By Hannah Hecht– With their recent successes over the past season, Kansas City Royals fans seem to be cropping up everywhere across the Midwest, even in places hundreds of miles from the Kansas/Missouri border. Some are coming out of the closet, so to speak, just now ready to vocalize their appreciation for what was, from 2004 to 2012, one of the worst teams in major league baseball. Meanwhile, others are jumping onto the bandwagon while professing to have been true Royals fans all along.
Jacob Meysenburg fits into neither of these camps. Many of his classmates remember that back in 2012, one of those seasons in the so-called “dark ages,” Meysenburg, a senior math and English major, would wear a blue Royals cap all day every game day. He is Morningside’s biggest Royals fan, and he has been nothing short of ecstatic with the team’s recent victories.
“I took a victory lap after the Oakland game,” he said. “I ran down the hall, outside of Dimmitt, and then all the way around campus.”
And if you had ever watched a baseball game with Jacob, you wouldn’t doubt the veracity of his claim. After a hit, especially a double or a triple, he’ll jump up from his seat, clap his hands and let out an excited squeal, his longer-than-shoulder-length brown hair falling into his face from the shock. He taunts the on-screen opposition with a mix of baseball terms that would go over a layperson’s head (“That’s what you get for pulling your starter, Bruce Bochy, even though that was the tactically-correct decision”) to more explicit and direct commentary (“Anyone who cheers for the Giants is a communist!”). He goes beyond insults and excitement, though, and shows sympathy for the players and understanding for the game in a way that only a true fan can. (“It went off the side of his glove. Cain wouldn’t have usually missed that. You don’t see that much from a center fielder.”)
“Watching a baseball game with with Jacob is the most stressful thing in my entire life,” said his roommate and best friend Josh Karel. “I think he’s going to freak out and break my computer or our entire apartment.”
Watching Royals games started off as something that Meysenburg did to bond with his dad. His father was in his twenties back when the Royals lost the World Series to the Philadelphia Phillies in 1980 and when they won the Series in ‘85, and Jacob’s family has followed the Royals ever since.
“I started watching them in earnest around 2007, I suppose,” Meysenburg said, “And we’d watch every single game on TV, which definitely interfered with my school, but that’s okay… You’ve gotta have priorities.”
While Royals baseball may interfere with Meysenburg’s schoolwork at times, he has found a way to use his passion to do something he loves while gaining workplace experience and building his resume. During his sophomore year at Morningside, Jacob was hired on as a blogger for the Sports Illustrated-affiliated Kansas City sports blog KCKingdom.com. His blog posts are sabermetrically-minded, that is, they focus mainly on the analysis of baseball statistics.
“I was actually awful at math in high school.” Meysenburg said, “Well, not awful, just awful relative to my other stuff. Which is why I’m a… math major?”
Meysenburg thinks that a lot of Royals fans are uniquely interested in sabermetrics.
“As a fan of a team that loses a lot, you try and find ways in which your team can not lose. It’s a very stat-minded community.”
Jacob’s articles, like this one, combine his writing skills and prodigious knowledge of and ability to crunch baseball statistics (hence the English and math double major) into an easy-to-interpret mine of information for fans. His posts are unceasingly professional, but they retain enough voice that you can feel the college student, giddy with the prospect of his favorite team making their way to the World Series, at the core.
“If I were to write an article right now and post it, it would have over a thousand views pretty quickly,” he said, “I became involved with the site because I wanted to do stat-based articles, but those don’t get many clicks. Click-bait gets lots and lots of clicks, though. I’ll go on there and see ‘Three reasons that such and such,’ and that will get a lot more views than my heavily research-based article, so that’s a bit of a turn-off, but on the other hand, it’s really cool to have a platform to publish work that you do.”
His position with KC Kingdom is unpaid, but his experience has helped him to land other internships.
“I just got hired to write for a company that makes a piece of equipment that is supposed to revolutionize the way that physical therapists treat patients with balance disorders.”
Meysenburg, a senior, hopes to use his skills in writing and statistics to become an actuary. Or at least, that’s the goal that his parents want for him.
“I would love to do work for a baseball team; that would be optimal, but I guess I need to be a little more realistic. And maybe I’m being pessimistic, but it doesn’t seem very likely that I could get a job doing stats for a team,” he says, “Alternatively, the dream job would be doing nothing… You’ve got to think of the important things… Yourself.”
The Royals almost made it through to become World Series Champions of the 2014 season, but they came up just short, losing game seven (in best out of seven play) by just one point: two to three.
“It was soul crushing,” said Meysenburg. “Watching the seventh game of the world series was like watching Harry Potter, and Voldemort wins. Actually, watching game seven was like watching Miracle, and the Russians win. Actually, wait, game seven of the World Series was like watching Old Yeller, except they don’t shoot the dog at the end; instead he just infects everyone with rabies.”
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