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Kansas City Royals

Baseball is an outdoor sport in which a pitcher pitches a hard, fist sized ball to the hitting area of a batter. The batter hits the hard ball with a tapered, smooth, cylindrical bat made up of wood or metal. The batsman scores by running counter-clockwise within the four markers called the bases arranged at the corners of a diamond. Baseball is sometimes called hardball to differentiate it from similar games such as softball.

The Athletics left Kansas City for Oakland after the 1967 season. Major League Baseball, looking to expand to 24 teams, grants Kansas City one of its four expansion teams which would begin play in 1969. The team, which is owned by Ewing M. Kauffman, would be named the Royals.

In 1968 Ewing Kauffman purchased an AL, American League expansion franchise that took the field the following year as the Kansas City Royals. In 1971, only their third season, the Royals finished second. Never has an expansion team fared so well so quickly. Three factors contributed to the rapid and sustained success. First, their farm system quickly produced a number of stars, including George Brett, Willie Wilson, and Frank White, and pitchers Paul Splittorff, Steve Busby, Dennis Leonard, and Dan Quisenberry.

Expansion teams Kansas City Royals, Montreal Expos, San Diego Padres, and Seattle Pilots made things look easy by winning their first regular-season games. The Expos won by scoring 11 runs against the Mets to win 11–10. Pitcher Dan McGinn cracked the Expos first homer to help keep the Mets winless for openers. The host Royals edged the Twins in 12 innings, 4–3.

The Royals' front office made several trades that brought pivotal players to Kansas City, such as Hal McRae, Amos Otis, Freddie Patek, John Mayberry, and Cookie Rojas. And finally, the team employed highly competent field bosses like Jack McKeon, Whitey Herzog, Jim Frey, and Dick Howser, who molded youth and veterans into winning combinations. In their first twenty campaigns, the Royals won a World Championship in 1985, two AL pennants, six AL Western Division titles, and had seven second-place finishes. They lost three straight bitterly contested LCS, the League Championship Series to the Yankees from 1976 to 1978 before finally reaching the WS, the World Series with a sweep of the Yankees in the 1980 playoffs.

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