Posnanski: ....snaps - Page 3

tk13 · 05-05-2006, 01:48 AM

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...s/14504364.htm

At the end of their ropes
Even the eternally hopeful have a breaking point
JOE POSNANSKI
Kansas City Star

You never know what will make you snap. After all these years of horrendous Royals baseball, I never expected a nice Australian kid named Justin Huber to break me. But so it goes. Consider me broken. This is me snapping. The Royals are an embarrassment. A mess. A disaster. It’s time to blow up the whole thing and start new.

Of course, Huber is just the final straw. It is 10 full years of ghastly baseball that leads to this rant. Ten years, we’ve watched the Royals try out softball pitchers, get hit in the back with relay throws, fall off bases on pickoff attempts, jog toward dugouts while fly balls drop behind them, slash payroll, send out incorrect lineup cards, injure themselves in home-plate celebrations and sacrifice innocent young pitchers at Yankee Stadium.

All of that will get to you after a while.

Through it all, I’ve tried to hold out hope. Hey, it’s baseball. Ya gotta hope. Look at the Cincinnati Reds this year. Look at Detroit. In baseball, there should always be hope.

Then this Royals team came along. And you know what? There is no hope. They broke me. I am finishing a book these days, and so my mornings and afternoons have been spent in a writing fog. My evenings, though, have been reserved for the Royals. I have, for the first time as an adult, been able to watch baseball entirely as a fan, and usually with my oldest daughter on my lap. Elizabeth is 4 now, and she does not care at all about baseball, but she likes eating popsicles where she can make the biggest mess. To humor me, she will occasionally look at the Royals game, notice something similar to baseball happening, and ask, “Daddy, when will the commercials come back on?”

I appreciate the question. This Royals season has been awful. Every game has been torture. The commercial that shows termites attacking wood has been more inspiring.

Sure, it’s true the Royals have been awful almost every minute since the strike of 1994. But this team is a different kind of awful. This is the dreariest collection I can remember for any team in my lifetime. It isn’t just that the Royals can’t hit or field or slug or pitch or run or walk or throw or stay healthy — and that covers just about everything.

No, there’s something else. It is that as you look around the field, you see nothing but despair, nothing but castoffs who signed here for a chance or a few extra bucks, nothing but young players who go out and stubbornly prove every day they are not major league.

How did it get this bad? There’s plenty of blame to go around, from an owner who won’t spend money to a management group that never figured out how to win games to talent evaluators who recommended Eli Marrero and Albie Lopez, to aging veterans just cashing paychecks, to amateur scouts who championed Colt Griffin and Roscoe Crosby, to strength and conditioning people who can’t keep anybody healthy, to coaches who have not developed a single high-quality major-league starter or everyday player.

This team has been a crushing and colossal failure.

And we’ve hit the low point now. The Royals aren’t just bad, they’re old. Hitters two through six average 35 years of age. That’s pure hopelessness.

The Royals aren’t just bad, they’re funny. Last week, Esteban German — for reasons readily apparent to no one — was playing center field. He either forgot his sunglasses in the dugout or purposely left them there. Whatever, a fly ball smacked him in the face. I’m told German did wear his designer shades on the plane out of town that night.

The Royals aren’t just bad, they’re infuriating. John Buck — a key element in the Carlos Beltran trade — actually had a passed ball on a pitchout the other day. First time I’ve seen that one. And it reminds you that the Beltran trade, looking back, was the death knell for this organization. The Royals had one great player to trade, one of the best players in the game, and in exchange they got Buck, Mark Teahen and Mike Wood. A baseball executive e-mailed me that day to say the trade was a fiasco, a breathtakingly dumb move by general manager Allard Baird. I held out hope that the executive was wrong.

He wasn’t wrong. To this point, Buck and Teahen — the two key elements to the deal — are hitting a combined .190 with three times more errors than home runs.

