Posnanski: ....snaps - Page 5

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.

OmahaChief · 05-05-2006, 05:25 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?

Could we really do much worse? The Royals talent evaluators have missed so much in the last 5 years that it makes me sick. The team is a joke and will continue to be one until we get new ownership. That hurts to say as they are the only baseball team I watch but sadly it is true.

**DaneMcCloud** · 05-05-2006, 05:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tk13

There's nothing the Marlins can do. Don't forget, the first time they won a title, they did exactly what some Royal fans would want Glass to do... he went out and spent huge dollars in the FA market, put a World Series champ on the field, and still lost $30 million dollars due to poor attendance. That's when Wayne Huizenga wanted out and sold the team... that's not his fault, he's a pretty successful businessman, owns the Dolphins, etc... and he put his money where his mouth was, and it didn't work.

Oakland's a bad example too, look at how the Raiders never sell out.

I understand your point about the Marlins, which is right in line with mine. Just because the fans don't care in Miami doesn't make it a "small market". Loria couldn't get funding for a new stadium so he dumped salary and is looking to move the team. It appears that no one in Florida will care if they move, either.

The Raiders and A's have no direct correlation. Al Davis received hundreds of millions of dollars from the city of Oakland, along with a remodeled stadium. If they don't sell out, it's not the fans but the Raider's fault. Oakland and the East Bay have millions and millions of people there to build a fan base. It's just not the same as Kansas City.

Quote:

Originally Posted by tk13

I don't expect David Glass to lose money owning the team. I think that's an unrealistic goal, and up until last year he had not turned any huge profits on this team... and that kinda backs up Fringe's point. He makes some money trying to develop players, then gets pressured by the other owners, and he goes out and signs a bunch of older players to make it look like he's spending the money which kind of throws a wrench in things. If you don't like "subsidizing" the Royals, don't go over the luxury tax. That's the whole freakin idea behind it! Genius. I don't think David Glass is the smartest baseball guy but I don't think he's a bad businessman and I do think he has the best interest for parity in baseball as a whole in mind. I'm all for a salary floor, as long as we put in a reasonable salary cap. Can't have it both ways. And that's all he's pushed for all along.

When Steinbrenner makes $300 million a year on the Yankees, he can afford the luxury tax. But why should he have to pay to keep the Royals in business? The Royals don't bring people to the ballpark and they don't put money in his pocket. HE PUTS MONEY IN THEIR POCKET. The Salary Floor will exist so that a team like the Royals don't just get money to exist and make a profit for themselves. It's not fair to the other owners, the majority of whom do not have financial issues.

MLB will never be like the NFL in regards to a hard cap. The "Old Guard" is too well established and make far too much money. David Glass needs to sell the team or step it up. He needs to be spending $75 million a year to field a good team that competes for a playoff spot every year. If he does that, there will be a ton of money in TV & Broadcast rights, along with Merchandising and attendance. And he'll still get money from the Luxury Tax!

If he doesn't make serious changes financially or sell the team, I'm afraid they'll be out of existence. It would be much cheaper for MLB to pay off the Jackson County Sports Authority than it would be to continue to subsidise the Royals for 25 years.

tk13 · 05-05-2006, 05:57 PM

Apparently Aaron Guiel's been called up, he's starting tonight, and Mark Teahen's been sent down. Joe Mays has apparently lost his rotation spot. According to someone on kcroyals.com they said they were listening to the pregame show and Baird was apparently not very happy about these moves... the Glasses or Bell probably had a say in them.

**DaneMcCloud** · 05-05-2006, 06:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ENDelt260

There's not a ton of money in broadcast rights for the Royals to be had.

Of course there's not at this time. But don't you think that if the Royals were successful, year in - year out (and I mean Playoffs every years and WS successful) that the market would increase? Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Oklahoma, eastern Colorado, etc.? And as the demand is raised, rights fees would be raised as well.

I hate to say it but St. Louis doesn't have the problems the Royals have and that town's not much bigger. It's all about the product on the field. Glass is just sitting around, hoping to get a bigger piece of the pie instead of making sure he puts a winning, marketable product on the field.

The Braves used to be horrible, too. The cry of "were a small market" isn't working and won't beyone the next CBA.

tk13 · 05-05-2006, 06:12 PM

St. Louis? St. Louis metro is like 3.5 million people. Kansas City is 1.6 million, it's not even close. Plus they've just been around three times as long and have had KMOX all those years broadcasting out all over the middle part of the country when the games weren't on TV. That's a rough comparison.

**Reaper16** · 05-05-2006, 06:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tk13

Apparently Aaron Guiel's been called up, he's starting tonight, and Mark Teahen's been sent down. Joe Mays has apparently lost his rotation spot. According to someone on kcroyals.com they said they were listening to the pregame show and Baird was apparently not very happy about these moves... the Glasses or Bell probably had a say in them.

Beat j00

Demonpenz · 05-05-2006, 06:40 PM

man sit stairs lets get some of young players time if we are going to bring them up

Demonpenz · 05-05-2006, 06:41 PM

Man I should give two shits about the royals. They are my team and i somehow still never give up hope

**Reaper16** · 05-05-2006, 07:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Demonpenz

Man I should give two shits about the royals. They are my team and i somehow still never give up hope

I hear ya'.

**DaneMcCloud** · 05-05-2006, 07:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tk13

St. Louis? St. Louis metro is like 3.5 million people. Kansas City is 1.6 million, it's not even close. Plus they've just been around three times as long and have had KMOX all those years broadcasting out all over the middle part of the country when the games weren't on TV. That's a rough comparison.

