Mom and Dad never missed a game. Now, this Royals pitcher has 70,000 behind him
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Noah Cameron shines in MLB debut, pitching historic scoreless starts for Royals.
- St. Joseph honors hometown star with local tributes, jerseys and a stadium night.
- Cameron’s parents track every game, reflecting a lifelong family baseball journey.
Inside an 86-year-old baseball stadium in a community of 70,000, a mother and father of five occupy the front row.
Mom has watched games here for literal generations — her father, brother and then youngest son on the field — but tonight is a unique experience.
Her wheelchair is sandwiched between two aisle seats and tears stream down her face. A recently diagnosed neurological disorder makes it a challenge to wipe them away.
She and her husband wear jerseys that they had custom made before the shops starting selling them — Royals tops, with a name and number stitched on the back
Cameron.
65.
They grab a bit of attention here.
“You probably don’t know me,” a woman says, initiating a conversation. “But congrats on your son’s success.”
Mom, with light-brown hair long enough to cover that name plate, smiles during these interactions, which are starting to happen a lot recently. She smiles about most anything.
Dad is a storyteller. He blends into the crowd, with a mustache and wire-framed glasses that, come to think of it, resemble the pair his son used to wear on this very mound.
That youngest son has upgraded to Oakley sunglasses now — and they passed out 100 just like them ahead of this game, offering kids a chance to mimic their new Major League Baseball idol.
Royals left-handed pitcher Noah Cameron, the youngest of the five Cameron children, is taking the big leagues by storm not many years after taking this very place by storm as a kid.
On this night, the 25-year-old Cameron and his Oakleys are stationed an hour south of St. Joe, in Kansas City, where Kauffman Stadium is playing host to the Big Slick charity softball game benefiting a local children’s hospital, an event put on by some prominent KC celebrities.
But back here at 86-year-old Phil Welch Stadium in St. Joseph, they are on hand to honor their own celebrity.
Him.
So Cameron’s family walked onto the field before a local independent-league game. Six-year-old Harper, a niece, sang the national anthem, absent the music and without missing a word. Two-year-old Logan, a nephew, intended to throw out the first pitch but apparently decided he’d prefer to keep the baseball instead.
And an announcer bellowed the four words that started to make Mom cry again.
“It’s Noah Cameron night!”
‘Here to see Noah’
During Noah Cameron’s first college baseball weekend at Central Arkansas, mom Diane and dad Tracy drove nearly seven hours to watch him play.
Just on the off-chance they could watch him.
Cameron warmed up in the bullpen that Friday night, but the coaches opted against putting him in the game. He got loose again Saturday but didn’t make the trot to the mound then, either. He warmed up in the bullpen a third time Sunday, and, still, nothing.
A week later, undeterred, Diane and Tracy got back in the car and embarked on another 6 1/2-hour drive. In that weekend’s fourth game, the seventh of the season, Cameron finally got the ball.
He threw seven shutout innings. And his spot in the rotation became permanent immediately.
His parents have never missed a game. Literally, not one. As he has progressed through Little League, travel baseball, college, the minors and now to the majors, they’ve either attended every game in person or watched on a live stream.
After the Royals drafted Cameron in 2021, his parents traveled to see him compete in spring training the following year. The grounds-workers figured they were lost and unaware they were watching minor-league games, so they pointed them in the direction of the lower fields.
“We’re here to see Noah,” they’d reply.
They were the only people on the hill watching those inter-squad minor-league games in Arizona. For two decades, Noah has been their story to follow all across the country — oftentimes, theirs alone.
Now, his story belongs to all of us.
Cameron has started four games with the Royals, initially as an injury fill-in for Seth Lugo and Cole Ragans. But now he is taking on the look of a future mainstay for the club’s major-league pitching staff.
He’s pitched into the seventh inning in all four of his starts and has yet to allow more than one run in any of them. He’s the first MLB pitcher since 1893 to accomplish that feat, per the Elias Sports Bureau.
Those numbers aren’t transposed. It’s been 132 years since baseball has seen this kind of start to a major-league career.
That’s a win for the Royals’ scouting and pitching development operations. When KC drafted Cameron, he still wasn’t fully recovered from Tommy John surgery. Since then, he has layered new offerings into his pitching arsenal, enough that he’s mixed up his game plans from start to start.
Draft night is when Noah’s father, Tracy, had the jerseys made. Cameron got the call from the Royals, and his dad wanted the family to wear KC attire for the local newscast that evening.
