CHICAGO -- The Royals made a two-game pit stop at Wrigley Field in August 2020, dropping both games to the Cubs before the two teams went to Kansas City and split a two-game set at Kauffman Stadium.
Nicky Lopez didn’t make an appearance in either of the two games in Chicago. That wasn’t a complete disappointment for Lopez, since fans weren’t allowed in the stands last season.
“It was tough. It was brutal,” Lopez said before Friday’s series opener. “That's what we take pride in, is playing in front of fans. We love the fans. So, to be able to play here at a historic field like this and not have fans here, it was different.”
So when Lopez started at shortstop for the Royals on Friday against the Cubs with an actual crowd filling the ballpark, it felt like the perfect way for Lopez to make his “home” debut.
Lopez grew up in Naperville, Ill., and graduated from Naperville Central High School in 2013. He grew up a Cubs fan -- though he did admit to rooting for Kansas City’s American League Central rival White Sox in the 2005 World Series -- and went to Wrigley Field a few times growing up.
That hometown connection hasn’t left Lopez since he was drafted by the Royals in 2016. He said he has plenty of family members who planned to be there to see his Wrigley Field debut, along with his girlfriend, his girlfriend’s family and some old friends who still live in the area.
“There's gonna be a good crowd, for sure,” he said.
Being in the same division as the White Sox, Lopez has already been back to Chicago multiple times, playing in 17 games at Guaranteed Rate Field through his three seasons in the big leagues. And growing up in the suburbs, it’s not as if the city itself is an unfamiliar place to him.
According to Lopez, though similar to Fenway Park in Boston and Yankee Stadium in New York, there’s a different kind of atmosphere one finds at Wrigley Field, an ambience he started taking in as soon as the Royals arrived at the ballpark on Friday.
“Definitely a different vibe [here],” he said. “Obviously, playing against the White Sox, you see [Guaranteed Rate Field] a lot. This is not a field that you really see often. Especially because [I'm a] hometown kid and my whole family being Cubs fans and me kind of growing up seeing the ivy and all that stuff, being able to go out there and actually touch it and see what it's all about is pretty cool.”
Quotable
“Take everything in consideration over the last year, how little of the Major League experience our guys had. It is important, I believe -- for the health of our players, emotionally more than anything else -- to be able to go and have dinner with your teammates and enjoy some nice cities. This is a great city. It's an opportunity to either spend it with your family or spend it with your teammates. Either way, I think it's good to have some of these day games where guys can do something besides wake up, go to the field, go home, go to bed, [and] redo tomorrow. I think it's healthy.” -- Royals manager Mike Matheny, on having consecutive day games