Monarchs baseball player Travis Swaggerty walks out into the outfield at KCK’s Legends Field barefoot, a practice he calls grounding. He takes this time before every game to connect internally and externally.
The 27-year-old outfielder’s day has begun like any other in the relentless dog days of summer, which, in Kansas City, can be devastatingly hot. The weather doesn’t care if you have a doubleheader and a night on the road ahead. The sun keeps shining, the humidity thick in the air—it’s baseball season.
Swaggerty began his day Facetiming his wife and young daughter, who are back home in Mississippi. He made breakfast with his roommate, fellow Monarchs outfielder Danny Amaral, before getting to the stadium near their temporary home. The late afternoon will be filled with stretching, batting, hitting and throwing practice. Swaggerty will get live reads in the outfield, and after “BP” (batting practice), he’ll hit the training room or just hang inside, staying cool in air conditioning, until the early evening. Then, it’s time to play ball.
The practices don’t last long in the thick afternoon heat of Legends Field, which neighbors the sprawling Legends Shopping Center and a massive Nebraska Furniture Mart. Both after and during baseball season, the field is transformed into concert spaces and pop-up events. A recent music festival put further strain on the field, which has dealt with intermittent flooding after an unusually rainy summer. Many games have been postponed and turned into doubleheaders due to weather and field conditions.
The Monarchs season hasn’t been exactly what Swaggerty or others on the team had been hoping for—or expecting. The team has pretty much stayed solidly in the middle of its division, a stark change from past seasons where they dominated.
The Monarchs play in the American Association of Professional Baseball, an MLB Partner League (the team is not directly affiliated with the MLB). This means they are part of an independent professional baseball league, which operates in the Central United States and Canada, mostly in cities not served by Major League Baseball teams or their minor league affiliates. The league is split into two divisions, East and West, with six teams in each. The Monarchs play in the West division, and the regular season lasts 100 games throughout the summer and ends on Labor Day. The top four teams from each division at the end of the regular season go to the playoffs, which has two rounds in a best-of-three series. One team from each division advances to the Miles Wolff Cup Finals, where the winner of that best-of-five series is crowned league champion.
Monarchs manager Joe Calfapietra took the helm seven years ago and has led the team through one of its most successful stints, making it to the division championships every year he’s been a coach. The team has won three American Association championships: in 2018, 2021 and, most recently, last year.
Outfielder Swaggerty played in the big leagues for the Pittsburgh Pirates from 2018 until last year, and like all players on the Monarchs, he hopes his performance with the team will help him fight his way back to the major leagues.
Swaggerty was born in the small town of Lacombe in southeast Louisiana, but Hurricane Katrina displaced his family when he was a child, and they moved to a town outside of Baton Rouge. Swaggerty, an admitted “bad loser,” tried various sports in high school, including football and basketball, before fully setting his sights on baseball.
“When I got into high school, I was still 5’2”-5’3,” a buck forty,” he says. “I was like, ‘I am not going out there with these gargantuan humans in football and basketball.’ Baseball was the only sport I could still be really good at and not have a problem with my size.”
Swaggerty is all-American handsome, and traces of his Louisiana roots can be heard in his occasional drawl. His leg bounces, and I can tell he’s ready to stop answering questions—though not in a rude way. He’d just rather be out on the field playing ball.
“I have played right field [during] most of this season here,” he says. “In my career, I mostly exclusively played center field. So it’s a little bit of a change, but I don’t mind it. I actually had a conversation with Joe about playing right field here. He said, ‘You know, based on how big right field is and the short wall and everything, it’s the hardest of the three positions to play here.’ So, I guess he trusts me in right field. I’m like, ‘All right, you can put me anywhere—as long as I’m in the lineup, I don’t care.’”
Swaggerty’s need to just play ball is echoed throughout the team. For most, the Monarchs is a stepping stone to break into the MLB or, in Swaggerty’s case, to get back in.
