This 'KALEctible' is More Than an Action Figure

It was just a normal day at Segra Park for Ryan MacAdams and Andrew Ellison, a Corporal and Officer at the Richland County Sherriff’s Department. They decided to come to attend the Fireflies first home game since August of 2019, have a couple of beers and socialize with other friends they would run into at the game.

After a few innings, they found out that one of their friends was sitting near Columbia’s bullpen, so they moved and noticed a bullpen arm begin to warm-up.

As McAdams remembers it, “We started making some comments to Kale while he was catching and he started to laugh and shake his head, interacting with us.” That Kale in the bullpen is catcher Kale Emshoff, who has played in 11 of the first 18 games for the Columbia Fireflies. The game was anything but just another game for the backstop from Robstown, Texas.

After his senior season at The University of Arkansas at Little Rock was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the Pre-Season All-Sun Belt Selection did what he knew best and went home to work at the family farm.

While there, Kale does “anything my dad tells me to.” The 6’2, burly catcher chuckles. That mostly includes driving the tractor round and round. Then when this last harvest came around, he had the opportunity to drive the grain buggy, which takes the grain from the combine at the farm to the 18 wheelers that ship them out.

As July rolled around, it was time for the draft, a moment where Kale would certainly get picked up by a team and he could start his journey as a professional baseball player. Then, May 8, two months to the day from Emshoff’s final game with the Little Rock Trojans, Major League Baseball announced that they were shortening the draft from 40 rounds to five rounds.

A .417 average in 17 games with seven homers, including one in his final game, against Southern Miss was good, but it wasn’t enough to get the backstop picked up in the shortened draft format. So how did the farmer find himself on the Royals farm, rather than on the soil in Texas?

In a way, it was a blessing that everything was shortened, because Emshoff had over 25 offers to choose from. “Because I didn’t get selected with the draft being shortened due to COVID, I literally got to hand-pick the team I got to go to.” The Fireflies catcher recalls.

It all started with a visit from Royals’ scout Matt Price. Price stressed that the Royals were all about being a family and that players weren’t just players to the coaches and staff, but they were members of the larger Kansas City Royals Family.

The more Emshoff looked into the organization, the more he realized that it matched his mentality and work ethic, a work-ethic that he brought with him from the family farm to Little Rock to Columbia.

His college coach, Chris Curry, said, “Kale is one of my all-time favorites. He was having a Player of the Year Season before COVID shut down his senior year, but he is one of those guys who would come in early and stay late every day. The thing I appreciated most was that he didn’t do that for him. He led through his body language and his positivity each day.”

After signing with Kansas City, it was time for the Texan to start planting for the summer and he also had to prepare for Spring Training. That created an unimaginable schedule for most. “I was getting up at 6 or 6:30 every morning to walk over to the barn and start checking out the tractor.” Emshoff remembers. “Then when my Dad got off work around 6 or 7 at night, he would hop on the tractor and let me get to lifting or baseball and whatever I needed to do to prepare.”

That brings us back to May 11, after nearly 14 months from his last game in college, the former-Trojan was in the bullpen for his night off warming up a pitcher. It was the first time he put on a uniform in front of a home crowd as a professional baseball player.

He remembers a group of guys who were chirping him a bit at the start of the game, telling him “Good job, Kale!” on small things he was doing behind the dish. “Then our pitcher started throwing balls in the dirt, and I started picking them with my glove. That made those guys get more rowdy. They were screaming ‘Let’s go!’ and they were getting really pumped.”

The officers and the catcher met after the game and became friends. Kale even took a picture with the fans, who prior to parting ways told him that they were going to make t-shirts and a fan section honoring the backstop.

“I thought. Yeah, okay. There’s no way that that’s going to happen, but then they came back with the shirts and their whole family and I just thought, wow. This is crazy.” Emshoff says.

As the officers left the stadium that night, they came up with the name “The KALEctibles” for the fan club. “We knew that he was an undrafted free agent out of Arkansas Little Rock.” Officer Andrew Ellison explains, “We were hoping that it might give him some encouragement to keep doing big things.”

Of course, the group could have picked any player to start a fan club for, but MacAdams contends that “He interacted with us on social media after the game, and that was when we decided to make the fan club. It was the fan-centered approach to the whole situation that made us all like him from the start.”

It’s the blue-collar hard-working attitude that helped the officers of the Richland County Sherriff’s department resonate towards the farmer, and that attitude is helping him continue to be successful in the Low-A East League.

Just like the grain that Emshoff harvests in the offseason, the club started off small, with just four members, but after the first home slate, the group was already up to around 20 members. As for Kale and his journey, through the team’s first 18 games, he leads the Fireflies with 14 RBI and has a .277 average in 47 at-bats. He’s continuing to grow and learn while with the Royals, and that leadership is still shining through in the Fireflies club house.

Reflecting on the off-season with Kansas City and his first month on the Royals farm Kale tells, “I can easily say that I made the right choice.”