With Royals’ season on hold, Ryan Lefebvre takes time to appreciate blessings in life
Ryan Lefebrve had planned to spend last Wednesday night with his Royals broadcast colleagues taking in the Blackhawks-Penguins game in Chicago.
On Thursday, he would have taken his place behind the microphone, calling the Royals’ 2020 season opener against the White Sox for Fox Sports Kansas City.
Instead, Lefebvre has found that he’s sometimes still in his pajamas at 12:45 p.m.
This is not a bad reaction to Major League Baseball being on hold because of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. While Lefebvre is not working, he and his wife, Sarah, are homeschooling their four children, whose ages range from 4 and 10.
Schoolwork with the kids can spill past the noon hour, which explains his sometimes-attire. Besides, Lefebvre has nowhere to go, which is strange since the Major League Baseball calendar showed the Royals were supposed to play ball for their home opener Thursday at Kauffman Stadium.
For just the second time in Lefebvre’s broadcasting career, which began with the Minnesota Twins in 1995, the season isn’t starting as expected. That year, a labor dispute was to blame.
“Even though I had to wait for the late start, it was so new to me that I didn’t have the withdrawal or the odd feeling that I should be doing baseball games, because it was my first year,” Lefebvre said. “So this is the first time other than 9/11 when I feel like I should be at work. And there’s no work to go to.”
Lefebvre is missing the games he won’t call, the people he works with and doing a job he loves dearly.
But as the world has turned upside down because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Lefebvre is embracing this extra time with his wife and kids. When Major League Baseball shut down earlier this month, Lefebvre and his family flew back from spring camp in Arizona to their home in Greenwood, Missouri.
Because they’d traveled through airports, Lefebvre and his wife decided to stay at home as much as possible as a precaution. The couple had been considering homeschooling their kids and suddenly have the opportunity to determine if that will be feasible once the season does begin.
Lefebvre is embracing the small moments that we all can miss during our hectic lives.
Before the shutdown, mornings had been spent getting the kids up, fed and off to school. There’s a deliberate pace to the start of the day now ... it’s just different.
“My wife has these huge bird feeders outside of our kitchen and these incredible birds are coming up to the bird feeder,” Lefebvre said. “We’ve seen cardinals, we’ve seen blue jays, we’ve seen bluebirds, we’ve seen finches. The tufted titmouse.
“We have this little book that of course we’ve never cracked open before, ‘Native Birds of Missouri.’ And now it’s at the kitchen table. We sit there and we eat at the pace we want to eat and we just look at the different birds coming, and it’s just like, ‘This is the way we’re supposed to live.’”
The change-of-pace to life doesn’t have Lefebvre contemplating retirement, though. He misses the job too much and can’t wait to get back to calling games.
But the coronavirus’ dreadful and deadly toll has made Lefebvre take stock of the good things in his life, both in baseball and at home.
“It’s like at 49 now maybe there’s a fatherly voice speaking to the younger Ryan Lefebvre, because I was so young when I started (in broadcasting),” he said. “I was 24. It was just ‘go go go’ from the very beginning that now I think it’s time to just kind of sit back and appreciate what I get to do and with whom I get to do it, and all the blessings that have come with it.”
This story was originally published March 26, 2020 at 11:00 AM.
