Stand inside the batter’s box of George Brett Field, the main practice field at Royals spring training, and you can see a collection of trees sitting beyond the right-center field wall. The trees are surrounded by gravel, maybe 50 feet behind the chain-link fence, and beyond the fence is a side road, named for Kansas City legend Buck O’Neil. This, Alex Gordon says, is where the first baseball landed.
Well, OK, let’s be clear here: This is sort of a guess. Gordon cannot be sure where this particular baseball landed, he says, but it was somewhere out there, amid the desert gravel and shrubs, out where the baseball just bounced and disappeared from view.