Royals must work Fetty Wap reference into interviews -- or pay the price

Baseball’s regular season is quite long. Kansas City has a nine-game lead in the American League Central, so there’s no real division race to keep things interesting during the next two months before the postseason finally gets underway.

So some of the Royals players have been amusing themselves by requiring each other to drop a reference to rapper Fetty Wap into postgame interviews.

Specifically, the numbers 17 and 38.

Apparently the rapper recites the number 1738 in several of his songs -- including the hit, “Trap Queen” -- as a shout out to his crew, “Remy Boyz 1738,” which took its name from a Remy Martin cognac.

Kansas City Star reporter Andy McCullough was the first to notice this phenomenon following the Royals’ 2-1 win over Cleveland on Tuesday night.

He tweeted that outfielder Lorenzo Cain said of Indians pitcher Trevor Bauer, “He was like a 17-38 to the plate;” first baseman Eric Hosmer said of his RBIs, “I’ll take 17. I’ll take 38;” and third baseman Mike Moustakas said of a play by Hosmer, “Hoz picks that thing 17 out of 38 times.”

Turns out that “Trap Queen” is Cain’s walk-up music at the plate. McCullough tweeted that a player must use the numbers when talking to reporters or else pay a fine to his teammates.

All I can say is, it’s a good thing this didn’t happen a couple summers ago. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to work a Carly Rae Jepsen reference into interviews?