The Royals are set to celebrate a broadcaster, not a box score, on Friday night.
Kansas City’s game will be the 9,155th in franchise history, but the bigger marker is Denny Matthews’ 8,000th career game behind the microphone. Matthews has been with the Royals since the franchise began in 1969, and the club plans to recognize the longtime radio voice with an in-game presentation.
The night already has plenty built in around the ballpark. The Royals are planning fireworks, their top minor-league players will be at Kauffman Stadium, and the first 20,000 fans will receive a Salvador Perez bobblehead.
On the broadcast, RoyalsTV analyst Eric Hosmer said he and others recently went back to the start of Matthews’ run and listened to a call from that first season.
“We’re on the bus the other night,” Hosmer said during Friday’s broadcast, “and we’re listening to Danny Matthews’s first call, and you can hear him calling the game, and he promotes McDonald’s brand-new sandwich, the Big Mac,” Hosmer said. “How about that?
1969, baby. That was awesome.”
Hosmer’s mention of the Big Mac was a neat time capsule from the early days of Matthews’ career. A McDonald’s restaurant in Pennsylvania introduced the sandwich in 1967, and it went national the next year, according to History.com. By 1969, it was still a relatively fresh piece of fast-food culture.
The Royals realized the 8,000-game milestone was approaching because Matthews has kept every one of his scorecards. Ryan Lefebvre said he and Curt Nelson, the director of the Royals Hall of Fame, dug into the boxes with help from Sam Mellinger, the Royals vice president of communications, and other staff members.
“Curt Nelson and I had wondered for years: How many games has Denny done? Denny has saved all of his scorecards, and years ago he turned them over to Curt.
Curt asked for them, and so they’ve been in the Royals’ possession for years,” Lefebvre said on the broadcast. “And he and I have been saying one of these days we’ve got to find out how many games he’s done.
Call it divine inspiration, instinct, whatever. But Curt and I finally said, ‘We’re either going to do this or we’re not going to do this.’ ...
“But he and I got a group of about 10 to 15 Royals employees, and the Royals paid for lunch. And here come all the boxes of scorecards going back to 1969, and we actually counted all of them in about an hour.
It didn’t take that long, and I’m glad we did. Sam Mellinger was in charge of tallying up the numbers, so someone would say, ‘OK, in 1972, we did 161 games,’ and we’re adding them up, and we’re tallying them up, tallying them up, and all of a sudden it hit us: ‘Oh my gosh, he’s going to do his 8,000th game this year.’”
Matthews’ resume already includes baseball’s highest honor for a broadcaster. He won the Ford C.
Frick Award from the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2007. Friday’s recognition will add another chapter to a run that has stretched from the Royals’ beginning to this week’s milestone night.
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