The last ‘ticket’: Royals fan’s family says goodbye with a creative funeral souvenir

Who knows how many hours of baseball Michael Jimenez watched on TV? Hundreds? Thousands?

It’s certainly possible for a longtime youth baseball coach and ardent fan of the game whose family jokes that he watched baseball 24/7.

His son Chris Jimenez will never forget the last baseball game he watched with his father, a General Motors retiree.

It was on Saturday night. Game 7. The National League Championship game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Milwaukee Brewers.

They watched it together in a hospital room at St. Luke’s Hospital of Kansas City.

After he got home, Chris got a phone call that his father had died.

Jimenez learned he had prostate cancer in June, and the disease quickly laid into his body with a vengeance, spreading to his bones and liver. In his last days, a series of strokes put Jimenez in the hospital where, at the end, cardiac arrest claimed his life, his family says.

Gone at 63.

When his two sons and daughter, Jennifer, planned his funeral at Chapel Hill-Butler Funeral Home in KCK this week, the topic of baseball kept coming up as they talked about their dad, said funeral director Alena Haskins.

So Haskins — who works for a company whose motto is “life well-celebrated” — brought up the idea of printing Jimenez’s obituary on a replica Royals game ticket, something she had only done once before.

“We do everything we can to celebrate every life because everyone has their own unique story, and we want to celebrate each person, their interests, what they love,” said Haskins. “It was just a really beautiful tribute, incorporating the Royals ticket.”

Jimenez’s son Marc, who lives in Piper, said he wasn’t sure at first how family and friends would respond “because it’s a little bit off-the-wall. But we went with it, and it was received pretty well.”

The “tickets” were given out at the visitation on Wednesday night and the funeral Thursday morning.

“Everybody said it was him, 100 percent,” said Chris.

Jimenez’s niece, Stacey Boyd, posted a photo of one of the tickets on “The Official Facebook Kansas City Royals Fan Club” Facebook page.

“My Uncle passed away and this is his obituary!” she wrote. “#fortheloveofthegame #KCtillyoudie.”

Royals fans are leaving condolences for the family and calling the ticket idea a home run.

“Sorry for your loss. The ticket stub is very cool. That’s a great tribute to him as a fan,” wrote Brett J. Richard.

“My condolences to you. What a great (way) to celebrate his life as a KC Royal fan,” Anensky Norberto wrote.

So in the end, the baseball fan and coach who spent years buying sports memorabilia on eBay — Nolan Ryan, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar among the notable autographs — left behind a souvenir of himself.

“My dad was the biggest fan,” said Chris, who is 43 and lives in Kansas City. “Growing up he was a Mickey Mantle fan so he liked the Yankees. But he also liked George Brett.”

Jimenez started teaching his sons how to play baseball shortly after they learned how to walk, and he coached Marc’s team through many winning seasons.

The Merchants made a name in Wyandotte County, where Jimenez coached a couple generations of kids. Several went on to play ball in college, said Marc, while one of his dad’s former players spent time with the Kansas City T-Bones.

The family would attend a handful of Royals games every year when they were growing up, said Marc, who started working at General Motors shortly after his dad retired from there in 2006.

But mostly, they were too busy playing the game themselves to watch.

Jimenez, who didn’t get to go to any of the Royals’ most recent World Series games, had hope in his heart for a repeat performance.

“You watch them, here in a few years, they’re going to go back to the World Series,” he told Chris. “But they don’t have any pitching. That’s why they’re getting hammered.”

Chris said his dad used to say, “Good pitching will beat good hitting any day of the week.”

The Jimenez family is close to another Wyandotte County “baseball family” of coaches and players — the Coles.

Jimenez wanted to be buried next to his mother in Chapel Hill Memorial Gardens in KCK.

And so, as baseball luck would have it, he was laid to rest just a few feet away from Cole family patriarch, George Cole Sr.