Baseball will never be as popular as Football. I do think that it will rival Basketball as the number two sport.

There is much more anticipation for an upcoming Football game mainly in my estimation because there are so few games. When you only get to see 16 games a year unless you make the play-offs every game is an event. In baseball if you miss a game, well there are 5 more this week. The same can be said about the NBA though on a lesser scale.

The only real accurate statement you can make is that you don't like baseball so it sucks to you. Many, many people love it.

I could say Van Halen sucks too. Doesn't mean it's true just because it might not be my kind of music. If that were the case I certainly wouldn't waste my time preaching it to a bunch of Van Halen fans. What is the point of that? Only to make waves.

Baseball isn't your kind of sport. That's fine. Some of us don't live in the same ADD world as you.

Well, much the way you've preached the Glory of Baseball in this thread, I've tried to preach the Evils of Baseball. You like baseball, I don't. Internet forums are all about the exchange of ideas.

If you are concerned about discussing baseball in a criticism-free environment, I might suggest you found a Royalsplanet.com website. Until then, I will continue to have less than pleasant things to say about the sport while reading and posting on this football forum.

For the record, I don't like the band Van Halen. It's a name I have been stuck with by cruel fate.

Nobody said you had to like it, but if a person in 1986 were to say "Van Halen sucks and nobody listens to them anymore. You see kids listening to Ratt and Poison, but never Van Halen", that would be a false statement based on their bias against Van Halen.

As for the football forum comment...
1. Only 6 of the first 25 most recent threads are football related, (including the two on sticky and the thread about Fatlock on Rome)
2. Of your last 25 posts, 8 were on baseball related threads.
3. I highly doubt that any webpage called RoyalsPlanet would be criticsm free.

This thread is like saying I use Yahoo search instead of Google, so Google must not be popular.

Baseball's doing just fine. I don't agree with everything Selig does, but attendance is up. There is probably more parity than there's been in 15 years... there's been 7 different champions the last seven years, teams like the Brewers and Tigers have come out of the doldrums. The Yankees aren't anything close to dominant, they haven't been in years. While in football the big story will be Pats vs. Colts for about the 7th or 8th straight year. Sometimes I feel like the people making these arguments are stuck in 1998.

So what your saying is: The Royals just suck...no small market excuses anymore? Ive been saying this for years.

They are improving, it takes time to get a contender going and i belive they ar headed the right direction.

Attendance isn't up -- the overall increased attendance is accounted for by increases in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The rest of the teams are mostly either stagnant or in decline. (You'll have to check a previous post in this thread for the source.)

Baseball is still broken. Without a real salary cap and real revenue sharing, the game will be broken. Smaller market teams can have a run, but will continue to be forced to get rid of their superstars when the big contracts come in.

Correct me if I'm wrong on the above...

I thought the same thing in 91, 94, 96, 97, 01, 02, 03 and 04, its the same old song and dance...

What are you talking about? Of course it's not an excuse. I don't think anyone here who actually follows the Royals has used that as an excuse in a long time. Now people who whine and complain about it all the time, like yourself, may do that... but everybody who actually follows the sport knows you can win on a smaller budget. The Indians are leading this entire division this year with a smaller payroll than the Royals. And pretty much everyone else. It's not rocket science anymore... which is why I think there is a lot more parity in baseball, the small market teams have put their focus into player development and it's paying dividends. Even teams like the Royals, Pirates, D-Rays, they don't seem like the vast wastelands that they once were. The Royals obviously have a pretty good young core of position players and are playing pretty good baseball right now. The Pirates have a nice set of young arms... and the D-Rays are loaded with young prospects.

You are correct. I was using anecdotal evidence to suggest that kids don't go out and play baseball spontaneously for fun anymore. I have lived in two major Midwestern cities in the past ten years and I can count on one finger the number of times I've seen kids playing what appeared to be a spontaneous game for fun. Another poster pointed out that it is a different story in Liberty, MO -- where the parks are teeming with children playing baseball every waking minute.

Little league is another story. It will always be a popular suburban rite of passage. I admittedly enjoy watching the local high school baseball and softball teams, as well. Perhaps that makes me a hypocrite, I don't know.

One of my frustrations with this website (and obviously one that I can tolerate), is the lack of actual football threads. I find the baseball-related threads and the accompanying optimism annoying (compared to the incessantly gloomy Chiefs posts). I'm not a frequent poster, although I read threads daily. Recently I've felt compelled to crap on the parade of Royals threads.

But what happens when the contracts are up on that pretty good young core?

Actually I think the luxury tax has helped. I actually really like the luxury tax... I think they should make it harsher. It probably helped the Royals be able to afford someone like Gil Meche. It's not the NFL but everything doesn't have to be like the NFL. There are drawbacks to the salary cap as well, you can't always afford to retain all of your players because of it. But there is a luxury tax in place, and as we've seen, the Royals are spending money, the Brewers spent money on Jeff Suppan.

I do not think the system is perfect. But it's not as bad as it used to be. Look at Oakland, they never complain, they just keep going out and winning, and they hardly ever re-sign anybody.

Why cant the Royals be like that then?? What would you do to fix this organization if you were the owner??

Well, I think the Royals are in a better position to pay some of these guys than they used to be. But no, you can't resign everyone. As Dayton has said, even in Atlanta they couldn't re-sign everyone. Look at Andruw Jones, they might not be able to re-sign him.

That's why you either A) spend money and raise ticket prices or B) keep your pipeline of young talent going. Look at Oakland... if you'd asked someone where they'd be without Hudson/Mulder/Zito a few years ago, people would say in the gutter. But look at them now, they're all gone, and Oakland has one of the best pitching staffs in the league. Because they keep looking for talent. The same thing happens in the NFL. Look at how we had LJ to replace Priest... and how people think we haven't developed enough offensive linemen to replace the ones we had. If you keep developing talent, you'll win, no matter what sport it is.