Viral lawn-mowing guy from Kansas gets surprise job request — mow The K for opening day
The Royals reached out to him about a month ago the same way anyone else does, by leaving a message on his SB Mowing website.
But this ended up being a message unlike any other that Spencer, a nice guy with a lawn mower from Wichita, had ever received.
Would he like to come to Kansas City and help get the Kauffman Stadium field ready for opening day, the Royals asked. The team begins the new season at The K on Thursday against the Cleveland Guardians.
Like more than 33 million others who follow him on social media, the Royals are familiar with the 26-year-old K-State graduate’s viral videos, which can be seen on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat.
He mows and cleans up eyesore, neglected, overgrown yards around Wichita. The yards often belong to people who can’t keep up the work anymore. Seniors. Disabled residents. Some of the houses are abandoned and have become unsightly neighborhood nuisances.
Spencer transforms them all for free.
He films hours of sweaty, physical labor — mowing, weed eating, cutting through jungle-like brush, power-washing dirty driveways. The videos often end with hugs and tears from grateful homeowners and neighbors.
“It’s very, very labor-intensive work, especially when it gets into really hot days in the summer, June, July, August, especially shoveling dirt off sidewalks and cutting roots with my shovel,” Spencer told The Star. “I think I moved almost 3,000 pounds from one yard, bagged it up and hauled it away.”
In January one of his videos helped raise more than $886,000, as of Friday, for an older woman who needed more than having him clear her yard last summer.
“We love SB Mowing’s spirit of generosity, and being from the area we knew this was someone we wanted to work with,” Sam Mellinger, vice president of communications for the Royals, told The Star.
“We were as excited as he was to come out and work a full shift with Trevor, and we look forward to watching him continue to build his mission and help people who could use it.”
Trevor, in this case, is Trevor Vance, who is in his 30th season with the Royals as senior director of groundskeeping and landscaping.
Of course Spencer made a video of his work day at The K. He posted it Wednesday.
“Way to go, Spencer!!! Playing the big leagues!!! I’m a fan of yours and your work!!!” one fan wrote on Instagram.
“Hey everyone it’s Spencer here with SB Mowing and I got a call from a local neighbor telling me they needed help getting their lawn back in shape for the season,” he says in the video.
“When I showed up at the address they sent I was super surprised that it was the KC Royals. So I spent the entire day getting everything looking great again.”
(It wasn’t really a surprise, of course.)
The Royals “said that they knew I was kinda local ... and said that they all loved my content and they saw that, with the grass finally starting to green up, this would be kind of a cool thing to do,” Spencer said.
He had never been in Kauffman Stadium before about 9 a.m. on Saturday, March 15. The breadth of what was about to happen hit him when he saw the beautiful, massive MLB playing field.
He was “a little bit nervous because it’s obviously very nice turf,” he said. “I’m used to working on crazy, overgrown properties that no matter what I do it’s going to look quite a bit better afterwards. I’m not used to working on that kind of grass.”
He helped condition the dirt on the field, spreading bags of new dirt, raking it smooth, watering it down, creating a safe playing surface.
He helped mow the sidelines “so they can get the grow lights out there,” he said.
The lights are laid “over the whole infield to keep it nice and warm ... because we obviously have crazy weather in Kansas and Missouri,” he said.
Bad Boy Mowers, one of his social media sponsors, sent one of their machines to the stadium from a Sutherlands in Raytown so Spencer wouldn’t have to haul his own equipment from Wichita to Kansas City.
He used it to mow the stadium’s front yard, the lawn behind the CrownVision scoreboard.
Spencer has cut grass since he was 10, when he and a buddy knocked on doors around their Wichita neighborhood looking for jobs using their dads’ push mower and weed eater.
When his buddy joined the military, Spencer employed family and friends to work for him while he was studying at K-State, where he got a degree in computer science. But social media stardom changed that path.
“My very first video I posted went viral on TikTok,” he said.
As he mowed yards for regular clients he began noticing nearby lawns that needed help and began mowing them, too, documenting the work.
Those videos went viral quickly, he said, and in less than a year he turned over his regular clients to his brother to focus on the lawn rehabs.
He and his wife — he calls her “Mrs. SB” — “will pick an area of town and drive up and down every street for, like, four to eight hours and write down every single yard that needs help,” he said. “Then we’ll go back and start with the worst ones.
“I’ve never had someone turn me down. Usually they’re really needing help. They have the city on their back, they have fines coming their way. I have had times where I knocked on a door 10 different times and they don’t answer ... I don’t do those.”
Mrs. SB helps with editing the videos.
“There’s so much work that goes on behind the scenes,” Spencer said. “When you see a 30-minute video I’m probably putting 30, 40 hours into that video. It’s a very tough thing to do but I love it.”
A couple of recent jobs grabbed national attention. Last year while mowing an overgrown yard in Corpus Christi, Texas — the family spends time there in the local mowing offseason — he found a severely wounded cat.
Edgar and Ivy’s Cat Sanctuary was the only shelter or rescue he could find that would take the cat. The owner, who had sunk thousands of dollars of her own money into the shelter, turned out to be a fan of his work.
She confided that she needed $20,000 to outfit a new medical center for the animals. Spencer asked if he could start a GoFundMe campaign. His fans came through, donating more than $200,000 to date.
The money allowed the shelter to expand into a larger wellness center, which Spencer named after his followers — the SB Mowing Community Wellness Center.
Philanthropy can have its perks. Arkansas-based Bad Boy Mowers, also a marketing partner of the Chiefs, gave Spencer and his wife tickets to the Super Bowl in New Orleans.
Fans have told him why they enjoy his videos.
“I think there’s a few different things,” he said. “One is it’s very satisfying to see something cleaned up in fast-motion, see something going from very dirty to very clean in a matter of minutes.
“On top of that, you don’t see a lot of good in the world, or like a ton of it. So i think it kinda throws people for a loop, catches people off guard, when they see that.
“Whenever I talk to people about it, or whenever I talk about it in general, I just encourage people to get out there, even if they’re doing the smallest amount of work for their neighbor.”
He doesn’t know where all this will eventually lead, though he hinted that he has something in the works that he’s keeping secret for now.
The Royals invited him to attend a game this season, but with the mowing season at hand he’s not sure when he’ll be able to return to Kansas City.
In his video of his day at the stadium he thanked the team “and the ground crew for inviting me to The K and showing me how they make those awesome stripes that you see on TV.
“Next up is to attend a game really soon, but until then we’ll see you next time.
“SB Mowing, out.”
This story was originally published March 24, 2025 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Viral lawn-mowing guy from Kansas gets surprise job request — mow The K for opening day."
.jpg)