Stadium #114 - Kansas City

I skipped the weekend Los Angeles trip (RBG came and stayed with my brother and his girlfriend) because I've been so busy and the Tuesday/Wednesday trip to Austin because there wasn't a whole lot that was interesting besides the game, which you'll only care about if you're a Dynamo fan, and in that case, there's info over on MyDynamo.net. Because the game was pretty much only on radio, I know our listenership in Houston was much higher than normal, so I hope I did the game justice. I'll post highlights at the bottom of this post.

But tonight (Friday) we're in Kansas City, and I went to Kauffman Stadium for the first time ever, the 114th different stadium in which I've seen a professional baseball game. Because the Royals are not a very successful franchise, I hadn't built this up as a big deal in my head, but it was awesome! As a kid, I read Dodger Dogs to Fenway Franks, a book chronicling one man's journey to all 26 (it was written in 1985) Major League Baseball stadiums in one summer. You can blame my stadium craze on him. Anyway, he finished with Dodger Stadium and Kauffman Stadium tied for the No. 1 spot in his rankings. Now I understand why.

Kauffman underwent pretty extensive renovations over the last year, and the updated version has been getting rave reviews. Not having seen the old stadium, I must confess I'm not sure exactly what they did, but from watching on TV, I'm pretty sure they built up the outfield, where there used to be only fountains, and added a lot of stands out there. If you're interested in the renovations, I recommend the Wikipedia article.

At any rate, we had a freaking blast. Because it was July 3, a Friday night, Zack Greinke was pitching, and dollar hot dog night, the place was buzzing from the moment we arrived about 45 minutes before the game. My hook-ups in the Wizards' front office got us two free tickets in the lower bowl under the overhang, so we walked pretty much straight to our seats and had a good view of the game. I downed three hot dogs before the game even started, adding a bag of peanuts as the game went on.

I'm having trouble getting pictures from my phone to the computer, but I'll post them when I can ... the place was just awesome. I think what impressed us most was that almost everybody seemed to be wearing Royals blue shirts or some sort of Royals paraphernalia. It's what we in the business call brand loyalty, and it is much coveted. At Dynamo games, a large percentage of the fans wear orange or Dynamo gear, and Royals fans were very impressive in this regard. As you might expect in Kansas City, it was a fairly lilywhite crowd, and they stayed the whole game (despite the Royals' anemic offense in a 5-0 loss) for the fireworks. But when the Royals did ANYTHING worthwhile, and that was rare on this night, the fans really got into it and made the place rock.

The upper deck has a gradual curve to it - again, I don't know if that's original or not - that really works, for some reason. The fountains have been crammed into space left my seats in the outfield, but it all seems to work. The views from out there were amazing when I walked through late in the game, so I recommend outfield seating. In one section, there were a ton of people standing at the back of the section like they wanted to be sitting. But there were two empty seats at the end of the back row, so I just slid into one and continued keeping score like normal. The looks I started to get! The woman in front of me kept looking back, not subtly at all, and I feel like the people in the back row were giving me WTF? glances as well. I'm still not sure if the surprise was more that I was keeping score or that I dared to take someone else's seat. Eventually the woman whose seat it was arrived, I smiled and got up, and it was all good.

So a great night for a ballgame. We had taken a cab to the game, so we were worried about getting home. It's so suburban we thought we might have to call a cab. Luckily, we walked out the same gate we came in, and there was a line of taxis waiting. We hopped in the first one and headed out, beating the crowd and the traffic as we drove past legions of cars pulled into parking lots or onto the side of the road to watch the post-game fireworks. Definitely a night of stereotypical middle Americana, and I didn't mind one bit. Kauffman Stadium is, for me, a must-see.

Oh, and the scoreboard! Holy crap. They have this enormous videoboard (turns out it's the second-largest LED board in the world behind the one in the Cowboys new stadium) in center field (it has the Royals' crown on top of it, a tribute to the stadium's past) that has almost all the information you could ever want. Whoever designed it must be someone who keeps score (which is very rare these days, but that's another post), because they get a ton of info onto the board and use it pretty well, in my opinion. They have the lineup for the hitting team, the defensive alignment and due up next for the visiting team, pitch speed, stats for the batter, the scoring decision for the previous play, and the linescore all in one location. As I mentioned to our television commentator, who we ran into at the game, you could almost call a game without notes just from looking at the scoreboard. They also use the videoboards in the left and right field corners for the pitchers from each team, one board for each team so you have stats on both pitchers all night.

OK, Austin highlights:


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