Once the Royals failed to cash in on Beltran, the dominoes tumbled. They hired Buddy Bell, who had one of the worst managerial records in baseball history. They lost Zack Greinke, their best pitching prospect in a decade, to a personal issue that nobody, not even Greinke himself, seems to understand. They acquired a bunch of old pitchers. Before the Beltran trade, they signed Angel Berroa to a long-term deal, a move that at the time seemed like a decent gamble and now seems to have them stuck with a shortstop who has a knack for making disastrous errors and an addiction to pitches in the dirt.

It’s so dark now, you can’t even see bright spots.

That brings us back to Justin Huber. If you don’t know, Huber is a pretty solid Royals prospect. He should be the team’s first baseman of the future. He led the Texas League in hitting last season, he was hitting quite well in Omaha this season. The Royals wisely intended to keep him in Class AAA most of the season, maybe all season, so he could get experience playing first base and develop his power.

This week, the Royals called up Huber. Why? They concede he will not play first base — he’s not ready, and the Royals paid quite a bit of money to Doug Mientkiewicz to play there, and if you can believe it, Mientkiewicz leads the starters with a .322 on-base percentage (league average on-base percentage: .335).

The Royals also concede he will not be the regular designated hitter, not with 38-year-old Matt Stairs on the team.

So, they brought up Justin Huber, their first baseman of the future, to (drum roll, please) sit on the bench. I assume they could not think of any other way to slow his development. Maybe next week they will start whacking his toes with baseball bats.

I realize, of course, that we are talking about the Royals. This is the team that traded Jermaine Dye for Neifi Perez. This is the team that canceled the team banquet because it was too expensive. This is the team that has decided to give out T-shirts of its best players every Tuesday and has already run out of players, so next Tuesday they’re giving out T-shirts with condiments on them. This is the team that on Thursday tried to get out of its hitting doldrums by skipping batting practice. Next, they might stop wearing batting helmets.

So in the grand scheme of Royals catastrophes, this Huber move hardly ranks up there.

But you never know what it is that will make you snap. The Royals have utterly lost their way. There’s panic in the streets. They’re messing up prospects now. They’re skipping batting practice. It’s only a matter of time before they rush prize prospects Alex Gordon and Billy Butler, along with any other Royals hitter who gets two hits in a row. They’re going goofy.

And it’s clear that everything has to change. Everything. The leadership. The mind-set. The core players. Everything. The worst thing David Glass can do is let this thing linger, make Allard Baird a lame duck, let this organization drift for a minute longer. It’s bad for the club, and, frankly, it’s unfair to Baird, too. You can’t run a team like this. If you’re going to fire him — and you are — do it quick and do it now.

It’s time right now to find a GM who has been around winning. It’s time to pour money into scouting and development and the draft. It’s time to focus entirely on 2007 — this season is flat over. The only thing that matters now is getting some value for those veterans, making the right pick at No. 1 in the amateur draft, giving promising pitchers such as Jeremy Affeldt and Denny Bautista their innings and not squandering those good young hitters Baird and company were able to find.

The Royals finally won on the road Thursday, which was nice. But the Royals need to start on the long road back today.

Dr. Johnny Fever · 05-05-2006, 10:45 AM

Ewing Kauffman must be spinning in his grave.

Deberg_1990 · 05-05-2006, 10:45 AM

What concerns me the most is this: The team has been so awful for the past 10 years or so, that it has whittled the fan base down to almost nothing. Im curious how many Royals season ticket holders there are anymore?? The average attendence to a game is only like 10,000 or so?? Sooner or later Royals management will start holding that over the citys head saying that they arnt generating enough revenue due to low attendence. They will threaten to move to another city. Its a vicious circle because nobody wants to pay good money to go watch crappy baseball.

