Royals doing giveaways, going to events for KC’s Hispanic community
Last week, the Guadalupe Centers in Kansas City’s Westside neighborhood hosted its annual Cinco de Mayo festival. Despite some bad weather, the live music and festivities raged on throughout the weekend.
Among the beer, jewelry and aguas frescas booths on Avenida Cesar E. Chavez were the Kansas City Royals, the team that’s not only off to a hot start to the 2024 MLB season, but looking to reconnect with the Hispanic community.
With Royals infield coach José Alguacil at the festival, the team was handing out free tickets and shirts and encouraging fans to follow their rebranded Spanish social media accounts on Facebook and Instagram.
A few of the players, like outfielder Dairon Blanco, are inspiring classrooms with a heavy Spanishspeaking population at Kansas City Public
Schools to keep learning.
It’s all a part of their “Nos Vemos En El K” initiative, with the help from Fresco Marketing, a Kansas City-based multicultural marketing company.
The team gave away 1,000 free tickets to fans during the three-day festival, according to Sinhue Mendoza, Fresco Marketing’s marketing manager.
“We’re incredibly excited to work with Fresco Marketing as we work to further our support of the Hispanic community,” Tony Snethen, vice president of brand innovation for the Royals, said in a statement. “The Royals are such an important part of the community and it’s vital that everyone feels welcome, feels seen, and feels represented, and this partnership is an opportunity to continue fulfilling that promise.”
HOW DID ‘NOS VEMOS EN EL K’ START?
2024 began with the Royals and Fresco Marketing partnering on the season’s pump-up Spanish commercial that ran on Univision for the Super Bowl, but the partnership has been in the works for quite a while, Mendoza said.
At the end of the 2023 MLB season, Mendoza and his team had completed a study involving four focus groups for the Royals — three in Kansas City and one in Omaha — specifically targeting Hispanic people within the region with a primary focus on baseball. They also conducted a survey involving 140 participants from the
Hispanic community in the Kansas City area.
Mendoza shared some of their findings:
●●●Participants in the study and survey were born in countries like the United States, Mexico, El Salvador, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Honduras, Colombia, Brazil,
Bolivia and Chile. Hispanics have a positive view of the Royals’ brand. However, there’s a clear call for inclusivity across all Latino groups, highlighting a need for broader recognition and involvement. “It’s more of a call for we love your team, but we don’t feel you do enough for us beyond Viva Los Reales,” Mendoza said, referring to the Royals’ annual event celebrating Hispanic culture. Locals strongly identify with the Royals, presenting an opportunity to cultivate a dedicated fan base.
●●●Fans prefer “Los
Royals” over “Los Reales,” so the team rebranded its Spanish social media accounts to reflect their wants. Family and community values emerged as core principles among those surveyed. The community loves catcher Salvador Perez. They see an opportunity to promote other Hispanic players on the team, like infielder Maikel Garcia and catcher Freddy Fermín.
The tagline “Nos Vemos En El K” was presented to the Royals by Fresco Marketing, and Scott Lichtenauer, group director of marketing with the team, said it resonated with the team. It’s important for them to make Kauffman Stadium an inclusive and welcoming place for all visitors.
“It’s really important for us to make sure that everybody comes here and sees a part of themselves reflected in everything we do,” Lichtenauer said. “It’s approachable, it’s conversational and it’s saying ‘hey, just come on out to The K.’”
WHAT DO THE ROYALS’ OUTREACH EFFORTS LOOK LIKE?
Hispanics make up 10% of the population in the Kansas City metro area, but are only 5% of the Royals’ fan base, according to the study. So the team saw an opportunity to bridge the gap and establish a stronger connection.
Their initiative is ongoing, as they are partnering with Guadalupe Centers to host a six-week baseball and softball summer camp, said Luis Maes, the Royals’ vice president of community impact. Guadalupe Centers’ CEO Beto Lopez threw out the first pitch recently, as has the Hispanic Chamber of
Commerce of Greater Kansas City’s consulate Soileh Padilla and Mattie Rhodes Center CEO John Fierro.
They’re continuing to work with community leaders from Mattie Rhodes Center and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, which Maes said also helped design the Los Royals jersey that will be available during the Sept. 20 game against the San Francisco Giants for the Viva Los Royals event.
Maes said now they’re trying to calibrate what they’ve learned from the community so they can be more intentional with their outreach so they can grow their Hispanic fandom.
“It’s our goal to grow fandom and grow love for baseball and softball in the city. That takes time,” Lichtenauer said. “It takes considered effort over and over again. You try stuff. Some stuff works and some stuff doesn’t. You be open about it, open to change and learning from your mistakes and learning what works. We’re certainly committed to this.”
