Baseball: Beltran completes revival

Wednesday 07 April 2004 00:00 BST
Comments

In front of the biggest opening day crowd in the city's baseball history, the Kansas City Royals came back from a six-run deficit against the Chicago White Sox to win the match 9-7 in the ninth, and give rise to hopes that their 19-year play-off drought could be about to end.

Mendy Lopez tied the game with a three-run homer and Carlos Beltran won it with a two-run shot in front of a record 41,575 frenetic fans in the Kaufman Stadium.

"This I'm going to remember for the rest of my life," Beltran said. "Opening day. A walk-off home run. It doesn't get any better than this."

As improbable as the victory seemed, the Royals manager, Tony Pena, insisted it was nothing surprising. "We have the type of offensive ball club where we can come back any time and we showed that today. It's good it happened on the first day of the season because now our players know we view our ball club differently than a lot of people view our ball club."

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in