Eleazar · 05-05-2006, 10:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Deberg_1990

What concerns me the most is this. The team has been so awful for the past 10 years or so, that it has whittled the fan base down to almost nothing. Im curious how many Royals season ticket holders there are anymore?? The average attendence to a game is only like 10,000 or so?? Sooner or later Royals management will start holding that over the citys head saying that they arnt making enough revenue due to low attendence. They will threaten to move to another city. Its a vicious circle because nobody wants to go pay good money to go watch crappy baseball.

Uh, the team's lease just got extended for like 25 years.

chiefqueen · 05-05-2006, 11:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Deberg_1990

What concerns me the most is this: The team has been so awful for the past 10 years or so, that it has whittled the fan base down to almost nothing. Im curious how many Royals season ticket holders there are anymore?? The average attendence to a game is only like 10,000 or so?? Sooner or later Royals management will start holding that over the citys head saying that they arnt generating enough revenue due to low attendence. They will threaten to move to another city. Its a vicious circle because nobody wants to pay good money to go watch crappy baseball.

Is that the actual attendance or does it count unused sold and comp tickets.

**ChiTown** · 05-05-2006, 12:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cochise

What makes you think George Brett can run a draft? Because he played baseball?

Even GB knows that the only thing in baseball he was ever good at was hitting line drives and licking Jaime Quirk's pucker hole.............

tk13 · 05-05-2006, 12:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by KevB

Here's the problem about clearing the whole thing out today.....the draft is only about a month away. If you wipe the slate clean, who in the heck is going to make decisions on 40+ draft picks? If we clean out our player personnel and scouting department, who's going to decide who to draft in the 17th round? I can't imagine many scouts will be hired away from other organizations mid-season.

Having said that, our inability to find players through the draft is the source of this organization's downfall, so do you really want the current regime making the picks?

Now that depends. If you hire a "Moneyball" disciple, you don't need scouts. Just a stat geek with a computer.

That said, I personally think our drafts have gotten a lot better the last 3-4 years. Not great maybe but I think we've drafted better. Gordon, Butler was a great pick, Lubanski, Greinke, Maier, Howell, Bianchi, etc, etc. At least better than the disasters that came before it.

And more importantly, I'm worried about what's gonna happen to Donny Rowland. He's only been our director of player personnel for 1 draft. I think it would be a real shame to lose that guy... people talk about having good baseball people, that guy has a great record of success. He built the Angels farm system into one of the best, and before that was a scout with the Yankees when they were winning championships back in the 90's. This year would only be the 2nd draft he'd help be in charge of, not nearly enough time to evaluate how well he's done with us.

KevB · 05-05-2006, 01:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tk13

Now that depends. If you hire a "Moneyball" disciple, you don't need scouts. Just a stat geek with a computer.

That said, I personally think our drafts have gotten a lot better the last 3-4 years. Not great maybe but I think we've drafted better. Gordon, Butler was a great pick, Lubanski, Greinke, Maier, Howell, Bianchi, etc, etc. At least better than the disasters that came before it.

And more importantly, I'm worried about what's gonna happen to Donny Rowland. He's only been our director of player personnel for 1 draft. I think it would be a real shame to lose that guy... people talk about having good baseball people, that guy has a great record of success. He built the Angels farm system into one of the best, and before that was a scout with the Yankees when they were winning championships back in the 90's. This year would only be the 2nd draft he'd help be in charge of, not nearly enough time to evaluate how well he's done with us.

I agree with everything you've said, especially about Rowland. Having said that, the real improvement has come at the very top of the draft. We've done better identifying guys who look to at least contribute at a high organizational level, instead of swinging for the fences with potential. Every name you referenced above was at least a 2nd round pick. We have very rarely found anyone in the middle of the draft that come close to being major league players.

SCTrojan · 05-05-2006, 01:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bkkcoh

Randy Johnson has 1 less win than the Royals........ 5 weeks into the season, that is freakin' SAD

And Greg Maddux had matched their victory total going into last night.

Call me blind to the harsh reality that is the Royals organization today, but I keep rooting for them and get my heart ripped away piece by piece with each successive loss.