WASHINGTON
The president was livid. He had just been shown pictures of civilians killed by Israeli shelling, including a small baby with an arm blown off. He ordered aides to get the Israeli prime minister on the phone and then dressed him down sharply.
The president was Ronald Reagan, the year was 1982, and the battlefield was Lebanon, where Israelis were attacking Palestinian fighters. The conversation Reagan had with Prime Minister Menachem Begin that day, Aug. 12, would be one of the few times aides ever heard the usually mildmannered president so exercised.
“It is a holocaust,” Reagan told Begin angrily.
Begin, whose parents and brother were killed by the Nazis, snapped back, “Mr. President, I know all about a holocaust.”
Nonetheless, Reagan retorted, it had to stop. Begin heeded the demand. Twenty minutes later, he called back and told the president that he had ordered a halt to the shelling. “I didn’t know I had that kind of power,” Reagan marveled to aides afterward.
It would not be the only time he would use it to rein in Israel. In fact, Reagan used the power of U.S. arms several times to influence Israeli war policy, at different points ordering warplanes and cluster munitions to be delayed or withheld. His actions take on new meaning four decades later as President Joe Biden delays a shipment of bombs and threatens to withhold other offensive weapons from Israel if it attacks Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip.
Even as Republicans rail against Biden, accusing him of abandoning an ally in the middle of a war, supporters of the president’s decision pointed to the Reagan precedent. If it was reasonable for the Republican presidential icon to limit arms to impose his will on Israel, they argue, it should be acceptable for the current Democratic president to do the same.
But what the Reagan comparison really underscores is how much the politics of Israel have evolved in the United States since the 1980s.
For decades, presidents and prime ministers have quarreled without permanently damaging the robust relationship between the two countries.
Dwight D. Eisenhower threatened economic sanctions and an aid cutoff to force Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula after it invaded Egypt in 1956. Gerald Ford warned that he would reevaluate the entire relationship in 1975 over what he considered Israel’s recalcitrance during peace talks with
Egypt. George H.W. Bush postponed $10 billion in loan guarantees in 1991 in a dispute over settlements in the West Bank.
In Reagan’s day, Democrats were thought to be the party that was more supportive of Israel, a perception he wanted to change. By Reagan’s own account, “they’ve never had a better friend of Israel in the White House.” And yet it was a friendship that was tested again and again.
In June 1981, less than five months after Reagan took office, Israel used U.S.-made F-16 warplanes to bomb the Osirak nuclear plant in Iraq, a surprise attack that outraged many in Washington. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, considered a friend of the Arabs, urged Reagan to halt the arms flow to Israel. Secretary of State Alexander Haig Jr., considered a friend of Israel, argued against it.
In the end, Reagan agreed to vote to condemn Israel at the U.N. Security Council and to delay the delivery of four F-16s due that summer – what Patrick Tyler, in “A World of Trouble,” his history of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, characterized as “a minimal rebuke.”
But just weeks later, an Israeli airstrike killed an estimated 300 civilians in Palestinian neighborhoods of Beirut, prompting Reagan to hold back another 10 F-16s and two F-15 jet fighters. Still, the standoff did not last long. By August, he lifted the freeze.
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 forced another confrontation. Reagan halted the shipment of cluster-type artillery shells out of concern that such munitions were being used against civilians in violation of agreements. Around the same time, he delayed the delivery of 75 F-16 warplanes without explanation until March 1983, when he announced that he would not release the jets until Israel withdrew forces from Lebanon.
The move caused no wave of criticism like that seen in Washington this week. “Maybe it was a necessary signal to Israel,” Reagan wrote mildly in his diary that night in describing his decision.
In the days that followed, stories in The New York Times did not include criticism from members of Congress in either party. Not until a week later did William Safire, a conservative columnist for the Times, fault Reagan’s move as “a tragic flip-flop on Israel,” as he put it.
“Reagan had public support for withholding aid because the bombing of Beirut was witnessed on American television,” recalled Lou Cannon, the Reagan biographer. “As with Gaza, it was horrible.”
Since then, of course, Republicans have repositioned themselves as the party that unquestionably supports Israel, while Democrats who bristle at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long conservative reign have become more divided on the issue. Today, there is none of the tempered deference that Reagan enjoyed from across the aisle on foreign policy.
The August 1982 bombardment in particular affected Reagan in a powerful way. Whatever his politics or policy, he reacted viscerally to the pictures he saw.
“Reagan was deeply upset by the bombardment of Beirut,” Richard Murphy, his ambassador to Saudi Arabia, recalled in an oral history by Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober. “He made it very plain that he wanted this to come to a stop when the human side was pushed in his face.”
Reagan did not hold back and was willing to put it all on the line. “I was angry,” he wrote in his diary that last night, describing the tense conversation with Begin. “I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered.” And stop it did, at least temporarily.
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