Tech N9ne talks World Series, George Brett and Marlins Man

Tech N9ne doesn’t know where he got tickets to the opening game of the World Series at Kauffman Stadium.

The Kansas City rapper sent his business partner, Travis O’Guin, out to grab a couple of tickets, but never learned of their origin.

Nor did Tech N9ne know where, after he bought them, he would sit for the first World Series game in Kansas City in nearly 30 years.

But as luck would have it, he ended up with the best seats in the stadium — first row, behind home plate.

“We walked out there, and I said, ‘This is our seats?'” Tech N9ne tells The Pitch. “He says, ‘Yup,’ and I was like, wow…I didn’t know what I had paid for.”

That is, what he paid $6,000 apiece for.

Tech N9ne stood out on television screens all around the country, clad in a black Kansas City Royals shirt.

He has a message for people who gave him guff for not wearing blue: “People on Instagram were blaming me for not wearing blue. If the Royals didn’t want people to wear black Royals gear, they wouldn’t make it.”

He didn’t stand out quite as much as the man two seats down in the front row. Laurence Leavy, better known as Marlins Man for the eye-popping bright-orange shirt and visor that the 58-year-old Florida lawyer wears to high-profile sporting events, could be seen on television showing Tech N9ne and others around him things on his cellphone and generally not seeming to pay close attention to the game in front of him.

“He was cool,” Tech N9ne says. “He tried to give me food and everything.”

But for $8,000 a seat, Leavy could do pretty much anything he wanted, including refuse overtures by the Royals front office to move elsewhere or cover up his Marlins gear with Royals attire. Leavy is cast professionally as a workers’ compensation lawyer from Fort Lauderdale, but Tech N9ne says Leavy described himself as something of a fixer for his purported client, Wal-Mart.

“He told me he’s like the Wolf in Pulp Fiction. He’s the cleaner. He comes in and cleans up. If they have a problem, he comes in and fixes it,” Tech N9ne recalls. “When he’s done with that, they pay for him to come to games where seats cost $6,000.”

Marlins Man wasn’t the only celebrity in the prime seats during Game 1. Spotted among the Crown Club gentry was Cerner co-founder Cliff Illig. George Brett made an appearance in the bowels of the stadium, where Crown Club ticketholders gorge themselves on expensive food.

“The big thing was when I was in there eating prime rib and everything — I was eating pork chops — George Brett was in there,” Tech N9ne says. “I touched him in the back with my hand. He turned around and looked at me, and I said, ‘Tech N9ne.’ He said, ‘Oh, man, I haven’t seen you since that thing we did with the mayor.'”

Tech N9ne got to enjoy fine dining and plum seats, but the view only gave him an unobstructed vantage point to watch the San Francisco Giants steamroll the Royals 7-1. Was it still worth $6,000 a seat? Yes, he says, in part if you count the publicity that being on television and in newspapers brings with it.

“I wouldn’t change it for the world,” he says. “I don’t care that they did lose. It’s almost like the biggest show I ever did.”

Tech N9ne leaves Saturday for a 21-show tour that starts October 27 in Sacramento, California, not terribly far from where the Royals and Giants will be playing the next three games of the World Series, starting tonight.