Kauffman Stadium: The House Ewing Built

On the eastern edge of Kansas City, a pair of stadiums sit side by side in a sports complex unlike any other in professional sports. Baseball on the left. Football on the right. Both built at the same time in the early nineteen seventies, both still standing, both still in use, an arrangement so unusual it has become one of the defining images of this city.

The baseball stadium, Kauffman Stadium, originally called Royals Stadium when it opened on April tenth, nineteen seventy-three, was shaped by the vision of one man: Ewing Kauffman, a Kansas City pharmaceutical entrepreneur who founded the Royals expansion franchise in nineteen sixty-nine and became one of the most beloved owners in baseball history. Kauffman believed that if you treated people right, the rest would follow. He offered his players profit-sharing, funded a baseball academy in Florida to develop raw talent, and ran the franchise as if winning actually mattered to him rather than just to the accountants.

The stadium itself was built as a baseball-only park at a time when many cities were constructing dreary multi-purpose concrete bowls. Its artificial turf gave way to natural grass in the nineteen nineties, and a major renovation in two thousand nine added a spectacular waterfall and fountain beyond the outfield fence. The two hundred fifty million dollar project was paid for with a voter approved Jackson County sales tax, making it one of the largest publicly funded stadium renovations in American history at the time.

The Royals rewarded the city's patience. In nineteen eighty-five, they won the World Series over the rival St. Louis Cardinals in seven games. George Brett, the third baseman whose pine tar bat had generated one of the most famous tantrums in baseball history two summers earlier, anchored a team that came back from three games to one to win the championship.

The stadium was renamed for Ewing Kauffman on July second, nineteen ninety-three, about one month before his death that August. He had asked that the name not be changed while he was alive, but Jackson County went ahead anyway. The fountains still play beyond the outfield wall, a touch of grace in a sport that needs it.