Kansas City Royals Named After Livestock Show

Wall Street Journal:

As October rolls on, Royal mania is mounting. The days ahead will determine the champion: Will it be Thunder? Boomer? Blackjack? Or maybe Baldy?
You probably think the name of the Kansas City Royals, who on Wednesday won the American League pennant, is meant to associate the baseball team with castles and courts, purple and ermine.
Oh, no, it is something with a much grander local lineage: a livestock show.
It is called the American Royal, and unlike the Royals, who are playing October baseball for the first time in 29 years, it draws crowds every year at this time, including thousands of farm children and their prize-seeking sheep, hogs and cattle.
Even in Kansas City, few seem to know the Royals are named after the Royal. “Nobody around here is talking about cows—man, we’re talking about the World Series,” says Robert Kennedy, a 55-year-old street department foreman in Kansas City, Kan.
But in a neighborhood known as the stockyards, inside an arena that transforms into a barn every October, fans of the livestock show take pride that the hottest team in professional baseball is its namesake. The team’s naming “was a nod to our city’s heritage in the livestock industry,” says Bob Petersen, the American Royal’s chief executive.
A 1968 contest to name the city’s new baseball franchise attracted proposals such as “Mules” and “Cowpokes.” A now-deceased Kansas City engineer named Sanford Porte proposed “Royals,” in honor of what he called “Missouri’s billion-dollar livestock income, Kansas City’s position as the nation’s leading stocker and feeder market and the nationally known American Royal parade and pageant.” Mr. Porte’s entry prevailed.
Soon after the team’s 1969 debut, livestock references fell silent. This coincided with a civic effort in the 1970s to dissociate Kansas City from its stockyards, where 64,000 cattle a day once transformed into steaks and packaged meat.
“A campaign was launched to promote Kansas City as a ‘glamour city,’” Kansas City native Calvin Trillin wrote in a 1983 New Yorker article. “The standard headline for stories planted by the campaign’s New York public-relations firm was ‘COWTOWN NO MORE.’”...
Some powerful members of Kansas City’s business royalty have long supported the American Royal, and for good reason. A 2006 report by a Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City executive found about one in six jobs in the area were agriculture-related. And while many locals might prefer to tout area high-tech players like Sprint Corp. and Garmin Ltd., one of the American Royal’s most-committed benefactors is Neal Patterson, CEO of Cerner Corp. , a Kansas City-based health-care-technology firm.
The American Royal is a nonprofit that raises money for agricultural-related scholarships, in part via champion-livestock auctions. Last year, Mr. Patterson and his wife paid $170,000 for the Grand Champion steer, then gave the animal to charity. The American Royal’s Mr. Petersen notes Mr. Patterson “grew up on a small farm, raised hogs to put himself through school and he’s never forgotten his roots.”

Didn't know that.