KC Royals: So Many Yordano Ventura Memories In So Little Time

KC Royals pitcher Yordano Ventura has left fans across major league baseball with a wealth of memories in his short, three-year career.

What a way to wake up Sunday morning. I admit, I’m a late sleeper on the weekends, and I was in bed when my sister called just after 11 a.m.. “Did you hear who died?” That’s never a good way to start the day. Fortunately, it was no one close in my life. Unfortunately, it was Kansas City Royals pitcher Yordano Ventura.

I’m not one to jump on the saint bandwagon. We do that too often in death, and in a way, it cheapens who the person was. Ventura was likely not a saint, but there is still plenty of reason to be sad.

I’m a relative newcomer to the Royals – I became a fan in 2008 while waiting for late scores on press nights at a weekly newspaper. They were pretty terrible back then.

Never really concerned with the winning, my collection of KC Royals gear continued to grow each year as I began to build an identity around an organization that, honesty, has no idea I exist. That never mattered to me. For whatever reason, the nightly televised games were a great distraction for me.

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The distraction usually disappears for a good six months out of the year as the Kansas CIty Royals are eliminated from playoff contention or the season ends. In 2013, Kansas City just missed the playoffs. Personally, the end of that year was setting me up for a disaster of a 2014.