Why Royals’ first employee’s election to team hall of fame is overdue and healing

When John Schuerholz was a 28-year-old administrative assistant with the still-hatching Kansas City Royals in 1968, his nimble range of duties included walking back and forth in the franchise’s prospective uniforms for club executives evaluating the look.

“I was young and way better looking than I am now,” the 83-year-old Schuerholz said with a laugh on Thursday. “And they asked me to do that, and I did it and everybody seemed to think it was OK.”

If Schuerholz literally was the model for a model expansion franchise that promptly flourished, though, it was at the behest and guidance of Cedric Tallis — the first club-specific associate hired by Ewing Kauffman to develop and mold the embryonic venture that made its debut in 1969.

Still working for the Angels in 1967, Tallis became so entwined with the development of the Royals that he was even part of the mission before they existed: He accompanied Kauffman as an adviser at the 1967 baseball owners’ meetings in Mexico City that led to MLB awarding Kansas City a new team on Jan. 11, 1968 — just months after the Athletics left for Oakland.

Formally hired days later as the executive vice president and general manager, Tallis was tethered to Kauffman for every distinguishing aspect of what was to come.

That included announcing the very name “Royals” and going to Hallmark with the Kauffmans to provide the criteria for the logo that would be designed by Shannon Manning and his influence on the design and cavernous dimensions of what would become known as Kauffman Stadium when it opened in 1973.

It was Tallis who decided on Buddy Blattner to be the first voice of the team, and Tallis who announced Blattner’s decision in 1968 to bring on 26-year-old Denny Matthews.

And it was Tallis who implemented the blueprint and foundation that morphed into a remarkable decade for the fledgling team that culminated in winning the 1985 World Series by then steered by Schuerholz.

So, as announced Thursday, it was aptly fitting that Tallis, who died in 1991, and Schuerholz simultaneously were elected to the Royals Hall of Fame.

Each will be inducted at Kauffman Stadium on June 28 before the Royals take on Cleveland; Bo Jackson, drafted by the Royals under Schuerholz, will be inducted the next day.

Richly deserving as the duo is, though, there is something particularly poignant about the long overdue recognition of Tallis — who was abruptly and somewhat mysteriously fired by Kauffman in June 1974 and agonized by it.

While Schuerholz, who later was the architect of a rebuild and another World Series winner in Atlanta, is in the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Tallis has been both underappreciated overall and historically neglected.

“It’s been so hard, because he was crushed when he had to leave the Royals,” his daughter, Gale, said in a Zoom call with local media on Wednesday.

After all, he loved the Royals and Kansas City and, she said, “really felt like this was his team.” And as invested as he was with the Angels before the Royals and Yankees afterward, the pain of being thus exiled lingered in the family.

“So this is healing to know that he will be honored,” said his daughter, who is the executive director of the Folly Theater and a University of Kansas graduate.

No wonder she wishes her mother, Barbara, who died in 2018, and father were here to enjoy it.

“Oh my gosh, it’s hard to put into words what this would have meant to him,” said Tallis, whose virtually 15-minute-long smile during the call told a story in itself. “He absolutely adored the Royals. It was his team. He built it.”

Built it to last, too.

At least in the early iterations, starting with an inaugural team that won 13 more games (69) than the Royals did last season and produced a winning record in its third season — when Tallis was named MLB GM of the year in a Sporting News poll of baseball executives.

For context, consider that It was a decade before any of the three other 1969 expansion clubs compiled a winning record, and by then the Royals had earned multiple postseason berths.

“Nearly every first in Royals history can be traced back to Cedric Tallis …” Curt Nelson, senior director of the Royals Hall of Fame, said in a statement. “All of us have followed in his footsteps.”

Indeed, Tallis’ ledger and legacy is more about what followed his tenure — the pillars he created and seeds he sowed — than the early run itself.

That included hiring the likes of super-scout Art Stewart and future MLB general managers such as Jack McKeon, Herk Robinson, Syd Thrift and Lou Gorman, who brought Schuerholz from Baltimore.

Tallis’ tenure featured the drafting of George Brett, Steve Busby, Al Cowens, Dennis Leonard, Paul Splittorff and Willie Wilson, among significant others, and the signing of Frank White from the Royals Baseball Academy.

And his trademark trades included acquiring five future Royals Hall of Famers in the franchise’s first four years: Amos Otis, Cookie Rojas, Fred Patek, John Mayberry and Hal McRae.

All of which makes it all the more bizarre that Tallis was suddenly dismissed before he could fully enjoy the spoils of what he’d built.

On a June 1974 day, Kauffman summoned him to Marion Labs and with no explanation simply said he was “terminating me,” Tallis told the Newark Star-Ledger after he joined the Yankees.

The why remains an open question. Perhaps it was over financial decisions. Or an apparent ongoing rift over Kauffman firing manager Bob Lemon over Tallis’ objections. Some thought there was tension between Tallis and McKeon, Lemon’s replacement.

When I spoke with Gale Tallis in 2019 for a column advocating for Tallis’ place in the team’s Hall of Fame, she noted her father seldom spoke the wounds he’d suffered in the Aleutian Islands during World War II that resulted in him being awarded a Purple Heart and contending with a bullet crease on his face and frequent headaches.

So it was little surprise to her that he rarely, if ever, spoke about what happened with Kauffman, who was criticized then by Star sports editor Joe McGuff in a column headlined, “Firing Of Cedric Tallis Shocking And Disturbing.”

McGuff called it a “tragic mistake,” and said, “Considering what he accomplished for the Royals, he should be awarded lifetime compensation.”

Fifty years later, this isn’t that, exactly.

But it’s certainly a lifetime affirmation — and essentially the righting of a wrong in understanding the history of the Royals.