The population of the St. Louis metro area in 2004 was 2.5 million. Do you really think that 900,00 people or so make THAT big of a difference? All of those people aren't going the ballpark. It just comes back to Poor Team, Poor Front Office, Unwillingness to spend the Big Buck$ in the majors and, rightly so, fan apathy.

Phoenix has 1.5 million people and they aren't whining about being a small market. And they've got NHL & NBA to contend with.

tk13 · 05-05-2006, 07:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DaneMcCloud

The population of the St. Louis metro area in 2004 was 2.5 million. Do you really think that 900,00 people or so make THAT big of a difference? All of those people aren't going the ballpark. It just comes back to Poor Team, Poor Front Office, Unwillingness to spend the Big Buck$ in the majors and, rightly so, fan apathy.

Phoenix has 1.5 million people and they aren't whining about being a small market. And they've got NHL & NBA to contend with.

Yeah, but it's more than that. How many kids around here grew up listening to KMOX... Jack Buck, etc... and following the team since Musial, Gibson, Brock, etc... they've just been around for 100 years. I would agree that probably has more to do with it than pure population.

Personally, I think if Glass spent 75 million on payroll he'd lose about 20 million dollars a year, but we could see I guess. I remember going to the games when I was a kid and George Brett and all those guys were there and it was still a winning team, they still only drew like 25,000 a night. Go look it up, George Brett's final season we had a winning record and still finished 13th out of 14 AL teams in attendance.

**DaneMcCloud** · 05-05-2006, 09:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tk13

Yeah, but it's more than that. How many kids around here grew up listening to KMOX... Jack Buck, etc... and following the team since Musial, Gibson, Brock, etc... they've just been around for 100 years. I would agree that probably has more to do with it than pure population.

Personally, I think if Glass spent 75 million on payroll he'd lose about 20 million dollars a year, but we could see I guess. I remember going to the games when I was a kid and George Brett and all those guys were there and it was still a winning team, they still only drew like 25,000 a night. Go look it up, George Brett's final season we had a winning record and still finished 13th out of 14 AL teams in attendance.

So basically what you're saying is that Kansas City, while having over 1.6 million residents, can't put 10,000 people a night in the stands and in their heyday, they were 13th out of 14th in attendance. For the owner to compete at a modest payroll of $75 milion, he would lose at least 20 million. In addition, because there is no tradition, the Royals won't ever be able to get valuable television and radio rights because there aren't enough people to support the team because they haven't been around long enough. Add to that, they have horrific front office people.

So having said all of that, please explain to me why the Mets, Yankees, Dodgers, Red Sox, et al should continue to fund this team?

Halfcan · 05-05-2006, 09:23 PM

Nice article-pretty much sums up what I think of David Glass and the Bumbling Royals.

Eleazar · 05-05-2006, 09:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DaneMcCloud

So having said all of that, please explain to me why the Mets, Yankees, Dodgers, Red Sox, et al should continue to fund this team?

Because if they don't kick down some change out of their ashtray for the small market teams, you will have just listed all of the teams in major league baseball.

**DaneMcCloud** · 05-05-2006, 10:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cochise

Because if they don't kick down some change out of their ashtray for the small market teams, you will have just listed all of the teams in major league baseball.

So you honestly think that the Yankees, Red Sox, Cubs, White Sox, Dodgers, Angels, etc. need the Royals to stay in business? Do you really think the game would suffer if KC no longer had a team? It's very obvious that the KC metro area doesn't love baseball, just by looking at attendence.

More than 20 MLB teams don't need or qualify for any money from the luxury tax. The Royals, Twins, Rays & Pirates are the biggest drain of the luxury tax. Remove those teams and the luxury tax disappears.

And since the Royals are small market, do you really think anyone would care?

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, 05:57 PM	#63
tk13 ... Join Date: Nov 2001 Casino cash: $1512500	Apparently Aaron Guiel's been called up, he's starting tonight, and Mark Teahen's been sent down. Joe Mays has apparently lost his rotation spot. According to someone on kcroyals.com they said they were listening to the pregame show and Baird was apparently not very happy about these moves... the Glasses or Bell probably had a say in them.
Posts: 55,050

05-05-2006, 06:12 PM	#65
tk13 ... Join Date: Nov 2001 Casino cash: $1512500	St. Louis? St. Louis metro is like 3.5 million people. Kansas City is 1.6 million, it's not even close. Plus they've just been around three times as long and have had KMOX all those years broadcasting out all over the middle part of the country when the games weren't on TV. That's a rough comparison.
Posts: 55,050

05-05-2006, 06:40 PM	#67
Demonpenz Woman should only make babies Join Date: Nov 2003 Location: Apartment "G UNIT!" Casino cash: $2742136	man sit stairs lets get some of young players time if we are going to bring them up __________________
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05-05-2006, 06:41 PM	#68
Demonpenz Woman should only make babies Join Date: Nov 2003 Location: Apartment "G UNIT!" Casino cash: $2742136	Man I should give two shits about the royals. They are my team and i somehow still never give up hope __________________
Posts: 54,336

05-05-2006, 09:23 PM	#73
Halfcan In Search of a Life Join Date: Aug 2005 Casino cash: $7327995	Nice article-pretty much sums up what I think of David Glass and the Bumbling Royals.
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