By Brendan Ulmer
Ulmer Uncensored
Never let the baseball gods see you happy.
Don’t even let them see you hopeful.
Back in March, I wrote a column about how the Kansas City Royals will surprise some people.
Let’s just say, I’ve definitely been surprised. It’s a surprise similar to finding a finger in your cereal box.
Halfway through the season, the Royals are the fourth-worst team in the league. At the beginning of the season, many people were saying that the Royals would be competing for a division championship. I was one of those people, but I should have known better.
Why the Royals have floundered so badly this season is not very interesting: injuries and regression. What is a bit more interesting is the Royals’ storied history of being one of the worst professional baseball teams in the world.
The Royals were founded back in 1969, and are currently trudging through their 58th season. They have only had a winning season 20 times, 14 of which were before 1994, nearly 10 years before I was even born.
To love the Royals is to suffer.
You can’t get too invested in the quality of the team, so you learn to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of a Royals game. They sure do wear a beautiful shade of blue, the fountains are fun, and the hot dogs are pretty good.
A team this bad has to be diseased in some way. It’s easy to point to the awful, cheap ownership that ran the team into the ground in the early aughts, but that’s mostly because it is their fault.
After buying the team from Ewing Kauffman’s estate for $96 million in 2000, David Glass invested minimal, and I mean minimal, amounts of money in the team year over year.
Do you remember that big signing that the Royals made in 2010? Me neither, because he doesn’t exist. It was a never-ending cycle of developing homegrown talent, to eventually sell off without ever putting complementary pieces around them. All while crying poor to the media.
I get it, athletes are expensive, but these sports teams are a community investment. The owners seem to understand this perfectly fine when asking for tax dollars to build a new stadium, but not when they actually have to shell out cash for a quality team.
These teams are also the ultimate appreciating asset. The $96 million Glass spent in 2000 turned into $1 billion when he sold the team to a group of investors led by John Sherman in 2019.
Sherman has done a fantastic job investing in the team. It’s clear to me he actually feels some investment in their on-field success, and doesn’t just want to watch the value of his asset shoot through the roof. However, in this post-Moneyball world, teams basically have to spend a downright irresponsible amount of money to guarantee they’ll be competitive. Meanwhile, Royals fans, because they are so traumatized, don’t want to spend money buying tickets for a team they’re pretty sure will just let them down.
As a big baseball fan, the saddest part is that they’re wasting the talent of their star shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. Witt is one of the greatest players of this generation, and the clock is ticking on his contract.
He has an opt-out clause after the 2030 season that I fully expect him to exercise, especially if the team continues to perform like this in the next few seasons.
Oh well, I don’t care anymore anyway.
Did you hear that, baseball gods, I don’t care anymore, so you can stop making my favorite team so bad, cause I’m not paying attention.
Brendan Ulmer is a local writer. He can be reached at btu2703@gmail.com or at (913)787-4132.