KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kauffman Stadium is mostly silent now. There are no cracks of the bat to be heard, and the field has been covered in a blanket of snow over the past week. But for Royals fans, that’s okay. They’re still basking in the warm glow of a World Series victory.
Toby Cook, Vice President of Community Affairs and Publicity for the Royals, said he’s been staying busy since the championship win.
“The fans, and maybe even the players back home, get to enjoy it, but it feels like once you accomplish something, you’re just on to the next thing,” Cook said.
The next thing for Cook and the Royals is Fanfest. For Dayton Moore and the front office, it’s building another team that could be a World Series contender.
“When we first took possession of it here in the Royals Hall of Fame, it had champagne, beer, spit, sweat, in postseason celebration mode.”
The sterling silver Commissioner’s Trophy has been a star attraction in Kansas City ever since Ned Yost brought it to town.
“There’s something about this inanimate object that has just drawn people to it,” Cook explained.
Curt Nelson is the Director of the Royals Hall of Fame. Wherever that trophy goes, Nelson goes with it. He talked about what the trophy truly means to people.
“You know, it’s a piece of metal. It is, it’s just a piece of metal, but what goes into it, it’s all those sorts of hopes and dreams,” Nelson said.
He has been accompanying the trophy on its cross-country tour.
“I like to convince myself that people are excited to see me,” Nelson laughed. “They could care if it’s me, but they’re like, ‘the World Series trophy is here!'”
“We didn’t have a plan necessarily for where we were going to have it, which was so fun because it would just pop up here and pop up there, at the Nutcracker in the Kansas City Ballet,” Cook recalled.
Nelson recently sent the trophy to have it cleaned and polished, and also got it engraved.
The new addition to the Hall of Fame will eventually be permanently displayed in the Crowning Moments gallery. But the backdrop of the trophy case isn’t a picture of the team celebrating on the field in New York. It’s that iconic scene of hundreds of thousands of Royals fans gathered at Union Station, right here in Kansas City.