Here’s another of my game stories for SABR’s Games Project.
At some point in the future, I’ll tell the longer story of this game, and all the others that I’m writing up. The short story is that this is the first game I attended in what was then known as Royals Stadium, now Kauffman Stadium, in Kansas City. It’s also the first big league game I ever attended with my dad, the handsome devil shown here.
As you can see, he remained a Red Sox fan, as did everyone in our family, despite the fact that his job had transferred us in the summer of 1980 to broiling hot Kansas City, home of the equally-hot Royals and George Brett as he pursued a .400 batting average.
In late July, only a month or so after we moved there, the Red Sox came to town. My parents had told us the local team was really good, and we should get on board that bandwagon. This series looked like a good opportunity to transition some of our sentiment to the Royals, so my dad got three tickets for himself, my brother and me.
At the time, Kauffman Stadium was only 7 years old, and presented a drastically different experience to us than crusty old Fenway Park did. We spent the game pretty much dumbfounded, by the crowd, the noise, the heat, the stadium, all of it.
Please check out the story of how the game itself went. I hope you enjoy reading about it as much as we enjoyed attending it.