Spewing More Royals Invectives

Even the best part of being a baseball fan is getting ruined.

The truly great thing about following a baseball team is that on any given day your team can win a game. This means that even the lowly Royals can beat the vaunted Yankees or Red Sox or White Sox once in a series. Shoot, the Royals swept three games from the Yankees at home last year. That obviously has nothing to do with the actual skill level of either team; it just means that over the course of a 162-game season, even the losers have to win sometimes.

So, for a guy like me who continues to masochistically follow the Royals, every game is a clean slate. I can derive some amount of pleasure knowing that occasionally my guys will win a game. Sure, it won't happen often, but there is an inherent chance at the beginning of each fresh game.

That's why this season is already killing me.

It seems like time after time, whenever I tune into a game, the Royals are behind. Quickly. Like, in the first inning. So I decided to look it up and see if this was true. In the Royals 12 games this year, they have allowed their opponents to score first 10 times. The two times the Royals scored first? They ended up losing. They actually came from behind (somewhat miraculously) to win their only two games this year. In so doing, they've allowed the most runs in the American League. Oh, yeah; they've also scored the fewest runs in the American League, which means that's the chances of them staging some sort of comeback from an initial deficit are generally fairly poor.

And that's what stinks. These guys are so bad that my fresh slate looks like a teacher's chalkboard after a misbehaving child has done his after school penance. I usually don't even get the benefit of blind hope for more than one inning. The Royals have allowed themselves to get behind in the first inning six times.

So what do I have to hang on to with this team?

That's a question I continue to ask myself. And I haven't come up with a compelling answer yet.