I was a season-ticket holder when I was there and would still be if I hadn't moved away.

They are like an old flame to me. No matter what has happened through the years, I still see them at the height of their beauty - 1975-1985.

**Reaper16** · 05-05-2006, 01:19 PM

Our drafts have gotten better under Baird. That's it. The Beltran trade failure is reason enough to fire the guy.

**alanm** · 05-05-2006, 01:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cochise

What makes you think George Brett can run a draft? Because he played baseball?

I'd wager Brett is a better talent evaluator than any of the stiffs their paying at the moment.

Deberg_1990 · 05-05-2006, 01:34 PM

and another thing.....Their problems are obviously alot deeper than him but why on earth did they hire Buddy Bell???? At least try and get a proven winning manager in here to try and turn things around.

kcfanXIII · 05-05-2006, 01:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chiefqueen

Is that the actual attendance or does it count unused sold and comp tickets.

i believe its the attendance. i go to games to watch baseball, not always the royals. i can't be a royals fan any longer. after hearing that glass made a bigger profit then any of the big market teams, i am officially a free agent. it disgusts me, that i stood up for this prick during the last round of CBA talks. i had big market fans telling me the luxury tax was a bad idea because there was no gurantee the owners were going to spend the money on the team, but i disagreed. i said there was no reason glass would not spend the money. the twenty million he made very well could have: a. kept carlos beltran here b. maybe sign a quality pitcher or two, and not elarton and mays c. been spent on position players who could hit. d. a good coaching staff that won't squander talent. if you don't sign mike sweeney, there's another 10 million a year. i'm going to laugh when the all star game comes around, and they don't even let one guy from kc play. none deserve to. also i, like JoPa, have been eternally optomistic through the past five years or so, but have reached the end of my rope. until they start winning, they are dead to me.

Eleazar · 05-05-2006, 01:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kcfanXIII

glass made a bigger profit then any of the big market teams

FringeNC · 05-05-2006, 01:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tk13

Now that depends. If you hire a "Moneyball" disciple, you don't need scouts. Just a stat geek with a computer.

If the draft consisted of drafting other teams' minor league talent, you'd be correct, but where does the data come from for the amateur draft? No one trusts high school data because of the differences in talent-level. Moneyball guys do tend to stress in the books college performance over "tools" propspects (kinda like Bill Belichick does in football, and even the Chiefs' recent draft), but to say Moneyball guys don't scout is ludicrous.

If only the Royals could get one of Billy Beane's young hotshots...

The sad thing is Baird is substantially better than Herk Robinson, but still terrible.

**DaneMcCloud** · 05-05-2006, 01:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cochise

That's why my "sources" tell me that there will definitely be a Salary Floor in the next CBA. It's not fair to the Red Sox, Yankees, Mets and all the other teams to pay huge Luxury Tax that fund the Royals when the Royals turn around and have a 30 Million dolllar payroll and 20 million in profit. As I've said before, the rest of MLB is tired of subsidizing the Royal.

I predict that Glass will sell the team after the next CBA is ratified.

