Deadspin's Royals Preview: "Lefty or righty? Lefty or righty motherf***er!"

[Ultra Peanut]

http://deadspin.com/sports/baseball/...als-241517.php

This is not a preview of a baseball team. This is a cry for help.

Please, don't give me your pity. Better to give me your scorn. That's what I need. Give me a sound box on the head. A boot to the gut. Lord knows, I deserve it.

Yeah, I'm a fan of the Kansas City Royals. I can't help it. I was freaking born into this. If I could change it, I would.

I used to be proud of the Royals and all that. I even loved the powder blues. Now, I'm like a kind of junkie, I suppose, long after the buzz has worn off. And not a pretty junky like Jared Leto in "Requiem for a Dream." More like a methhead from the Missouri backwoods, with sunken eyes and black, rotting teeth.

I should have quit the Royals a long time ago, but that's just not the way sports fandom works in my universe. When the Yankees or the Red Sox are in town and I see all the hollow little people trot in from their SUV bandwagons in the parking lot, wearing their little Yankee caps and Red Sox caps, sputtering their suburbababble, I want to turn into Janeane Garofalo.

That's not to say that there aren't legitimate reasons to abandon the Royals. After all, they are owned by a man who ran Wal-Mart, the most nefarious creation ever unleashed on small-town America. But, no, you won't see me jumping on the Yankees bandwagon any time soon. Nor the Cardinals, the defending World Series champs and the baseball solace that other, less reputable, members of my family have sought. (Family members last seen in a post-championship group-grope of Stan Musial's statue.)

This incessant losing wears on you, it really does. It gnaws at your self esteem. It seeps into your subconscious. I dream about this stuff and that's no joke. I wish it was.

To wit: I keep an old manual typewriter in a spare room of my house, a 70-odd-year-old Underwood that weighs about 300 pounds. I don't use it that often, but sometimes I just like to listen to the clickety-clack and enjoy the feeling of being unplugged. One of the things I use it for is, in the morning, to type out any interesting (or troubling) dreams that I might have experienced during the night.

Here's one of those dreams, copied just as I typed it on the morning of Dec. 21, 2006. Some of it doesn't make much sense and, yes, sometimes I narrate my dreams while they're going on. I'm sure there is a good reason for that...