I know I’ve written about the Royals and Kansas City a lot recently. It wasn’t a plan of mine, it just sort of happened. And I’d very much like to move on to other topics, but then the Royals released the renderings of the two finalists for their new ballpark to replace Kauffman Stadium. That means I now have to write my Kauffman Stadium review. Sorry, these are the rules.
Review may not be the right word for this one. It’s more of a remembrance. Having lived here for over 40 years, I’ve seen the ballpark in every one of its iterations. I saw it on a hot July night as George Brett tried to hit .400. I saw it in the national spotlight during a World Series game. I was there when it was renovated, and the sax player who played the national anthem held a note for 30 seconds waiting for the expected flyover to arrive.
And, of course, I’ve seen it the way it is now. Aging sort of gracefully, but devoid of the energy that the big crowds and good baseball used to bring each night.
Royals Stadium, as it was known then, was only seven-years old when I moved here, and it was state of the art. In the early 1970s, cities were putting up these ugly circular multi-use concrete monstrosities that all looked the same and had no character. Three Rivers Stadium could have been Riverfront Stadium, which could have been the original Busch Stadium, which could have been Veterans Stadium, and so on. Even worse were domes. Don’t get me started on domes.
But Royals Stadium, was different. It was built just for baseball. It had fountains. It had the giant scoreboard with a crown on top. It was smaller, seating only 40,000 or so at a time when 50,000 or more was the norm. It had red and orange seats, which made no sense since the team’s colors were (and still are) blue and white, but it didn’t matter.
There was nothing around it but the adjacent Arrowhead Stadium for the Chiefs and a sea of concrete. You weren’t going there to shop, or got to a brewpub, or let your kids play in an arcade. You were there to watch baseball, and maybe tailgate before or after the game.
And it all worked! The team the Royals put together perfectly matched the ballpark, speedy teams focused on running and defense and pitching. Lots of doubles and triples hit into the enormous outfield gaps, skidding to the deep fence on the blazing hot artificial turf. They were good, the fans were loud. Royals Stadium was a party back when that team was a contender every year. For ten straight years, 1973 to 1982, the Royals were in the top five in the American League in attendance.
Yeah, the Royals. The ones in Kansas City. Go re-watch Game 4 of the 1980 World Series, played in glorious daylight, and you’ll get a sense of the atmosphere in that place. (Also, enjoy the performance by Willie Mays Aikens. Just needs to be said.)
And that’s the way it was for most of the teams’s first quarter century.
Then Ewing Kauffman died in 1993, and the team went through a horrible period without a principal owner. The new ownership trust that was established, and the ultimate owner, David Glass, simply stopped spending serious money on payroll. In the year Kauffman died, the Royals’ payroll trailed only Toronto and New York in the American League. They’d had the league’s highest payroll only three years earlier. Within two years of his death they were 12th. The following year, they were dead last.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, they changed the ballpark, too. Out went the artificial turf in favor of grass. The deep walls were brought in, hoping more crowd-pleasing home runs would be hit. They re-named it Kauffman Stadium. With all the changes, the team and ballpark simply lost its character, and with it went many fans’ identification with them. Attendance dropped until it was consistently in the bottom-five in the league.
A major renovation, funded mostly by the taxpayers, gave the ballpark a facelift in 2009. The fences were moved back, the giant crown scoreboard was updated. Seating was reduced to make room for broader concourses, and more food options. A plaza was built past the fountains in the outfield, and you could now actually sit or stand there for a game.
Despite that renovation, and the infusion of the fans’ money to make it happen and attend games at more expensive ticket prices, the Glass family still wouldn’t spend money on the payroll. Just two years after the renovation, the Royals again had the lowest payroll in baseball, spending about one-sixth of what they Yankees did.
That finally changed in 2013, when the club’s $87 million payroll, the highest in team history to that point, was the midpoint in the American League. Shockingly, the team actually had a winning record. (That’s sarcasm. It’s not shocking at all. You have to spend money to consistently have good baseball players. This is a simple concept to everyone in baseball outside of the Royals’ front office.) They kept spending, the team kept improving, and the fans returned. By 2015, the Royals were 7th in payroll, 6th in attendance, and won the World Series. Kauffman was rocking again.
The team rewarded the fans’ rebirth of enthusiasm by slashing the payroll again. They went from 7th in 2015, to 9th by 2017, to 12th by 2018, to 13th by 2020. The team’s record dropped with it, and then the attendance followed. The Glass family sold the team in the midst of that slide to John Sherman, former minority owner of the Cleveland Guardians.
And what John Sherman wants now is a shiny new stadium, with some kind of “ballpark district” surrounding it.
Look, I get it. Kauffman is now the fourth-oldest ballpark in the major leagues, younger than only Fenway, Wrigley, and Dodger Stadium. It probably needs a replacement if the team is going to generate the revenue they need to contend.
But there are two problems with that notion.
There’s no reason to expect that the Royals will either generate more money with a new ballpark, or that they’d spend that money on acquiring or retaining good players. Baseball teams, all privately owned and nestled behind a preposterous antitrust exemption, simply do not open their books. For all we know, the Royals are already wildly profitable, and the owners since Ewing Kauffman have simply been pocketing that profit instead of spending it on the team. Or they could be in desperate debt. We simply don’t know, and are supposed to take it on faith that the club needs the new stadium, and taxpayers to fund most of it, in order to return to respectability and contention.
Kauffman Stadium is still a great place to watch a ballgame.
It’s this second point that needs to be remembered. No, you still can’t do anything around the ballpark besides tailgate. And the concourses aren’t as wide as newer parks, and the food options aren’t as expansive, and so on, and so on.
But there isn’t a bad seat in the house, and the staff are all friendly. The food that is there is great, and the fans who come out are midwestern nice, and knowledgeable about the game. You get to stare out at those pretty fountains, and see the great crown scoreboard, and remember the days when George Brett and Willie Wilson and Amos Otis would hit gappers that would roll forever, or Dan Quisenberry would spray hot fans next to the bullpen with a hose on August afternoons, or Bo Jackson would make a preposterous throw, or babyfaced Bret Saberhagen would throw a no-hitter. Or some of the more recent memories from the few years when ownership cared enough to actually try.
Whether you still think of it as Royals Stadium, or as Kauffman Stadium, it’s always been misnamed. It’s not a stadium, damn it. It’s a ballpark, and a great one.
I know it probably has to go. I just wish I had faith that whatever is going to replace it was actually needed.
And that it will actually be worthy of what it’s going to replace.
Hi Paul, this is thoughtful and well done! I shared it on my Facebook timeline.