Stay Classy, Kansas City: Hal McRae

This is "Stay Classy, Kansas City." The purpose of this promise-to-be-short-lived feature is to review some oopses and blunders, be they one single event, or a career of fumblage, of a variety of current and former athletes that have donned Kansas City uniforms. Once the series concludes, we'll publish a post reviewing all of the candidates, and throw up a cute little poll on the side bar in certainty that our readers will participate. At the completion of yesterday's installment, I forecasted some baseball for today's segment, and it is baseball I will deliver. Today we will, via the fabulous Tubes of You, review a timeless meltdown by a man who once roamed the outfields and the dugout benches of the Kansas City Royals. All the fun and goodness is just after the jump.


Mr. McRae spent his first four seasons in the bigs with the Cincinnati Reds that had Dick Sisler at the helm. He would then log 15 seasons with the Kansas City Royals, and finish his career as a player with three all-star appearances, a lifetime .290 batting average, a lifetime .454 as a slugger (including a 1982 Silver Slugger award for designated hitter), and over 2000 hits. He, along with Amos Otis, Willie Wilson, Frank White, and U.L. Washington remain fixtures of my childhood years as a Royals baseball fan.



In the early 90s, however, McRae put on a different Royals uniform, that of the skipper. The Royals' days in the sun had begun to fade, and personally, I had begun to focus much more intently on that other fictitious Kansas City franchise. Although only two of McRae's four seasons as manager went the full 162 games, he finished above .500 in three of them. Seven years later, however, he signed on as the main man for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, where, he, uh, did not. His lifetime record as a manager wound up at 399-473, which isn't necessarily horrible, but his fifteen seconds of fame, perhaps are.

The only prelude I can offer to this clip would be something along the lines of, How in the flip would this guy handle media coverage today? Yikes.



And that's today's class act, gracious readers. We'll be back next week with more historical facts.