A journey in pictures: Kansas City!

After a sweep of the Colorado Rockies, my Kansas City Royals are no longer in last place in the AL Central. (That honor belongs to Cleveland. Here are the standings.) My parents wanted to go to this series, and invited me along. How could I say no? So my camera and I went along to the City of Kansas (and Missouri).

Seriously, Tuesday was a PERFECT baseball day in KC. I even got to meet some of our readers!

MONDAY: David DeJesus and Mike Aviles opened the game with a triple and a double, which started an unusual number of extra-base hits for the home team. Three Royals homered on the way to an 8-4 win. My favorite Royal, Brian Bannister, pitched 7 innings and got the win despite walking six Rockies.

After the game, my little brother and I waited outside for autographs. Hardly anyone stopped to sign, but Mark Teahen did, because he’s awesome like that. He also took the time to do a picture. (My brother was also in the original, but we decided to crop him out. That’s his hand in the lower right corner.)

TUESDAY was a damn beautiful day for baseball, and there’s no other place I would rather have been than Kauffman Stadium. Especially when being there allows me to meet some of our readers! KCMichelle and her husband (whose blog is awesome!) met up with me by the Royals’ 1985 World Series trophy, which is lonely in that case, but won’t be lonely forever.

Colorado’s Tuesday starter is an ex-Royal, Jorge de la Rosa (who I ran into at lunch the next day…random). For some reason, the Royals could not get anything going against JDLR for the first few innings, and I was a tiny bit scared he would no-hit us. He did not, and the Royals ended up winning 7-3.

The little brother and I tried again for autographs after the game, with much better luck. He got signatures from a ton of Royals, and I got some pictures of the process. Here’s cutie Gil Meche in his giant pickup (one of several cars; what else is he going to do with his $11MM a year?):

And here’s me with David DeJesus!

Damn, he is so attractive. I can’t really get over that. Look at him! (Confidential to David DeJesus: Marry me! Please? I love you!)

Actually, DeJesus is a pretty good segue into the WEDNESDAY stuff. Tuesday night in the 9th inning, ex-Rockie Ramon Ramirez threw two waaaaaayyy-inside pitches to Colorado’s Yorvit Torrealba. Ram-Ram publicly claims the pitches were purely accidental, but the word around KC was that there was malicious intent. I was kind of hoping that the tension from those pitches (along with some umpiring decisions along the way Tuesday night) would bubble over and make things fighty on Wednesday. So when David DeJesus got hit with a pitch to lead off the game Wednesday, I thought for sure it was the beginning of a crazy evening that might erupt into a brawl.

Nope. It was actually a very civilized game (and another Royal win!) after that, so “witness a benches-clearing brawl” is still on my Bucket List.

But one cool thing I did get to do was see the magical room upstairs in Kauffman Stadium, where my cousin Chris leads a team of skilled folks in running Crown Vision, the majestic new hi-def scoreboard. Seriously, if you haven’t seen a game in KC this year, you can’t believe how big Crown Vision is. Pictures can’t do it justice. It’s…HUGE! (thatswhatshesaid) And here are a few of the controls that make it work. I’m not sure why anyone trusted me near those millions of dollars’ worth of equipment, but there it is.

And here is the maestro who is behind the Crown Vision team, Chris DeRuyscher, long after the game ended and The K emptied out.

Also, I got to have lunch with Joe Posnanski on Wednesday! I did not take any pictures of that adventure, but we had a great time. JoePo is just awesome.

That is my adventure. Now I am finally home, and desperately trying to catch up on e-mail and Royals blogs and everything I missed while I was gone, which is the most exhausting part of any given travels for me. But I am pleased to know that, as of this posting, there are seven major league teams with worse records than Kansas City’s! Thank God we have the NL to beat up on!