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May 15, 2007

Appreciating the Stros

The Stros are not off to the best of starts this season. But if you are having trouble appreciating the local ballclub, take a moment to read this annual early May column of Kansas City sportswriter Joe Posnanski declaring the end of the Kansas City Royals' season:

Well, sadly, yes, it’s time once again for the annual, “You’ve got to be kidding me, the baseball season is over already?” column. We wrote this column last year on May 5, so if there’s any consolation, at least this year’s version comes a week later.

You’re right. There’s no consolation.

We begin this installment by first offering a list of May Royals highlights over the last 10 years. Every Kansas City fan knows the Royals have been awful in April (.390 winning percentage in the last 10 years). What not everyone appreciates is they have been even worse in May (.384 winning percentage). This team has routinely dug a hole so deep in those first two months they actually play June games in China.

(Technically speaking — according to my sixth-grade science teacher — if you tried to dig a hole through the Earth, you would not end up in China. You would end up, well, technically speaking, you’d end up dead. So, let’s not speak technically.)

May 23, 1998: Royals lose their eighth game in a row — the lowlight of the streak being a three-game series sweep by the Cleveland Indians. In those three games, the Indians score 36 runs, the Royals score 10 — it is the worst stomping the Royals had ever endured in a three-game series. “Is it getting old, losing like this?” a reporter asks manager Tony Muser.

“It got old a long time ago,” Muser says.

May 11, 2000: The Royals are actually playing good baseball and need a win on this day to climb into a first-place tie. Instead, they lose a squeaker to Cleveland, 16-0. It’s the second-worst loss ever for the Royals. Cleveland’s Manny Ramirez hits two home runs — on one of them he broke his bat. The Royals — thanks in large part to a dreadful bullpen, finish with a losing record despite having the highest-scoring offense in team history.

May 4, 2001: The Royals lose their fourth in a row, sparking Tony Muser to make his famous philosophical statement about the team’s lack of toughness: “I’d like to see ’em go out and pound tequila rather than cookies and milk,” Muser said. It is the beginning of the end, and almost exactly one year later …

May 1, 2002: It is actually at midnight — so just as April turned to May — that Royals general manager Allard Baird informs Tony Muser that he is being fired. Unfortunately, Muser had already been informed of his demise by reporters who knew about it two hours earlier. “I wanted to do this the right way,” Baird would say later.

May 1, 2004: The Royals — in a move so stunning you would swear it was from a rejected “Major League” movie script — decide to start a minor-leaguer nobody had ever heard of named Eduardo Villacis at Yankee Stadium against the New York Yankees. Shortly after Villacis is ripped to shreds, manager Tony Peña guarantees the Royals will win the division even though they are, at the time, in last place. “We are going to be unstoppable,” Peña says. The Royals end up losing 100 games, of course, and almost exactly a year later …

May 10, 2005: Peña resigns after another loss, the Royals’ eighth in nine days. “It’s tough to go to the ballpark and lose game after game,” Peña would say.

May 25, 2006: The Royals lose their 13th straight. Royals general manager Allard Baird has essentially been fired — he knows it, everybody knows it — but owner David Glass will not pull the trigger. One player says, “This team is some kind of circus, isn’t it?”

So, there’s some May history for you. And now? Now the Royals are 11-26 — 13 games back — worst record in the American League. They’re hitting .244 as a team; they’ve also given up more hits than any team in the league. The Royals have been hit by more pitches than any team in the league, but they’ve hit opposing batters less than any team in the league. That tells a story right there.

The Royals lost Friday’s game when their young shortstop Tony Peña Jr. — a defensive whiz — let a double-play grounder go through his legs. They lost Thursday’s game when the pitching staff gave up a team record six homers to an Oakland A’s team that, up to that point, couldn’t hit at all. They scored one run on Tuesday. On Sunday they were losing 13-0 at one point, in large part because Zack Greinke gave up three two-run homers in the same inning. The day before that, the bullpen blew a lead.

And so on.

Read the entire column. And then say a word of thanks for the Stros, who have had only one losing record in the past 15 seasons and have gone to the playoffs in 6 of the last 10.

Posted by Tom at May 15, 2007 4:10 AM |

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