Baseball Season

For most major league towns, Baseball Opening Day fell on the same day that College Basketball season ended. It was kind of a violent transition between the culminating basketball event, and the start of an extremely long baseball season. The baseball season in Kansas City is extremely long. Excruciatingly long. Painfully long, Tediously long. We have not had a competitive team in years.

The glory years of the 1970's and 1980's are long gone. Since then we Kansas Citians have been subjected to some of the worst professional baseball teams every assembled. We have seen multiple 100 game losers, super star players traded away to save money, and keystone cop acts on the field. The only recent bright spot was the Cy Young award winning performance of Zach Grenke last year.

Yet, even that performance was tempered by the reality that a single dominate player having an incredible year cannot overcome the talent he is surrounded by. There has never been a pitcher in baseball history with the number of innings (229), strikeouts (242), and ERA (2.16) that did not win at least 20 games. Zach was 16 wins, 8 losses in 2009. Many of his losses were hard luck losses when the team did not support him with runs. Many of his no decisions were games he left with a lead, but were lost by the bullpen.

Now is the time of year that Royals public relations department makes the case that this year will be different. They need to in order to sell tickets. Last year, attendance was up, but not because of the quality of play. Rather, attendance was up due to a remodeled "amusement park" stadium. Many Kansas Citians attended a game or two last year merely to see the new stadium. That is old news this year.

The Kansas City Royals will never play .500 ball with the current ownership. Owner David Glass of Walmart continues to run the team as a business. He expects to make a profit each year. That is far different that in the Royals glory days. The legendary, hall of fame owner Ewing Kaufman realized that competitive baseball in the Kansas City small market would never be profitable. He took his losses and let the baseball people build a winning franchise. It worked then, and would now if profit margins did not drive baseball decisions.

So we can expect the same this year. There may or may not be flashes of a winning team, but the truth is there are not enough talented players to win consistently. It is really sad when the most reasonable and attainable goal for this team is to lose less than 100 games. Another manager may be fired, the general manager could be in jeopardy if disaster strikes, but these would only be acts designed to buy more time. The best answer would be to fire the owner, and sell the team.