My first “favorite” baseball player was Danny Tartabull. “The Bull” wasn’t always the most popular player on the team, although I couldn’t see why. I was eight and he was the best player on my hometown Royals. 
I can remember my favorite baseball card. It was the Donruss card with Tartabull wearing the his batting practice mesh jersey, royal blue, posing in his batting stance for the camera. My card was bent in the middle from the rubber band that held it in its set of Royals cards. (Images of that card don’t exist anywhere online, but FanIQ had a nice cartoony one I’ve displayed here.) There was also a great George Brett card, in his home whites in the batting box. Brett was in his familiar batting stance, leaning way back, coiled up like a snake ready to strike.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see why Tartabull was not the favorite player of the masses. He didn’t have the history of George Brett, who was still swatting the ball over the field despite his advancing age. Brett had won the batting title the year before, the third time he had done so, ten years after he had last had that achievement.
Tartabull also didn’t have the raw athleticism, pedigree, or advertising campaign of fellow outfielder Bo Jackson. Bo is the only Royal ever to lead the fan balloting in All-Star votes. At that game, in Oakland, Bo hit a ball about as hard as any human had ever done against live pitching, way out of the ballpark and into the covered seats at the Coliseum.
Nor did Tartabull have the raw speed of Willie Wilson, the Cy Young awards and long flowing mane of Bret Saberhagen, or Frank White’s cabinet full of Gold Glove awards.
Then again, I was eight. I had no sense of history; I was two when the Royals won the 1985 World Series and, although I have my father’s game 7 ticket stub, I don’t remember a single moment of that October, of Don Deckinger, Vince Coleman and the tarp, or of Saberhagen’s brilliance. I didn’t know that Bo would be one of those shooting-star athletes, broken by injury before we even knew what we were watching. Besides, he played for the Raiders. I could only like Bo until football season started. By this 1991 season, Bo’s career with the Royals was already over. Bo was never the same again, despite attempting a comeback with the White Sox and the Angels.
I also didn’t understand how brutal Tartabull was with his glove. Eight year olds don’t understand defensive metrics.
What I did know was that, at this time in his career, Tartabull was the best overall hitter on the team. Brett no longer had the power he used to. He could still hit, but he had become a singles hitter. Jackson was brilliant and flawed; he seemed to strike out most of the time. And he played for the Raiders.
Tartabull taught me a harsh lesson too: never pick a favorite player as long as I am a Kansas City fan. He will only leave for heaps and heaps of money. In 1992, the Yankees inked the free agent to a league-high $5.3 million salary. Tartabull was doing Letterman and the Royals were out another slugger. The hurt in Kansas City was palpable: the Royals had never before lost such a high-profile free agent, and this was coming on the heels of Jackson hurting his hip. The Royals were pressing to win one final World Series before beloved owner Ewing Kauffman, fighting cancer, passed on.
I wish I could say I learned my lesson, but I didn’t. David Cone captivated me when he won the 1994 Cy Young Award. He was also the team’s player-rep in the strike that year, a strike that hurt Kansas City as much as any other franchise with the exception of Montreal. With a raise coming to him and a shaky ownership situation, Cone was traded before the next season.
That was about the time the Royals had a phenom tearing up the minor leagues. Like Cone, Johnny Damon was a local product and claimed to be a life-long Royals fan. I had not yet learned my lesson, as the royal blue number 18 jersey in my closet can attest.
In the end, that jersey is all that I can root for. I’ve been spurned too many times by players. Baseball players are human. Baseball management is human, too, and the two sides can’t always agree. I understand this now. I shed no tears when Carlos Beltran was traded. I can’t allow myself to be sucked in by new players, no matter how charming they are or how much they appeal to my own beliefs. I have to root for the team, not the individual.
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