Playing for the Monarchs is one of the best ways to get into the majors, both because the team is good—they won last year’s championship and had several amazing seasons the past few years—and Kansas City is centrally located, so scouts can come watch, look at a player’s data and see if he might be a good fit for their team. The next step is for the player to get signed internationally, often with teams in Mexico, or get back into affiliated ball, the minors and, hopefully, eventually the major leagues.
“We started out really, really hot,” Swaggerty says. “But then there’s circumstances with our field here. There’s a concert that rips apart our outfield, and then we pretty much play the whole month of June on the road, so that’s been tough. You’re riding on a bus eight hours overnight and you try to sleep in the hotel just long enough to have some energy for the game that night. Ideally, we would like to have a better record than we do right now, but there are challenges. There’s peaks and there’s valleys, and baseball is all about riding the wave—and that goes individually and as a team.”
Swaggerty chose to come to the Monarchs because of their reputation but also because of the potential to get signed elsewhere if they—and he—have a good season.
“Individually speaking, I don’t really necessarily care about what the numbers say, as long as I’m helping and making an impact on each and every game that I play in,” he says. “[That’s] what I try to do every night. If I can do something productive to help us win, that’s all I care about. Baseball’s got a funny way of evening out, so I think the tides are about to turn.”
Then, A Royal Legacy
In 2018, the team, then called the Kansas City T-Bones, won their first-ever American Association championship during Calfapietra’s first year as manager. In January 2021, under relatively new entrepreneur-owner Mark Brandmeyer, the team began a partnership with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and rebranded to the Monarchs, one of the founding teams of the league.
The Monarchs have a storied history in Kansas City, but they also played an important role in the history of baseball. The Kansas City-based Monarchs were the the longest-running franchise in the history of baseball’s Negro Leagues. They were also the best.
Before integration, they won 10 league championships. In 1924, the won the first Negro World Series. In their legendary tenure, the team had only one season in which they did not have a winning record. Overall, they generated more major league players than any other franchise in the Negro Leagues.
J.L. Wilkinson, who was owner of the Monarchs for nearly 30 years, helped catapult the team to new heights by becoming more active in the community. Wilkinson was the first person to implement special baseball days, like “Ladies’ Day” and “Kids’ Day.”
That legacy can still be seen in the Monarchs’ community engagement, where they host special themed days and events. Several times a year, the Monarchs become the Los Monarchs to honor the Hispanic and Latino community. This past season, they also hosted special events aimed at children, a Star Wars-themed game and even a Taylor Swift-inspired night, where they rebranded as the “Kansas Swiftie Monarchs” and gave away two Taylor Swift concert tickets.
In 1930, the Monarchs started playing night baseball to try to get more people to come to more games. The team had portable light systems powered by generators that could be transported on their bus to any game. They became the first team (including any of the major league teams) to play baseball under artificial light. Night baseball gave the Monarchs more time to play more games, which increased their visibility, popularity and, of course, profits, which helped cement them as one of the most solid Negro Leagues franchises.
Some legendary baseball players were part of the Monarchs Negro Leagues team, including iconic Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige and one of the most beloved and historically significant athletes of all time, Jackie Robinson. Robinson became the first Monarch to make the historic move to white baseball in 1946, integrating to the major leagues with the Dodgers in 1947, where his legacy was forever cemented.
As baseball gradually desegregated in the late ’40s and ’50s, the Monarchs became the premier developer of talent for the major leagues.
Calfapietra continues that legacy today, ceaselessly fostering his players’ talent. Although the team may take a hit when their most successful players leave, Calfapietra is helping make his players’ dreams come true, with many moving to affiliated baseball or signing to Mexico teams mid-season.
“It always is sad when you lose people that you care about,” Calfapietra says. “But that’s what it’s really all about—the players moving to big leagues. You go into it with the understanding that you’re here to try to teach them, to win games and help these players move on to their goals.”
