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Diary of a Losing Team: Hope
Posted: July 31st, 2010 | Filed under: Baseball | 80 Comments »
Are Alex Gordon and the Royals finally ready to come out of the rain? Maybe so. (Jamie Squire/Getty)
Tomorrow, I will post an oppressively long story on an American sports legend. Today, a curiously long post on why I’m finally excited about the Royals again.
* * *
I suppose that Rick Ankiel led to my nadir and also to the biggest burst of optimism I’ve had for the Kansas City Royals in a long, long time. So I have him to thank for that. Funny that it would be Ankiel at the center of my latest straw-breaking-camel’s-back moment and also this newfound hope — yes, funny that it would be Ankiel, a player everyone knew was only brought to Kansas City for one of those cynical “You give me a job, I’ll give you a year,” arrangements. But so it goes. With bad baseball teams, you take the good feelings however you can get them.
First the low point … I have to say that from a fan’s perspective I have never disliked a hometown team quite as much as I have disliked this year’s Kansas City Royals. It’s not a personal thing … the players seem nice enough, as far as that goes. It’s not a professional thing either; I would guess after watching KC play game after game that this Royals team has played about as hard as most bad teams do. No harder. But no less hard either.
No, what has bothered me about this team is that there was not even the slightest inkling of hope here. None. Forget the lousy play — you get used to that after a while. The real issue was that these Royals were an old, spent, jaundiced team featuring veteran after veteran who would be gone as soon as possible (but not soon enough for either party). Where were the young players? Where was the energy? Where was 2012 in all this mess? Every night it was Jason Kendall and Rick Ankiel and Jose Guillen and Scott Podsednik and Willie Bloomquist and Bruce Chen and Kyle Farnsworth and Wilson Betemit, on and on … it was a veteran desert out there. This was a team with players who simply had no place else to go. And it was agonizing to watch, day after day, night after night, a slow, painful march to the October grave.
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