Letter from the Editor: True optimism’s co-conspirators walk into a bar

August 3, 2025

Brock Wilbur,

Welcome, dearest readers, to the August 2025 print edition of The Pitch magazine—locally grown right here in KC, and featuring all the news that’s fit to print. And often… more. More than that. You know what you’re here for, yeah?

Here at The Pitch, our prime directive is always “Shine a light on good people doing good, bad people doing bad, and weird people doing weird.” Spreading that spotlight around has always been central to what we do, and as a guiding principle, it helps guide us into finding and celebrating the sort of folks whose stories rarely get told elsewhere in the metro.

In turn, we hope this means that caring about their lives (and choices) becomes a part of who you are, by nature of being a Pitch Person. We like to think that we aren’t a publication you read, but rather a kind of second-hand friend, embarking on an adventure—one that provides an unending set of trips, problems, and mysteries we’re going to tackle together.

Recently, I lost one of my favorite Pitch People from out in the wild.

David Kinerk was a regular at Lew’s. I’ve sat next to him in the afternoons for (at least) two days a week, probably since just after pandemic restrictions lifted, onward until the middle of May this year. I don’t think we ever really even introduced ourselves. I was just Brock, and he was Dave, and we were always involved in whatever the group conversation was floating toward—inevitably drifting until it was just him and me drilling down into specifics that got too tightly kept for larger public discussion. It was that ‘hard to define but you know it’ energy of a person you were friends with in high school, hadn’t seen in 15 years, and one day you just slot back into the dynamic you always had—without ever needing to acknowledge the intervening radio silence. He was… a co-conspirator? We’d both start to get quieter and lean in closer as we shared opinions and secrets; sometimes our own, sometimes those of another. It was the rare trust you place in a stranger only when you sense in your blood that they’re a fellow traveller.

David was Pitch People because I’m not sure there is anyone in this city who was as tuned in on what we publish day in and day out as he was. At one point, I thought he must be sneaking looks at his phone when he saw me coming. Even I rarely feel I’m on top of everything we run in a day. But David was. And he had opinions.

What we shared, if you saw it from the end of the bar, probably looked like two guys getting increasingly angry as they got quieter—like they had an unpopular opinion about a local sports team and didn’t want to invite the bar proper to engage in our private disparagement. When I reflect on it now, in totality, I would call it True Optimism. We were both given the inclination to care so much, so deeply, about so many people in this city… and oh my god, were we incredulous about the road blocks preventing Good and Change from being performed. Often, people who just needed to do their jobs in a way that we were positive we could do better. More often, from our professions, we knew things from behind the scenes that we exchanged because… I don’t know? More than once, we knew the guy who knew the guy who could maybe blow up the debris blocking the road?

We both could see joy, possibility, and a better world just out of reach, shimmering on the horizon. And we had the optimism that a single person, here and there, given the right support, could make it a reality. We were engaged in the True Optimism that required acknowledging just how much work it could take, but equally, how a better Kansas City was ready and waiting. He wanted to light that fire, and on more occasions than I can count, he gave me the kindling I needed to do my part.

He always saw the work that we as a publication were doing, and he was proud of us for it. There were days I needed that, and I’m not sure I ever told him how much it mattered that he pitched in to help us make it through.

So this month, this issue is full of folks from across the region who are Pitch People—good people doing good, and weird people whose joy or strength is infectious, and the ‘weird’ moniker only applies because the path they walk is staggeringly singular. There is a party in these pages for the power of people who are sitting right next to you, wherever you may be sitting right now. I’m always looking for more of them, and if I haven’t shared their story with the town yet, we’ll get to them next week, next month, or next year.

Pitch People never give up on us, and we’ll never give up on them. So thank you to each and every one of you reading this, living this, and getting on board for yet another deep dive this issue into a population that does the improbable in the face of the impossible.

Pitch in and we’ll make it through,