Amongst a flurry of youth sporting, dance/pageant extravaganzas and home projects that just can't seem to get done, my wife and I decided to escape the confounds of our complex and catch a Kansas City Royals game Sunday afternoon.
The reviews of the newly renovated Kaufmann Stadium have been glowing, and you can add me to the list.
I haven't been to too many Major League ballparks, but enough to say that The K has always been my favorite.
Now after taking the trip to watch the Royals, I can honestly say, there's no reason not to go — provided you own a bank and some lucrative real estate.
Here's a suggestion if you're watching your money: eat before you go. If you like to partake in liquid refreshments, do so (responsibly!) before walking into the complex. Beers were running $8 a bottle. Bottled water was $5. I couldn't bear to look at the price of the hot dogs.
Still, just being there is worth everything.
I won't bore you with details, but let's just say the new high definition scoreboard, the largest one in the world, towering over the 39,000-seat stadium is stunning.
The kids area will keep your hoodlums occupied for hours and there is a hall of fame complex opening up in July that will tickle the fancy out of boring old farts like myself, who gets into that history kind of stuff.
But the stadium has one glaring fault: the Kansas City Royals baseball team.
Sunday it was an interleague hoe-down between them and the St. Louis Cardinals.
St. Louis had already pounded the tar out of the Royals in the first two of a three-game series. So we figured the Royals had a chance to at least win the third.
Also, the Royals have done so little with themselves in the past 20 years. But they had managed to keep one streak alive: they win when the McCues are in attendance.
Plus, Royal pitcher Gil Meche was starting after coming off a 132-pitch shutout five days before.
And it was Fathers Day. Nothing goes wrong for you on Fathers Day... right?
Well, guess what? All good things eventually end.
The Cardinals, unfortunately, brought the King Kong of baseball to K.C. this weekend, i.e. Albert Pujols. He ruined everything, unless you were a Card fan who outnumbered Royals fans significantly.
In the fourth inning, K.C. and St. Louis were tied 4-all. But the bases were loaded with Cardinal red.
Pujols came up to the plate as the designated hitter — a little irony here considering K.C. is an American League residing team.
And on a 3-2 pitch down the middle, Pujols buried the ball over the left-field wall smacking into the not yet christened Hall of Fame window. The grand slam homer all but sealed the win. All that was left was wondering whether Pujols could hit a cycle — he did not because he couldn't get that elusive triple — and debating whether or not to purchase an $8 beer after all.
I guess I could spend the rest of the column whining about the Royals — how they are 29-39 overall, losers of five straight, and seem headed for another season of oblivion before July. And how it never seems to change year after year.
But I'm not going to do it. The trip to Kansas City was just too good overall. Kaufmann Stadium was just too fun, too cool, too hip.
The new renovated stadium makes you forget that the tenants of this facility hasn’t won jack since I was in college, drinking rot-gut Natural Light out of a can, and thinking I was spending too much.
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•Tracy McCue is sports editor of the Wellington Daily News. He can be reached at sports@wellingtondailynews.com.
Wellington, Kan. —
