The depressing life of a Royals fan
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
I could give you a bunch of reasons why the Royals really, really stink this year.
Like here’s one: Tony Pena Jr. has just as many errors (five) as hits (five) this season, and he’s played in 40 games and been given 51 at-bats by this team. Instead of letting Pena Jr. look for work, the Royals are now trying to make him a pitcher.
Numbers can only tell so much of the story of just how terrible a baseball team the Kansas City Royals are. To really see it, you have to witness it.
The last few weeks I’ve tried to avoid watching. I don’t want to see it.
I had sort of promised myself early this year that I would watch every Zach Greinke start, because Greinke was on pace to have a magical season. Greinke is still amazing to watch, but even his starts have become depressing. The Royals are so bad offensively that they’ve lost every one of Greinke’s last four starts — despite his 2.42 ERA over that time.
When I was in college, my buddy Ryan and I went — and suffered — through a lot of games at Kauffman. Eventually, we had to ease the pain by making rules like the Brian Anderson rule. Anderson was one of the worst starting pitchers in baseball in 2004, and so whenever he was pitching, we would not attend the game — the Brian Anderson rule.
This season’s Brian Anderson would be Sidney Ponson. He’s the fat guy who the Royals are trying to pretend is still a major league-caliber pitcher. Just like they tried to pretend Pena Jr. was a real major league shortstop.
Sidney Ponson has even worse numbers than Brian Anderson.
So when my buddy Thor was in town visiting this weekend and wanted to go to Sunday’s game, because he wanted to see the New K, I tried my best to talk him out of it.
The fat guy was pitching and I didn’t want to see the Royals get demolished.
Well, Thor talked me into it and Ponson even made me eat my words for a day — he pitched six scoreless innings. This was such a shocking development that even Royals manager Trey Hillman admitted after the game that he didn’t expect Ponson would be able to pitch that many innings.
But this is the Royals and whenever there’s a ray of hope, there’s plenty of doom and gloom sure to follow.
Now, when any team’s fifth starter pitches six scoreless innings, the probability that team is going to win is pretty high. Of course, while Ponson kept the Rangers scoreless, the Royals also couldn’t score a run in the first six innings. They do that a lot.
They also have made a habit of making indefensible mistakes.
For example, that Pena Jr. guy, the one whose bat doesn’t work, he once lost a fly ball in the sun because he didn’t have his sunglasses on. And the reason he didn’t have his sunglasses on: He had just ordered a new pair and they hadn’t arrived in the mail yet.
Another time, in 2006, Royals outfielder Kerry Robinson went to try to rob a home run at the wall. But when the Royals aren’t signing fat guys to pitch, they’re signing outfielders with poor depth perception. So when Robinson made his leap at the wall, the ball landed 10 feet in front of him, and then bounced over the wall for a ground-rule double.
Sunday’s hair-pulling moment came in the seventh inning. The Rangers had runners at the corners with two outs, and the Royals got just what they wanted, a routine infield pop fly. Of course, nothing is routine for this team. Second baseman Alberto Callaspo lost the ball in the sun, finally found it and then had the ball fall out of his glove.
The Rangers went on to score three runs, I waited for Thor to say he was ready to go, and the Rangers continued to pour it on in the eighth against Kansas City’s terrible bullpen.
You could use the Forrest Gump school of thought for the Callaspo error — ya know, s*#@ happens. But s*#@ just happens way too often with this team, and it starts to become a trend.
Now, I try to be an optimistic guy. I think the economy is eventually going to get better. I think newspapers will rise again. And I even tried — against my better judgment — to talk myself into believing the Royals would contend this year when they were 18-11.
But on Sunday as I watched the Royals play, as I watched the offense putter along, as I witnessed Callaspo’s inexcusable error, I realized things aren’t getting better anytime soon.
They don’t score runs. They aren’t a good fielding team. And they really aren’t that young anymore, so youth can no longer be an excuse.
To their credit, they’ve solved their shortstop issues by trading for Yuniesky Betancourt, who is another guy baseball experts say might be one of the worst everyday players in the game. Hey, he’s at least a step up; he has more hits (61) than errors (10).
Other than Ponson, they at least have a good starting rotation and they have one of the best young closers in baseball in Joakim Soria. But the rest of the bullpen has found a way to keep Soria plenty fresh for his future as the Yankees’ replacement for Mariano Rivera. A week ago against Tampa Bay, the Royals led every game of the series going into the eighth inning, and their bullpen blew every game in the eighth inning.
The bullpen had been a strength last year, but general manager Dayton Moore traded away the best two setup men he had for two busts — Mike Jacobs and Coco Crisp.
I wanted to believe in Moore when he was hired in 2006 and wanted to give him a chance. But every move he’s made the last year seems to be motivated by panic. Now, admittedly, I’m no baseball expert. So when I start questioning every move, I feel like there’s a problem there.
Moore was quoted last week in a story in the Kansas City Star talking about how he’s not going to give up on the process. And that it’s all about the process. And he kept repeating “process.” I’m not really sure what process he’s talking about — maybe the process of building a loser? What I do know is people who repeat things tend to be going down one of two paths. Either they’re not confident in what they’re saying, and they are trying to talk themselves into believing the gibberish that’s coming out of their mouth; or, they’re going crazy. It could be both for Moore.
And that’s what being around the Royals will do to you. It will make you go crazy.
An old guy sat in front of us on Sunday. As the Royals started to lose, he started talking to himself out loud. He had nobody to listen because he was by himself, probably because he couldn’t convince anyone else to go to the game.
Near the end, when it was clear the Royals had no shot of coming back, I started thinking, “I bet this guy never gets to see the Royals win the World Series again, or even make the playoffs, for the rest of his life.”
And the more I thought about it, I began to question whether I’d ever see it.