","15":"tag-mlb","16":"tag-royals","17":"tag-royals-review-question-of-the-day"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116144170922067568","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596618\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/596619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}