05-05-2006, 01:48 AM
tk13 ... Join Date: Nov 2001 Casino cash: $1512500	Posnanski: ....snaps http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...s/14504364.htm At the end of their ropes Even the eternally hopeful have a breaking point JOE POSNANSKI Kansas City Star You never know what will make you snap. After all these years of horrendous Royals baseball, I never expected a nice Australian kid named Justin Huber to break me. But so it goes. Consider me broken. This is me snapping. The Royals are an embarrassment. A mess. A disaster. It’s time to blow up the whole thing and start new. Of course, Huber is just the final straw. It is 10 full years of ghastly baseball that leads to this rant. Ten years, we’ve watched the Royals try out softball pitchers, get hit in the back with relay throws, fall off bases on pickoff attempts, jog toward dugouts while fly balls drop behind them, slash payroll, send out incorrect lineup cards, injure themselves in home-plate celebrations and sacrifice innocent young pitchers at Yankee Stadium. All of that will get to you after a while. Through it all, I’ve tried to hold out hope. Hey, it’s baseball. Ya gotta hope. Look at the Cincinnati Reds this year. Look at Detroit. In baseball, there should always be hope. Then this Royals team came along. And you know what? There is no hope. They broke me. I am finishing a book these days, and so my mornings and afternoons have been spent in a writing fog. My evenings, though, have been reserved for the Royals. I have, for the first time as an adult, been able to watch baseball entirely as a fan, and usually with my oldest daughter on my lap. Elizabeth is 4 now, and she does not care at all about baseball, but she likes eating popsicles where she can make the biggest mess. To humor me, she will occasionally look at the Royals game, notice something similar to baseball happening, and ask, “Daddy, when will the commercials come back on?” I appreciate the question. This Royals season has been awful. Every game has been torture. The commercial that shows termites attacking wood has been more inspiring. Sure, it’s true the Royals have been awful almost every minute since the strike of 1994. But this team is a different kind of awful. This is the dreariest collection I can remember for any team in my lifetime. It isn’t just that the Royals can’t hit or field or slug or pitch or run or walk or throw or stay healthy — and that covers just about everything. No, there’s something else. It is that as you look around the field, you see nothing but despair, nothing but castoffs who signed here for a chance or a few extra bucks, nothing but young players who go out and stubbornly prove every day they are not major league. How did it get this bad? There’s plenty of blame to go around, from an owner who won’t spend money to a management group that never figured out how to win games to talent evaluators who recommended Eli Marrero and Albie Lopez, to aging veterans just cashing paychecks, to amateur scouts who championed Colt Griffin and Roscoe Crosby, to strength and conditioning people who can’t keep anybody healthy, to coaches who have not developed a single high-quality major-league starter or everyday player. This team has been a crushing and colossal failure. And we’ve hit the low point now. The Royals aren’t just bad, they’re old. Hitters two through six average 35 years of age. That’s pure hopelessness. The Royals aren’t just bad, they’re funny. Last week, Esteban German — for reasons readily apparent to no one — was playing center field. He either forgot his sunglasses in the dugout or purposely left them there. Whatever, a fly ball smacked him in the face. I’m told German did wear his designer shades on the plane out of town that night. The Royals aren’t just bad, they’re infuriating. John Buck — a key element in the Carlos Beltran trade — actually had a passed ball on a pitchout the other day. First time I’ve seen that one. And it reminds you that the Beltran trade, looking back, was the death knell for this organization. The Royals had one great player to trade, one of the best players in the game, and in exchange they got Buck, Mark Teahen and Mike Wood. A baseball executive e-mailed me that day to say the trade was a fiasco, a breathtakingly dumb move by general manager Allard Baird. I held out hope that the executive was wrong. He wasn’t wrong. To this point, Buck and Teahen — the two key elements to the deal — are hitting a combined .190 with three times more errors than home runs. Once the Royals failed to cash in on Beltran, the dominoes tumbled. They hired Buddy Bell, who had one of the worst managerial records in baseball history. They lost Zack Greinke, their best pitching prospect in a decade, to a personal issue that nobody, not even Greinke himself, seems to understand. They acquired a bunch of old pitchers. Before the Beltran trade, they signed Angel Berroa to a long-term deal, a move that at the time seemed like a decent gamble and now seems to have them stuck with a shortstop who has a knack for making disastrous errors and an addiction to pitches in the dirt. It’s so dark now, you can’t even see bright spots. That brings us back to Justin Huber. If you don’t know, Huber is a pretty solid Royals prospect. He should be the team’s first baseman of the future. He led the Texas League in hitting last season, he was hitting quite well in Omaha this season. The Royals wisely intended to keep him in Class AAA most of the season, maybe all season, so he could get experience playing first base and develop his power. This week, the Royals called up Huber. Why? They concede he will not play first base — he’s not ready, and the Royals paid quite a bit of money to Doug Mientkiewicz to play there, and if you can believe it, Mientkiewicz leads the starters with a .322 on-base percentage (league average on-base percentage: .335). The Royals also concede he will not be the regular designated hitter, not with 38-year-old Matt Stairs on the team. So, they brought up Justin Huber, their first baseman of the future, to (drum roll, please) sit on the bench. I assume they could not think of any other way to slow his development. Maybe next week they will start whacking his toes with baseball bats. I realize, of course, that we are talking about the Royals. This is the team that traded Jermaine Dye for Neifi Perez. This is the team that canceled the team banquet because it was too expensive. This is the team that has decided to give out T-shirts of its best players every Tuesday and has already run out of players, so next Tuesday they’re giving out T-shirts with condiments on them. This is the team that on Thursday tried to get out of its hitting doldrums by skipping batting practice. Next, they might stop wearing batting helmets. So in the grand scheme of Royals catastrophes, this Huber move hardly ranks up there. But you never know what it is that will make you snap. The Royals have utterly lost their way. There’s panic in the streets. They’re messing up prospects now. They’re skipping batting practice. It’s only a matter of time before they rush prize prospects Alex Gordon and Billy Butler, along with any other Royals hitter who gets two hits in a row. They’re going goofy. And it’s clear that everything has to change. Everything. The leadership. The mind-set. The core players. Everything. The worst thing David Glass can do is let this thing linger, make Allard Baird a lame duck, let this organization drift for a minute longer. It’s bad for the club, and, frankly, it’s unfair to Baird, too. You can’t run a team like this. If you’re going to fire him — and you are — do it quick and do it now. It’s time right now to find a GM who has been around winning. It’s time to pour money into scouting and development and the draft. It’s time to focus entirely on 2007 — this season is flat over. The only thing that matters now is getting some value for those veterans, making the right pick at No. 1 in the amateur draft, giving promising pitchers such as Jeremy Affeldt and Denny Bautista their innings and not squandering those good young hitters Baird and company were able to find. The Royals finally won on the road Thursday, which was nice. But the Royals need to start on the long road back today.
Posts: 55,050

