A car pulled up in front of the Lard home on Thursday evening in Kansas City, Kan., and a big man stepped out. He wore white sneakers, a brown long-sleeve shirt and a familiar smile on his face. As he stood near the curb, he asked the group of boys in the yard if he could join their Wiffle Ball game.
At first, Cameron Lard, age 9, and his friends were a little confused.
“For a minute, they were all just kind of like: ‘What?’” recalled Lesley Lard, Cameron’s mother. “Why does this guy want to play?”
But one moment later, Cameron, wearing a blue Royals jersey, realized who it was.
“It’s Salvy!” Cameron screamed.
“All the boys went nuts,” Lesley Lard said.
Salvy, in this case, was Salvador Pérez, the All-Star catcher of the Kansas City Royals. He had the day off on Thursday, one day after the surprising Royals improved to 71-56 on the season, and he happened to be paying a visit to a friend in the neighborhood, a middle class pocket of the Kansas City area. According to Leslie Lard, Perez had visited the subdivision during an off day last summer, which created a minor buzz among neighbors. But this time, he saw the game happening outside the Lard home and, like Willie Mays in Harlem in the 1950s, he wanted in.
“My backyard is where the boys play every day,” Lesley said, “and he drove by and pulled over and got out of the car and said: ‘Hey guys, can I join?’”
Perez began by taking his place on defense. Soon enough, Cameron was running inside to alert his parents. When it was Perez’s turn to bat, Lesley’s husband Terry pulled out his phone and started filming. The boys started moving back — way back — all the way across the street. Perez started to laugh.
“Everybody was trying to play it cool, I guess,” Lesley said. “We wanted them to play.”
The outdoor baseball game at the Lard house is actually a neighborhood staple. On Thursday, it featured kids from third grade all the way up to high school, and at this point, the areas around home plate and the mound are just patches of dirt. Lesley, a local librarian, estimated that she’s spent “hundreds of dollars” on Wiffle Balls, which always seem to end up in the gutter or storm drain. Once, she said, a neighbor remarked that they didn’t realize kids did stuff like this anymore.
“But that’s what they do,” he said.
The family’s love of baseball stemmed from Lesley’s father, Tim Rauter, who was a devoted Royals fan. When the team made the World Series in 2014 for the first time in 29 years, Lesley was pregnant with Cameron, her only child.
“I told him: ‘Technically, he’s been to a World Series game,’” Lesley said.
Cameron came of age during another fallow period for baseball in Kansas City, when the franchise slipped back to the bottom of the standings. But the one constant was Perez, the 34-year-old from Venezuela who was the World Series MVP in 2015 and charmed the city with his youthful exuberance. Lesley’s father passed away three years ago, but the Royals have offered a pleasant surprise in 2024: Behind Perez and ascending superstar Bobby Witt Jr., the club is in position to make the playoffs for the first time in nine years.
“I was just hoping they’d do this when he was still young,” Lesley said, “to experience what it’s like to have a really good baseball team.”
With the way the Royals have played recently, taking over an AL Wild Card spot since the All-Star break, Lesley Lard says she’s been dreaming of taking her son to a postseason game at Kauffman Stadium. On Thursday, the superstar catcher came to them. Perez stuck around for more than 20 minutes, enough time to take some hacks, pose for photos, and for some of the kids to call their parents. One of the boys, Lesley said, bragged to his mom about “an epic fist bump.” And then, with a game against the Phillies on tap for Friday, Perez got back in his car and drove away.
“The fact that he did that might not be a big deal to him,” Lesley said. “But those boys are going to have that the rest of their lives.”
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