Northeast News
November 11, 2015
Last week, we saw the true character of Kansas City and it shone through like a beacon in the night after the Royals clenched the World Series title on Sunday night. Tuesday’s parade and rally drew hundreds of thousands to the downtown and crossroads area with nary a problem reported. Police Chief Darryl Forté reported a scant three arrests during the whole affair. Even social media was largely quiet on any kind of major issue that would have put a black eye on the event. No rioting. No overturned, burning vehicles on city streets like we saw last year in San Francisco after they actually won the title. Makes a news-dog proud, it does.
We do, however, have our doubts about the size of the crowd. Mayor Sly along with a number of other officials tweeted out the estimated 800,000 number and the main stream media just picked that number and fawningly ran with it despite any solid evidence to justify the numbers. Some mathematical denizens took to the interwebs on Kansas City’s most popular blog, Tony’s Kansas City, with their calculations and those numbers seem to make more sense to this pooch than anything remotely approaching the 800,000 mark. The comparison was even made to the 1921 dedication of Liberty Memorial, where the crowd numbered just north of 100,000 with the comparative pictures to back-up. This realist little news-dog is runnin’ with somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000. But what’s a hundred thousand bodies between friends, right?
This more moderate cipherin’ does not take away from some very important facts. The Royals won the World Series, roughly 400,000 people gathered in a very small space without any significant negative issues, and Kansas Citians are now being considered by Sports Illustrated magazine for their annual Sportsman of the Year award. That would be a huge coup given last year’s winner was none other than San Francisco Giants pitcher Madison “MadBum” Bumgarner, the guy who spoiled last year’s series run for the Royals. Yes sir, the character of this Cowtown was on full display last week and we, as a city, did not disappoint. Be proud Kansas City. Be very proud.