05-05-2006, 10:45 AM	#31
Dr. Johnny Fever stax of wax Join Date: Feb 2004 Casino cash: $10004900	Ewing Kauffman must be spinning in his grave. __________________ courtesy of BoneKrusher "Baseball? It's just a game. As simple as a ball and bat, yet as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes. It's a sport, a business and sometimes a religion." Ernie Harwell
Posts: 34,865

05-05-2006, 10:45 AM	#32
Deberg_1990 In Search of a Life Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: San Antonio Tx. Casino cash: $3524454	What concerns me the most is this: The team has been so awful for the past 10 years or so, that it has whittled the fan base down to almost nothing. Im curious how many Royals season ticket holders there are anymore?? The average attendence to a game is only like 10,000 or so?? Sooner or later Royals management will start holding that over the citys head saying that they arnt generating enough revenue due to low attendence. They will threaten to move to another city. Its a vicious circle because nobody wants to pay good money to go watch crappy baseball. __________________ Originally Posted by Cassel's Reckoning: Matt once made a very nice play in Seattle where he spun away from a pass rusher and hit Bowe off his back foot for a first down. One of the best plays Matt has ever made.
Posts: 66,914

05-05-2006, 01:34 PM	#41
Deberg_1990 In Search of a Life Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: San Antonio Tx. Casino cash: $3524454	and another thing.....Their problems are obviously alot deeper than him but why on earth did they hire Buddy Bell???? At least try and get a proven winning manager in here to try and turn things around. __________________ Originally Posted by Cassel's Reckoning: Matt once made a very nice play in Seattle where he spun away from a pass rusher and hit Bowe off his back foot for a first down. One of the best plays Matt has ever made.
Posts: 66,914