Why a 4-year-old’s baseball card is in Royals’ dugout: ‘If you need perspective...’

Something that never gets old about covering Major League Baseball, and the Royals in particular, is the intimate access of sitting in the dugout or standing against its railing as the teams get ready to play. In an era, when restrictions of media are increasingly common in every aspect of journalism, this part is alive and flourishing at Kauffman Stadium.

Any given day in and around there you can have casual conversations with front office personnel, team broadcasters and coaches with the crack of bats as the soundtrack. Like others before him, manager Matt Quatraro conducts his pregame news conference atop a dugout seat.

On occasion in that setting, you even have chats with players coming and going. Before one game in 2015, I spoke with Edinson Volquez just outside the dugout for more than an hour for a profile I was writing on him.

Far more typical are brief exchanges, such as in June 2022 when Vinnie Pasquantino was called up from Triple-A Omaha. While Pasquantino was nowhere to be seen, his glove was plopped on the bench.

When he came to retrieve it, he said, “I have no idea what’s going on” — a term I wrote in my notepad on a piece of paper that for some reason I keep on my home-office desk.

We’re not normally down there after games, but when the Royals won the 2015 World Series at Citi Field, a few of us were right alongside Jarrod Dyson and Eric Hosmer as they emerged from the clubhouse and stepped just outside the dugout hoisting the Commissioner’s Trophy toward hundreds of Royals fans there.

“This is going back to Kansas City, baby!” Hosmer yelled.

So you never quite know what you’ll learn or see in there.

Which brings me to my latest favorite dugout snapshot: a baseball card of a seemingly random smiling 4-year-old boy named Charlie that for weeks has adorned the pen ledge of a whiteboard in the corner nearest the Crown Club seats behind home plate.

Speaking casually with a handful of people about it, no one immediately knew where it came from or when it got there. It was as if it had just materialized there one day, as much a part of the scene as the adjacent bullpen phone.

Pitching coach Brian Sweeney, who along with manager Quatraro and bench coach Paul Hoover typically stands in that vicinity of the dugout every game, had no idea who the boy is or how the card got there.

Peering into the dugout from the railing where we spoke, he wondered if it had been furnished by owner John Sherman — who at the moment was sitting right by it as he spoke on his phone. He contemplated if it was brought in by Sal Perez or Freddy Fermin, who usually sit near there.

When a friend of his spotted it in the background of a TV broadcast and asked about it, Sweeney couldn’t offer any background at all. For that matter, he added, “I’ve never heard anybody talk about it.”

Funny thing is, though, he’s at least subconsciously conscious of it about every home game. If it’s been blown off the ledge, he picks it up and puts it back.

He’s also got a certain affection for it, evident when he ambled over to reach over Sherman for the card and bring it back to look closer. As we studied it together, we started to pull it out from its toploader for a more clear look only to realize it somehow was a little damp and leave it be so as not to do any damage.

But with the preciousness of it all the more evident from what Sweeney says about how it keeps him in the present by also taking him back.

“It’s like the innocence of the game, right there,” said Sweeney, who also likes to look into the stands to see his wife and kids for the same reassurance. “So if you need perspective, you can just look at that baseball card.”

When we finished talking, he playfully challenged me to do some investigative reporting to get the story.

As it happened, it didn’t take any major sleuthing.

On a lark, I asked Quatraro as he headed out of the dugout onto the field the other day if he knew where it came from. Simple: On July Fourth, he signed an autograph for the boy, who then offered his own card in exchange.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Quatraro smile as broadly and brightly as when I told him I’d try to let Charlie and his family know about the place his card occupies — and presumably still will, barring any overzealous cleanup, as the Royals return home Monday.

Finding them also was easy enough because of the information on the back of the card, which included his “Tee Ball Batting Record” for the 2024 season (batting 1.000 with 16 RBIs in eight games), his height and weight (3 foot 5, 36 pounds) and “resume.”

“The Force is strong with Charlie,” the card reads. “Veteran of multiple spring trainings in Arizona and a huge KC Royals fan.”

More pertinent to tracking down the family, though, was the inclusion on the back of his full name (Charlie English) and affiliation — the Elkhorn Athletic Association in Nebraska, staunch Royals territory because of its proximity, the Royals’ Triple-A affiliate in Omaha and the storied Royals career of Nebraska native Alex Gordon.

The association’s Chris McCain connected me with the English family, who had no notion the card had occupied such a rarefied place after the brush with Quatraro in which Charlie’s mom, Alison, “may have” mentioned to look out for Charlie in the 2038 MLB Draft.

They figured the card probably ended up in a drawer or a trash bin and were thrilled to know where it is — and to preserve the image for themselves with a freeze frame of the card visible in the background of Bobby Witt Jr. celebrating after the Royals’ 8-3 win over the Cardinals on Aug. 10.

Knowing where it landed adds to an already great Independence Day memory for Charlie despite the Royals’ 10-8 loss to Tampa Bay.

Amid what was only Charlie’s third Royals’ game, Fermin handed him a ball and Witt threw him two red batting gloves that Charlie likes to wear taking practice swings in the living room of their West Omaha home.

When his parents asked him during my call how it felt to get those, he simply ran to go get them and put them on.

Charlie is so enamored with the Royals that he watches them, intently, every night with his parents, longtime fans themselves: His father, Quint, grew up listening to them on radio in Fairbury, Nebraska, about 200 miles from Kansas City; Alison went to Olathe East High.

Their second date was a Royals game in 2014, and together they became enthralled with them during their 2014 and 2015 World Series runs.

Baseball has only become more of a family matter since. Many nights, Quint and Alison take out Charlie, typically clad in Witt gear, to a local park and shag the balls either Quint pitches to him or that Charlie hits off a tee.

So what if they still might need to shag and reset the tee itself?

“He ran us ragged,” Quint said after another session last weekend.

Meanwhile, it was no exaggeration to say Charlie is a spring training veteran, as it was described on the card by its idea man and copywriter: Brad McDonald, Alison’s father.

Near the practice fields of the complex the Royals share with the Texas Rangers in Surprise, Arizona, Charlie has been honing the skill of asking for autographs.

So on two baseballs he has collected the signatures of most of the current Royals, and this year he also got a picture with MJ Melendez to go with the one he had with Witt high-fiving him last year. Perez has stopped to say hello there, and he has enjoyed a moment with Pasquantino, one of his favorite players. He also spent a few moments in Surprise with Cole Ragans — who knelt to Charlie’s eye level to speak with him.

Since Charlie had his glove with him and at times was playing catch with his parents, Royals 2022 draftee Austin Charles, now with the Class-A Columbia Fireflies, came by and asked Charlie to throw with him.

“Those interactions … meld into his mind of what a baseball player is and what they’re supposed to do,” Quint English said.

Enough so that it’s made Charlie more confident and outgoing as he’s learned that politely approaching even those he has on a pedestal can lead to meaningful moments.

As Quint English considered it all, he thought about the simplicity and romance of baseball that often gets obscured by the intensity of the business elements.

Much as Sweeney thinks of it, and, well, me too.

All the more so when you realize that one of the reasons Charlie that night brought along the cards, all 15 in that set, was that he had hoped to simply trade one with Witt, a known card collector, and perhaps others.

Alas, that didn’t quite work out.

But it’s hard to top the organic magic of what happened instead.