<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t care for baseball as a young child. I knew the Royals were in the World Series, but I was more enamored with the guy in the red uniform doing backflips when he ran on the field than I was with any Royals players. At school, we were asked to draw a picture of our favorite Royals player. I asked my teacher who played left field for the Royals, since that was the position I played in t-ball (reflecting my playing ability at the time). She told me Lonnie Smith. I didn\u2019t know what he looked like, so I drew a white guy with curly blonde hair. Lonnie Smith is not a white guy with curly blonde hair<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
But in 1987, my next-door neighbor set up a small TV in his garage and we watched the American League Championship Series between the Twins and Tigers on that thing. The Tigers are my ancestral team – my dad grew up in Detroit (attending Al Kaline camp!), and I was born there before we moved to KC when I was a tot. So I was rooting for them and slowly getting hooked on baseball. That offseason, I read everything about baseball I could get my hands on, and when the next season rolled around, I was a rabid fan.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
I am pretty certain I could name every player on the 1988 Royals from memory, from Bo Jackson and George Brett down to Rey Palacios and Jos\u00e9 de Jes\u00fas. It was a fun team to follow with Bo becoming a superstar, George still in his prime, recognizable vets like Willie Wilson and Frank White, exciting young players like Danny Tartabull and Kevin Seitzer, and a terrific pitching staff with Bret Saberhagen, Mark Gubicza, and quirky submarining closer Dan Quisenberry.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
But they floundered around .500 much of the year and were overwhelmed by an emerging mini-dynasty in Oakland, the \u201cBash Brothers.\u201d They won 84 games, finishing a distant third place, 19.5 games back.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Still, I had watched as many games as I could (it was like 30-40 games on TV back in those days, kids!) and listened to the rest on my radio, sometimes cradling it in bed for the late-night West Coast games, drifting off to sleep as Denny Matthews described Charlie Leibrandt\u2019s battle against Claudell Washington. I read the Star sports section on a regular basis – Dick Kaegel, Gib Twyman, and Jonathan Rand in those days. I asked for Royals Starting Lineup figures for Christmas. I got a Bo Jackson poster in my room. I got my first Royals cap.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
That was my first season following the Royals. What was yours? What was the team that got you hooked?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.royalsreview.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I didn\u2019t care for baseball as a young child. I knew the Royals were in the World Series, but I was more enamored with the guy in the red uniform doing backflips when he ran on the field than I was with any Royals players. At school, we were asked to draw a picture of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2304625,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[445708,439384],"class_list":["post-2304624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty","tag-kansas-city-royals-discussion","tag-royals-review-question-of-the-day"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/What-was-the-first-Royals-team-you-really-followed.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2304624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2304624"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2304624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2304626,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2304624\/revisions\/2304626"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2304625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2304624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2304624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2304624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}