Posnanski: ....snaps

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.

**Rausch** · 05-05-2006, 02:05 AM

Good GAWD I wish JoPo would give up on baseball already...

DenverChief · 05-05-2006, 02:10 AM

Deberg_1990 · 05-05-2006, 02:15 AM

Nice read.....Im glad JoPo finally woke the **** Up. Ive been saying the exact same things he said in this article for at least the past 5-7 years.

Spicy McHaggis · 05-05-2006, 02:48 AM

If anyone else had written this article, anyone, I think I would have had a "No shit, Sherlock" attitude. With JoPo though, this game is his passion and the Royals are his team. No matter how terrible things got Posnanski would be there to say it's not that bad. He's given up the ship now.

I feel like today was the day the music died.

kc1977 · 05-05-2006, 05:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Spicy McHaggis

If anyone else had written this article, anyone, I think I would have had a "No shit, Sherlock" attitude. With JoPo though, this game is his passion and the Royals are his team. No matter how terrible things got Posnanski would be there to say it's not that bad. He's given up the ship now.

I feel like today was the day the music died.

Seriously though, aren't the Indians his team?

kcfanXIII · 05-05-2006, 03:15 AM

"say bye bye to johnny damon and dye,
sent beltran down to h-town and got shit in return.
just a F*** named buck, and a mark that makes you cry.
why can't you just catch a pop fly?
why can't you just catch a pop fly?.."

(to american pie, feel free to continue.)

chiefqueen · 05-05-2006, 08:01 AM

I'm thinking if the Royals don't take at least 2 out of 3 from the ChiSox, Baird better hire packers Sun. night to pack his stuff.

Monday could be interesting............

SCTrojan · 05-05-2006, 08:15 AM

They won last night. I'm not giving up the ship.

bkkcoh · 05-05-2006, 08:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SCTrojan

They won last night. I'm not giving up the ship.

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

**Bowser** · 05-05-2006, 08:59 AM

Pretty much dead on.

The only reason I can think of to bring Huber up is that Sweeney is done for good. Forever and ever.

I haven't been to a game this year. What has the fan reaction to this team been?

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.

Eleazar · 05-05-2006, 08:54 AM

I think this year I have more of a depressed feeling about the team than I have before. For some of the reasons that this column points out, that have little to do with baseball. Like how they are slinging t-shirts and promotions at seemingly every third game, and the ketchup/mustard/relish shirts.

I mean, the team is bad. Small market teams are going to be bad most of the time in baseball. I understand why they are bad, but it's one thing to be bad, quite another to make the team just look silly. The marketing department needs to be cleared out, for sure.

I don't think Baird is going to be occupying that office much longer. But if you are going to make a change in-season, why wait and see how the next week or so goes? Is one week of baseball enough to restore hope in a regime that after 5+ years hasn't put anything together? I don't understand that.

KevB · 05-05-2006, 08:59 AM

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?

Eleazar · 05-05-2006, 09:08 AM

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?

Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. You're not going to replace those people right before the draft. To me it doesn't make sense to make a change in midseason, but especially not before the draft. That would just be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

05-05-2006, 01:48 AM	Topic Starter
tk13 ... Join Date: Nov 2001 Casino cash: $2002500	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.
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05-05-2006, 02:10 AM	#3
DenverChief MVP Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Rocky Ford Casino cash: $5969867
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05-05-2006, 02:15 AM	#4
Deberg_1990 In Search of a Life Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: San Antonio Tx. Casino cash: $3914454	Nice read.....Im glad JoPo finally woke the **** Up. Ive been saying the exact same things he said in this article for at least the past 5-7 years. __________________ 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.
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05-05-2006, 02:48 AM	#5
Spicy McHaggis Keep 'er Movin' Join Date: Sep 2004 Casino cash: $9905359	If anyone else had written this article, anyone, I think I would have had a "No shit, Sherlock" attitude. With JoPo though, this game is his passion and the Royals are his team. No matter how terrible things got Posnanski would be there to say it's not that bad. He's given up the ship now. I feel like today was the day the music died. __________________ “We want players who are big, strong, smart, fast, tough and disciplined,” Pioli said, finally bringing an end to the era of Chiefs executives who searched desperately for players who are small, weak, stupid, slow, fragile and unruly.
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05-05-2006, 03:15 AM	#7
kcfanXIII Ride on! Join Date: Oct 2005 Location: Galaxy far far away Casino cash: $10013172	"say bye bye to johnny damon and dye, sent beltran down to h-town and got shit in return. just a F*** named buck, and a mark that makes you cry. why can't you just catch a pop fly? why can't you just catch a pop fly?.." (to american pie, feel free to continue.) __________________ Faster, faster, until the thrill of speed, overcomes the fear of death.
Posts: 5,470

05-05-2006, 08:01 AM	#8
chiefqueen On my throne Join Date: Aug 2000 Location: Kansas City, MO Casino cash: $8192060	I'm thinking if the Royals don't take at least 2 out of 3 from the ChiSox, Baird better hire packers Sun. night to pack his stuff. Monday could be interesting............
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05-05-2006, 08:15 AM	#9
SCTrojan Veteran Join Date: Nov 2003 Location: Across the park Casino cash: $6219719	They won last night. I'm not giving up the ship.
Posts: 2,193

05-05-2006, 08:59 AM	#11
Bowser sorta mod-ish Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: KC North Casino cash: $3461616	Pretty much dead on. The only reason I can think of to bring Huber up is that Sweeney is done for good. Forever and ever. I haven't been to a game this year. What has the fan reaction to this team been?
Posts: 100,585

05-05-2006, 08:54 AM	#13
Eleazar Beyond the Rapids Join Date: May 2003 Location: Langley, VA Casino cash: $-370000	I think this year I have more of a depressed feeling about the team than I have before. For some of the reasons that this column points out, that have little to do with baseball. Like how they are slinging t-shirts and promotions at seemingly every third game, and the ketchup/mustard/relish shirts. I mean, the team is bad. Small market teams are going to be bad most of the time in baseball. I understand why they are bad, but it's one thing to be bad, quite another to make the team just look silly. The marketing department needs to be cleared out, for sure. I don't think Baird is going to be occupying that office much longer. But if you are going to make a change in-season, why wait and see how the next week or so goes? Is one week of baseball enough to restore hope in a regime that after 5+ years hasn't put anything together? I don't understand that.
Posts: 80,659

05-05-2006, 08:59 AM	#14
KevB Agree to Disagree Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: The State of Euphoria Casino cash: $10026612	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?
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