You don’t often hear a lot of positive news surrounding the Kansas City Royals these days. A poster boy for mediocrity, the woe-be-gone baseball team has never made the headlines unless they have their hotshot prospects get fleeced by deep-pocketed teams, or in this case, a rumor involving the use of the numbers of their once great players to help win a lottery ticket.
Late last week, a rumor surfaced that one of the two winning Powerball tickets – the one coming from Missouri – hit the $580 million jackpot after the digits were supposedly picked using the numbers of iconic Kansas City Royals players. Major news outlets immediately picked the story up because the story in itself was too unbelievable to put on the back pages. What are the chances that the winning numbers in the biggest Powerball in history – 5, 16, 22, 23, 29, and 6 – are also the same numbers of the most beloved players in Kansas City Royals history?
In case you wanted to know, those numbers belonged to George Brett (5), Bo Jackson (16), Dennis Leonard (22), Mark Gubicza (23), Dan Quinsberry (29), and Willie Wilson (9).
Turns out, ridiculous as the coincidence is, it’s simply that. Coincidence.
As the rumor started flying off the shelves faster than Chef Boyardee Beefaroni cans on the eve of Armaggedon, the winner’s wife, Cindy Hill put everything to bed when she told Yahoo! Sports’ Jeff Passan that the winning numbers that were chosen were done in random, not as a way of paying tribute to those Royals greats. Passan proceed to tweet Hill’s clarification, saying, “Cindy Hill, the winner’s wife, confirms that the Powerball ticket was not chosen using former Royals players. “Random,” she said.”
Passan followed that up with another tweet: “Although, we love the Royals,” she said.
And here we thought that we could actually celebrate the Royals for actually helping someone win something. Whew. Guess the world hasn’t tilted off its axis yet.
While this rumor has become bigger than the actual story of a Mark Hill lucking out on a Powerball ticket, here’s a prediction we don’t mind making: the Hills will spend every last penny from their winnings before the Kansas City Royals win a World Series title.