A week later, Tracy took the jerseys to a local embroidery shop to have the family’s last name stitched onto the back.
And last week, some four years after the draft, Tracy returned to that shop with another request.
“It looks like,” he said, “I’m going to need the numbers on there, too.”
It’s stuck.
He’s stuck around.
For now.
Cameron is pushing the issue on those initial spot-start plans. Royals general manager J.J. Picollo told The Star his performance thus far is going to force the club to make a difficult decision — and perhaps even to re-think entirely its original plan for Cameron.
The organization is still awaiting a couple of additional data points — including the outcome of Cameron’s fifth big-league start, scheduled for Wednesday evening in St. Louis — before making that decision. But it’s coming, and soon.
As for the past?
Glad you asked.
St. Joe Proud
When Noah Cameron was 4, he walked along the Kauffman Stadium outfield. His parents think it was part of a school field trip, or something similar.
His father, Tracy, was raised in Pattonsburg, Missouri, a tiny town more than an hour north of Kansas City. The Royals were part of his early DNA.
Baseball came even earlier for his youngest son.
“When he was 2, barely walking, he’d take a pebble, an apple, an orange — if it was round, it was a ball,” Tracy recalled. “He’d come up to me in the recliner, look at me, and say, ‘Ball!’ And I knew he wanted to play catch.”
It’s a relatively linear development from there — travel ball, high school ace, college showcase, college rotation and then the MLB Draft.
Except for one thing.
This kind of dream doesn’t happen here, in this tight-knit community. And that isn’t meant to be insulting, but rather factual: Cameron is the first St. Joseph native to reach the major leagues since 1981, per Baseball Reference. His uncle, Steve Mapel, made it to Triple-A in the early 1980s.
So it’s understandable that this place has taken notice.
The local Rally House keeps getting requests for No. 65 jerseys. Local bars and restaurants don’t miss a game. A bank has even plastered Noah’s picture and number on its marquee.
Mom and Dad can’t visit the grocery store without being stopped. Their son has reached the big leagues, and now the townspeople of St. Joseph feel like they have reached the big leagues, too.
St. Joe Proud, they call it.
“We used to call it ‘the bandwagon,’” Tracy said. “We’ve got 70,000 people on the bandwagon right now.”
A couple-dozen of them made the trip to see Cameron’s first major-league start in Tampa, where he flirted with a no-hitter.
The Royals flew Tracy and Diane to that game. The couple made the trip on their own to Minnesota a few weeks later, a six-hour trip.
Cameron has been unfazed by the moment. Picollo, the Royals’ GM, said you wouldn’t know that he had no previous big-league experience. He acts as though he belongs. He pitches as though he belongs.
“This is unbelievable,” Cameron said. “But we’ve been talking about this moment for a long time.”
It’s real now.
For his parents, and his mom in particular, it’s maybe a little closer to surreal.
The home park
The trip to Tampa for Noah’s MLB debut was a whirlwind — a call late Sunday, on a plane two days later, Cameron nearly throwing a no-hitter Wednesday, then back home Thursday.
After that trip, after she returned home to St. Joseph, Diane found a quiet moment and sat down to re-watch the game. And then she watched it again. And again. She must’ve watched it six times from start to finish, she estimated, and during one of those viewings she pulled out a relic from when Noah was a kid.
A scorebook.
She has stacks of them now, from Noah’s childhood games, his high school contests and games he played in college. The four games she’s tracked from the major leagues look pretty clean.
Her writing has changed over the years, though, particularly recently. She was diagnosed with “stiff-person syndrome,” a rare neurological disorder that mimics its name.
But she lives a charmed life, she says, and she attributes that to her next sentence:
“Half my life,” she says, “has been at baseball games.”
Most of them were here at this venue, Phil Welch Stadium, a community setting with the feel of a minor-league park. Billboards adorn the outfield fence and there’s enough seating for nearly 4,000 fans.
Diane began making trips here as a kid — her dad umpired games. Her brother, Steve, later played here, too. And Noah’s high school, St. Joseph Central, used this stadium as its home field.
In all, she must have seen more than a hundred games at Phil Welch Stadium.
“Maybe a thousand,” she says.
But tonight? Well, tonight is even better than the thousand before it.
“Tonight,” she says, “it’s Noah Cameron Night.”
This story was originally published June 4, 2025 at 5:00 AM.