A Royal Pain

Let’s start off with some good news, but in keeping with the general tenor of 2020 for the Kansas City Royals, and this star-crossed year in general, it is backhanded good news. The Royals won’t lose one hundred games for the third straight season. That was guaranteed from the start, since even losing every one on the schedule only would have been sixty. But that schedule appears to be the only reason as the Royals are currently toting a 14-28 record, which would play out to a 54-108 record over a regular (please, please) season.

If you want to be nice about it, after two decades of absolute futility, the Royals had a nice five year run of competitiveness from 2013-2017. If you want to be mean, you could toss out the .500 record of the last two seasons and make it three. But you might as well choose the former because, it sure looks like the five years of respectability, are set to be followed with another half decade of disaster…..at least. Basically nothing about 2020 has done anything to raise the spirits.

Let’s start with the opportunity of just playing sixty, a shortened stretch with added playoff spots that opened the door for a not-so-great team to find a little vein of form to inject life into a fan base that was given the ultimate prize, only to be returned lickety-split back to what they had become dreadfully familiar with.. Uhhh, here in Kansas City seizing that chance…..not so much. The Royals immediately went out and put up a 3-10 start, hampered more by covid than many squads, but not enough not to play, and lose. They followed by trying to put some life back into things by winning four straight, but that would be (get ready), the only time this season that they have won consecutive games.

Now, of course, in the week that the Chiefs return to action, they have doubled down with a seven game losing streak, that will turn their already odd and troubled season into an afterthought in the Kansas City sports landscape. You really couldn’t have dreamed up more bad scenarios. Hunter Dozier missed the first fifteen games with Covid, Sal Perez has missed the last nineteen with (are you kidding me?) blurred vision from something nobody can figure out. Ian Kennedy is playing out his time here by getting ripped, and Adalberto Mondesi has been so bad he’s become a joking matter, so dreadful that his current four game hitting streak has raised his OPS 49 points……to .499. Dead last in baseball for qualified batters…..by 77 points. Even Whit Merrifield seems to have looked around, and said “What’s the point?”, and has rolled out a 2-34 to fall to an un-Whitley .249. I could tick off a few more things, but why pile on.

However, losing games in a bizarre truncated season, and some individual negatives notes, doesn’t even really get to the larger point. It sure as hell doesn’t look like there are many reasons to think this is going to change anytime soon. The division has become nasty, with three teams over .600, boosted of course by the Royals themselves. The Twins haven’t taken a step back, Cleveland keeps churning out so many quality starting pitchers that they can just breezily toss aside Kluber, and Bauer, and now Clevenger, and keep running out quality night after night, and the White Sox are teeming with young talent. From a position player standpoint, there is not a single youthful bright spot, and there doesn’t appear to be much coming. Then you can add on the fact that we can’t get a current clear picture of that because there is no minor league baseball.

We all know how we got here. Trades that helped the Royals win the World Series and the tragic loss of Yordano Ventura, yes, but many others too. Alex Gordon’s contract that was an obvious factor in neither Hosmer and Moustakus being here, dreadful drafting with high picks for near a decade, and one thing I haven’t heard talked about much at all, the fact that the Royals touted Latin pipeline seems to have dried up all of a sudden. Besides Mondesi, Melbrys Vilorio is the only young home-grown Latin player to come to the plate for the Royals this year, and obviously he wouldn’t have if not for the longstanding shining star in this category, Perez, was able to play. And pitching? The recent 6 1/3 innings from Carlos Hernandez is the sum and substance of it.

Clearly, creating some hope lies in the arms of the college pitchers the Royals have loaded up on in the past couple of years. Singer and Bubic are getting their feet wet this year, and even though they have ERA’s around five or over, they have showed enough encouraging poise and stuff. Behind them are Kowar and Lynch and Lacy and a couple others. The Royals do need an Indians-like run of starters to create a Tampa Bay style of squad (though they do it in a different way), that is built on their staff, although their anonymous offense is making noise this year, too.

2020 has sucked in so many ways for all of us, and unfortunately, the Royals have been no summertime elixir for our woes. That is in the capable hands of the Chiefs right now moving into the fall, as we appear to have unfortunately returned to a Kansas City sports tradition that euphemistically states that good baseball and good football can rarely co-exist. Sporting KC has injected a welcome option in the other kind of football for at least some.

Dayton Moore and his team gifted Kansas City with the unique to its sport small-market title, and after the subsequent crash, Moore noted that this time around he wanted to build something that could be more lasting, like the manly consistent success of Oakland and the aforementioned Rays.His track record deserves respect, but it‘s mighty hard right now to to view the landscape and not feel a lack of confidence that anything close to that is coming anytime soon. But it’s hard to view the landscape of a lot of things right now and feel that way.

Whether a full (please, please) season in 2021 with sunshine and fans (pretty please) brings more hope for the Royals as far as a winning product remains to be seen. But I will gladly take a first step with the other items, as in baseball, and life, we want 2020 to just flat go away.