Today, A Team Of Champions
Manager Joe Calfapietra is the best in the league. In his last seven years with the team, he has elevated the Monarchs’ game, got them to division championships, helped them win three championships and won the American Association’s Manager of the Year award twice.
All of the Monarchs players I talk to say the same thing: he’s one of the best coaches, if not the best, they’ve ever had. He has faith in them and just lets them do what they came to do—play ball.
“Joe is a player-first manager, and he really cares about all of his guys,” Swaggerty says. “You want to play for guys like that. He really cares. I mean, he hugs every guy before the game, tells him he loves him. It’s cool to have a guy that has your back. Coaching-wise, he’s really good about just letting the guys play. If there’s something he needs to get done, obviously he will voice that. But for the most part, we just go out there and he lets us play. It’s been refreshing.”
Calfapietra is no-nonsense in the best way. A self-proclaimed “Philadelphia guy,” he has an East Coast accent that more genteel (less Midwestern) ears could probably distinguish and a friendly face that has been sunburnt from the season—and 30 years of coaching baseball.
I can see what the players are talking about. He has sort of a gruff but loveable energy, like an uncle that will simultaneously razz you but will ensure you’re wearing your seatbelt when you leave his house with a tupperware of lasagna in hand. During our on-field interview, Calfapietra makes sure I take a bottled water and untangles a beetle that had (unbeknownst to me) flown in my hair.
“The guys really have embraced what we’ve wanted to accomplish here,” Calfapietra says. “They’re very excited to be a part of our organization. They understand what it means to embrace being a Kansas City Monarch—the tradition of not only what we’ve accomplished over the past few years—but what the Monarchs mean to the city.”
When talking about the season, Calfapietra echoes Swaggerty’s disappointment, but with three decades of experience, he knows how the season can ebb and flow.
“We’re setting our feet in the ground and looking forward to making a really good run here,” he says. “Every day is different, and we’re just looking for every day to get better. We’re happy with the players that we have in house right now, and every day development is constantly getting better.”
Despite a sometimes disappointing season, both players and coaches are proud of the team that they’ve built this year. And from my time interviewing, watching practices and games and taking an accidental trip into the locker room, I can attest that the Monarchs’ spirit is as fun and filled with camaraderie as ever (I’m sure in no small part to Calfapietra’s legacy and managerial style).
“Playing with the Monarchs has been fun,” Swaggerty says. “I’ve been on teams in the past where it gets cliquey—sort of like pitchers hang out with pitchers and hitters hang out with hitters. But this team has been pretty good with getting everybody involved. We hang out in the hotels, we play video games together. It’s all about building that relationship with guys off the field so that on the field it’s even better. Plus, I think those long bus rides have absolutely helped our relationships, too.”
Because most of the men on the team have been in the upper levels of the minor leagues or in the majors themselves, there’s a natural camaraderie—a team working together and trying to prove to themselves, and others, that they’re still as good as they’ve ever been. Swaggerty talks about things that the team has done this season, like instating Kangaroo Court, which is used as a fun way to keep everyone in check in the locker room.
“Kangaroo Court is when you give out fines to people for doing something that’s not correct, basically,” Swaggerty says. “Guys that are newer to the team that weren’t here with us on opening day, I have a dollar fine for each of them for being late to the season. There was a day we had a guy forget his jersey here [at Legends Field], so he had to play wearing somebody else’s jersey. Like, obviously that’s a finable offense. Most of them are a dollar. But if it’s egregious—like the shirt one’s egregious—that’ll be a five dollar fine. And all the money at the end, we’ve decided to allocate those funds to tip our bus driver who drives us while we’re on the road.”
With this year’s season wrapping up, the Monarchs’ dream of earning a championship for a second year in a row are virtually out of reach. However, Swaggerty, Calfapietra and the rest of the team’s part in continuing the Monarchs’ enduring legacy lives on.
“I think we’ve upheld our tradition with the Monarchs in the time that we’ve been here,” says Calfapietra. “We hope to continue and to win another championship—that’s why we’re here.”
