A Royal Day

Today is the first day of our mini-vacation for Memorial Day weekend. We came to Kansas City, decided that the risk of the weather was worth it, and got tickets for the family to see the Royals today.  We spent more money here for food than the tickets had cost on the secondary market, but one rule of bringing kids to a baseball game is feed them whatever they want.  Baseball for kids is boring...I walked around much of the upper deck with my son because God bless him, he tried, but just didn't really care that much and said that his bony rear end was hurting from the uncomfortable seats.  My daughter pays more attention to the people around her, and does more to try and enjoy the game, but tomorrow night's soccer game will be much more enjoyable for them than seeing a baseball game. 

The Royals lost, of course, 7-3.  They really are not very good at all.  Their starting pitching is getting lit up, they have several guys who are regularly in the lineup who probably could not hit me if I was pitching, and their good young talent is still really young in a game in which experience counts as much as any sport.   So it's gonna be a long year. 

But I still enjoy going.  I will always have a special place in my heart for baseball, though I have been influenced by our culture that wants everything to happen a lot more quickly.  And the Royals will always continue to be my favorite team, even though it's like that they have another 26 years before they win the Series again (or even make the playoffs).  You gotta stay loyal to your team, not be like these little turds who throw on their Yankees gear because they liked that the Yankees won back in the 90s. 

The Royals are losing again tonight.  They will be lucky to avoid 100 wins again, but maybe they will get some new leadership and these young players will get experience. 

My Baseball Post for 2019.

So...the Royals suck again.  A bit over a month into the season, they are now at 11-20, and that's with Alex Gordon having a late-career resurgence, Alberto Mondesi being the next big thing, and Hunter Dozier having one of the best OPSs in baseball.  Even the starting pitching has not been terrible, as they've put together a number of quality starts, and Ian Kennedy looking like his transition to the bullpen was a great idea. 

Yet they still suck, and this has been against mostly bad teams.  And people aren't coming out to watch...yesterday they had a doubleheader against the the Rays in which something like 500 people showed up (announced attendance, 11K). 

I guess this is the karmic price for the Royals winning the World Series in 2019...once in a generation we do something amazing, but most of the rest of the time we are consigned to misery.  Is this a good thing?  I suppose it's better to be the best once and really bad the rest of the time than it is to be good much of the time but never the best?  Which is best for my sports fandom? 

I still have the MLB app on my phone with the Royals set to my favorite team, and that will never change.  Who really wants to jump on a Dodgers bandwagon at this point?  Ugh.  But I guess we are stuck with the curse of suck until I am well into my retirement years. 

We'll always have 2015, though. 

Royals Madness

The new season of Major League baseball has begun, and once again the Royals are still considered major league.  That's surprising considering last year's team lost 104 games even though they played a number of young players who might have great potential.  If MLB were most soccer leagues around the world, they would have been relegated to AAA and some other team would have taken their place...this only two seasons after winning the World Series.  It's a quick trip from the penthouse to the outhouse, as the old saying goes. 

So the Royals are five games into the season, and so far the starting pitching has been solid, the team has scored a few runs, and a few young players are playing well.  BUT...the bullpen stinks again, today giving up a 6-3 lead to the almost as bad Twins.  I was out driving my route and saw that they had been tied 6-6 before I got back and saw that they had lost the game.  Oh well, we'll always have 2015.  But wouldn't it be nice if we could be at least more than terrible more than once every 30 years? 

I am not nearly as big a sports fan I used to be.  I don't have cable TV and don't have time to live and die with my teams as much as I do.  But I do like to casually drop in once in awhile, and hopefully this year we might even get to a game.  And if we do, I hope that I'm not wanting to put my head through a wall when another terrible reliever comes into the game.  Is that too much to ask? 

The Miracle of the Bloop Single

I come from a religious tradition that has generally eschewed miracles.  While we can't put an exact Scripture on it (never a good start), we have had this mindset that, ok, God gave 'extra' power to the apostles, who could give it to somebody else, who then couldn't give it to anybody else, and so miracle power died out in the first century.  I know, it's a rather lame piece of reasoning, but many of the frauds and charlatans of our world have driven us to a point that we think that God won't (can't?) do miracles today.

Even as this was how I was raised, I was never fully comfortable with this line of thinking.  Why do we pray?  And even if God chooses not to act in a certain way, does that really mean that this is always and forever the case?  And why do we even bother preaching from the gospels when Jesus (or elsewhere when somebody else) does something miraculous, if those stories have absolutely nothing to say to us today?  Miracles may not happen as we imagine that they will, but surely God can do whatever he chooses, right?

I say all these very serious things to lead up to something that, in the grand scheme of things, really isn't that important.  Last night, the Kansas City Royals won the World Series.  The Royals had endured almost a quarter century of mismanagement, bad luck, lack of money, and simply bad ballplayers to come back and win it all.  Since they had won 30 years ago I had come to believe that likely they would never do this again in my lifetime.  I wanted to believe, but so many years of watching some really bad baseball teams had sapped most of my belief.  Decent prospects like Angel Berroa and Carlos Febles turning to stone overnight.  Better-than-average players like Johnny Damon and Zack Grienke fleeing to greener pastures.  And lots and lots of Jimmy Gobble, Mark Redman, and Runelvys Hernandez blowing leads and causing us to hide between our fingers.

Even as the team got better in recent years I never fully could buy into it, never truly believe that this was actually happening.  Surely, I thought, they'd find a way to blow apart.  This season in September they were something like 12 games ahead in the division and I kept thinking, yeah, we might find a way to totally collapse and miss the playoffs.  A near-lifetime of horrors had convinced me that something bad was going to happen.  The team played poorly throughout most of September, though luckily the rest of the division was horrible.  We made the playoffs, then almost gagged it away against the Astros.

It's here that I need to stop and say that miracles (of a sort) made this team win a championship.  They won 11 games in the postseason, 8 of them in comebacks.  Several of those comebacks came against really good pitchers and involved really bad errors by the other team.  You can say all you want about how 'they kept pressing and pressing' or how 'they would never, ever give in', but seriously, watch these games.  A ball sneaks under the glove of the NLCS hero.  A lazy fly ball falls between Goins and Bautista. Multiple huge-run innings late in games in which not a single ball was hit hard.  How else can you explain this but to think that the natural order of things has somehow been fiddled with?

The skeptic in me is already thinking about how this won't last.  People still died and were suffering in the 'age of miracles', and I'm guessing it will be sooner rather than later that the Royals will stink again.  Players will leave, new players won't be as good, and the natural order of things will make it where balls don't slide under gloves or fall between three fielders.

I get it.  But for one month miracles were real again.