By David Driver Special Consultant

Justin Bour looked to the heavens after he had an emotional base hit for his Angels.
 
The Kansas City Royals, with former Patriots standout Dayton Moore as the General Manager, played at Nationals Park for the first time since 2010.
 
And former big-league pitcher Shawn Camp, who broke into the majors with the Royals in 2004, was recently named the new pitching coach of the Patriots under veteran coach Bill Brown.
 
It has been an eventful summer for the George Mason baseball program, who have several alums making an impact in Major League Baseball in many areas. Many of them point to the guidance of Brown, who has won more than 1,000 games at the school.
 
"It all starts with skip," former Patriots infielder Lonnie Goldberg, the Assistant General Manager/Scouting for the Royals, said of the Mason mentor. Brown and Goldberg both played at Marshall High in Falls Church.
 
The Royals won their first World Series in 2015 with a strong Mason contingent.
 
"We have an accountability to one another in this organization. We take a lot of pride in that," former minor league player Goldberg said in a telephone interview from Cleveland during the All-Star break.
 
One player that Brown helped send to the majors is Bour, who was drafted out of Mason in the 25^th round by the Chicago Cubs a decade ago.
 
The left-handed slugger had a two-run single as the Angels broke a 3-3 tie to beat the Texas Rangers 9-4 on July 2. That came one day after the death of Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs, 27, who passed away in the team hotel in Texas.
 
A product of Westfield High School, Bour was with the Miami Marlins in 2016 when star pitcher Jose Fernandez was killed in a boating accident. Bour hit 20 homers last season with the Marlins and Phillies and had eight homers in just 138 at-bats through the All-Star break with the Angels.
 
"I know how tough it's going to be every single day," Bour told reporters in Texas about the loss of Skaggs. "And it takes a really long time for it to sink in. And it still, sometimes it just doesn't."
 
A few days after the Bour hit in Texas, the Royals came to the nation's capital for a three-game series with the red-hot Washington Nationals.
 
Moore wasn't with the team on this trip but Jin Wong, the assistant general manager/baseball administration, was. He grew up in Vienna, played baseball at Bishop O'Connell High in Arlington and Division III Mary Washington University and began working with the Atlanta Braves under Moore more than 20 years ago.
 
Moore, an assistant coach under Brown at Mason, has been the general manager of the Royals since 2006 and Wong has been with him the entire way.
 
"He is a tremendous leader. He is always up front. I am very fortunate to work under him," said Wong, standing in the Royals clubhouse at Nationals Park.
 
Wong also has ties to Camp, who was named the Mason pitching coach in late June.
 
They were teammates in the amateur Clark Griffith League while in college then Wong was working in the front office of the Royals when Camp became available after pitching in the Pittsburgh farm system.
 
"We signed him and he had a nice MLB career," Wong said.
 
Camp pitched for the Royals, Tampa Bay Rays, Toronto Blue Jays, Chicago Cubs and Philadelphia Phillies in a career that lasted from 2004 to 2014. He led the National League in appearances with the Cubs in 2012 with 80 and came out of the bullpen 541 times in his big-league career.
 
A graduate of Robinson High, Camp was with Tampa Bay when Dave Martinez was a coach there. Martinez is now in his second year as the manager of the Nationals. "He has a lot of passion, a lot of energy," Camp said of Martinez.
 
The Kansas City front office also includes former Mason baseball player J.J. Picollo, Vice President/Assistant General Manager.
 
Royals catcher Cam Gallagher was drafted out of his Lancaster, Pa. high school in 2011 and has been with the organization since then. He talks to players with other teams and came away with a strong impression of Moore and the Royals.
 
"We care about winning. But they care about you as a father, husband son and brother," Gallagher said in Washington. "They put a lot of emphasis on that."
 
Chris Widger, a standout catcher for the Patriots, is the manager of Burlington (NC) Royals in the rookie Appalachian League in the Kansas City system after playing in the majors for parts of 10 years. Since he broke into the majors in 1995, Mason has had at least one of its former players appear in The Show every season.
 
Ken Munoz, another George Mason product, has been a scout for several years for Kansas City. Former Mason star Chris O'Grady pitched in eight games for the Marlins last year but has not pitched in the majors in 2019.
 
The Mason connection helped the Royals win their first World Series in 2015. Now they are going through another rebuild and trying to get back there again. Their top pick in the June draft was Bobby Witt, Jr., a Texas prep star whose father was born in Arlington and pitched in the majors.
 
"You try to learn from what worked," Goldberg said. "We obviously did a lot of good things during that time."
 
Editor's note: David Driver has written about pro and college baseball for 25 years in northern Virginia and has covered the Washington Nationals for seven years for various outlets. He can be reached at davidsdriver.com and @DaytonVaDriver.