Kansas City Royals Tickets

Kansas City Royals, American professional baseball team based in Kansas City, Missouri. The Royals have won four American League (AL) pennants and two World Series championships (1985 and 2015).

The Royals were founded in 1969 as an expansion franchise that was granted by Major League Baseball after the Kansas City Athletics moved to Oakland the previous year. The Royals did not take long to overcome the usual trials of an expansion club; they finished in second place in the AL Western Division three times in their first seven seasons. In an effort to cultivate prospects other franchises had missed, team owner Ewing Kauffman founded the Royals Baseball Academy in Sarasota, Florida, in 1970. The academy aimed to use technological innovations and advanced training techniques to develop baseball skills in overlooked prospects with raw athletic ability, and it produced 14 major leaguers from the 77 prospects that attended the academy in its four years of existence. In 1973 three key members of the Royals during the team’s most successful era made their debut: second baseman Frank White (a member of the first Royals Academy class), outfielder and designated hitter Hal McRae, and future Hall of Fame third baseman George Brett. The trio anchored Royals squads that won three consecutive division titles between 1976 and 1978 but that were defeated by the New York Yankees in each of the AL Championship Series (ALCS) of those seasons. After another second-place finish in 1979, Kansas City won a fourth division crown in 1980, as well as its first AL pennant, which was followed by a loss to the Philadelphia Phillies in the World Series.