7/5/2009 - Kauffman Stadium - MLB Ballpark #16

2009 Game #14 - Chicago White Sox at Kansas City Royals
Final Score: Royals 6, White Sox 3
Hot Dog - 2/5

Today’s ball game was at the “New K.”  That would be the newly remodeled Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City, MO.

What a great park!  We pulled into KC yesterday evening and did a drive around the stadium grounds.  Both the baseball and football stadiums are in the same complex, and were built to look very similar from the outside– a kind of 60’s/70’s shiny futuristic.  Surprisingly, the look has held up to time, and the remodel takes very little away from it.  (Arrowhead Stadium, the football arena, is undergoing its remodel this year.)

I really like the park’s interior.  The concourse is open to field level all the way around the park.  We both found this surprising, as only the “newer” parks seem to have this feature.  Kauffman has two characteristic elements:  The fountains and the scoreboard.  The outfield fountains are very nice.  They add a formal feeling to the setting.  I’d say “elegance,” but it is still a baseball field after all.  In the remodel, the left field fountains were partially covered for the addition of some bleacher seats.  It doesn’t ruin the effect, but it does dampen it (pun intended).  The scoreboard is… well, the scoreboard is gigantic.  It dominates the outfield view, which is actually not a bad thing, as there’s no “skyline” to speak of.  Given its size (over 100 feet, so we’ve heard), it’s able to provide a whole lot of information, which makes keeping track of the game easy for those of us who are scoring along.

The crowd today was a small one:  Only 15,915.  It’s a shame, really, because the Royals aren’t the bad team they’ve been over past seasons.  After today’s game, they were only 1 1/2 games out of first.  It was a good game, too.  Pitching was okay; not great, but not all that bad.  The Royals had two big innings (putting up “crooked numbers”) and their bullpen was mostly solid.

In other news:

• We sang along to Garth Brooks’ “Friends in Low Places” in-between the 7th and 8th innings.  Karyn doesn’t want to admit it, but she knew all the words. 
• We heard the Beatles version of “Kansas City” (you know the one) after the victory.  Now I love The Beatles, but theirs is not my favorite version of the song.
• Karyn caught a G-Force promotional t-shirt from the launcher-cannon thingie. Well, almost.  Actually, it landed near her and she picked it up off the ground, much to the dismay of the little girls sitting nearby. Unfortunately, Disney has plastered G-Force promotional material all over Major League Baseball this summer.  We’ve seen the posters, collected all the trading cards and have seen the trailer at least 10 or 12 times already (it still looks like an awful movie).  Oh well.

On to Denver!

-Rich