Kansas City Royals 1st Round Pick Retires

I moved to Columbia Missouri in Aug of 2014.  One of the stations in my cluster had just begun to carry The Kansas City Royals games on the radio.  I got the feeling that the Royals were the 2nd Missouri team, similar to the Chicago White Sox in Chicago. The Cubs were, and are the more popular team.  And I got the feeling it was the same for Royals fans.  The St Louis Cardinals are the more popular team.  In 2014, the Royals went to the World Series, and in 2015 they made it back and brought home the trophy!

This organizations seems to be able to draft and develop some really good players.  Not every draft pick works out as good as Eric Hosmer or George Brett.  In 2011, their first round draft pick was an outfielder out of Gardner Edgerton High School named Bubba Starling.  He was picked 5th overall. And he finally made it to the big leagues in 2019. He appeared in 35 games in the shortened 2020 season.

He has announced his retirement from baseball.  According to the article from Yahoo, which you can read HERE, Bubba was a terrific 3 sport athlete in high school, and played for Team USA at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, and he helped the team to win a Silver Medal.  And he was almost a starting QB at Nebraska where he turned down a scholarship and took the 7.5 million dollar signing bonus from the Royals.

It appears in his retirement, he will be doing his best to help others.  Good for him.  And thank you for representing our country in the Olympics.