If you want to start arming a populace with money they don’t have for a stadium they don’t want, there’s no easier yet more manipulative way to do it than by invoking the widow of the team’s most popular manager. I mean, imagine how the A’s could have handled their stadium campaign if they’d bothered to hunt down Connie Mack’s great-great-granddaughter.
But John Sherman, the owner of the Kansas City Royals and the iconic stadium they are hoping to replace, has traveled there and many other very strange and disgusting places in a letter to the Royals fans who are expected to foot the bill for said stadium and all associated property. Beginning with Nancy Howser, Dick Howser’s widow, and his experience at the 1985 World Series, he progressed to a deliberate platitude (“the restoration of the Royals to their rightful place in Major League Baseball” is particularly grandiose) that finally got to the heart of the matter.
Sherman (not related to Miami Marlins owner Bruce Sherman, who already has his new and almost unused stadium) is trying to pit two Missouri counties, Jackson and Clay, against each other for the right to pay to restore the royals to their rightful place — which, according to a cursory tour of the rankings since 2000, is 30th out of 30 teams. And that’s not the stadium’s fault, which at 50 years old is only younger than Fenway, Wrigley, Dodger, Angel and the Oakland Coliseum, but is by no means a seedy bunch.
Sherman is careful to cite the Chiefs, the new airport terminal, the expanded streetcar line, the NFL Draft, the World Cup, and the new stadium for the NWSL’s Kansas City Current as perfectly valid reasons for a new ballpark to which the Royals neither actually contributed nor are involved. Sherman just wants a new stadium because he wants a new stadium, and he just wants someone else to pay for it because he doesn’t want to pay for it himself. Not justifiable, but at least understandable.
But Nancy Howser had nothing to do with it, and neither did Sherman’s memories of 1985 or even 2015, the royals’ place in the universe, or even The Current. Thanks are due for putting together a letter that hides the nut graphic to the end, but the nut is still the nut. John Sherman sets up the touchdown, and the only thing that sets him apart from the A’s, for example, is that he hasn’t entered the threat phase yet. But it’s coming. The Royals have their rightful place to defend, after all, and being the Pittsburgh Pirates of the American League comes at a price — a price Shermy hopes someone else will pay.