DA: Royals Are Here to Give Us All Hope

By Damon Amendolara 

While the NFL can keep trumpeting its “parity” card, baseball still gives us the most mind-boggling turnarounds. Yes, the NFL is a weekly car-crash of mediocrity. Every team already has a loss. On Sunday we watched the winless Jaguars smash the Browns, who had just hammered the Steelers, who had previously dominated the Panthers, who had beaten the Lions handily, who had pulverized the Packers in Week 3. And Green Bay happens to look like one of the best teams in the league right now.

But only in MLB can the Royals happen. A franchise so lost, a land so scorched, the owner would sell his new manager to the city by saying, “Buddy Bell is obsessed with losing.” How do I know? I was present at the press conference when it happened. I worked in Kansas City for nearly five years starting in ’03, which just so happened to coincide with some of the darkest, most humiliating seasons in Royals history.

Kansas Citians have forever seen owner David Glass as a bumbling fool with the heart of Gargamel. He has been a billionaire overlord who pinched pennies like Mr. Burns, and was constantly trying to step on all those cute Smurfs (like Freddie Patek) running around Kansas City. On May 31, 2005 the Royals were 14-37, and already 20.5 games out of first place. Let that sink in. KC was more than 20 games out of first within the first two months of the season. That day, they hired crusty old baseball lifer Bell to manage the roster. It was a bad roster. And the Royals remained bad. But the ultimate Freudian slip told the story of the franchise when Glass took the podium at Kaufman Stadium to briefly talk about why Bell was the right man for the job.

“What you have in Buddy is a man obsessed with losing,” Glass said. Every media member in the room immediately glanced at one another. Did he just say that? Glass quickly corrected himself, that Bell was “obsessed with winning,” but the message from the baseball heavens was clear. This was an organization that indeed seemed obsessed with putting forth a rotten product, continually chopping away at the city’s baseball-beating heart.

And suggesting Bell was “obsessed with winning” also speaks to the team’s scouting department for much of the last three decades. In six full seasons and parts of three others as manager, he had two 100-loss campaigns, and a 90-loss one. He had only one winning season, and was nearly 100 games below .500 for his career. As a player he toiled for some of the worst teams of the era, the painfully awful Cleveland Indians of the ’70s and the equally atrocious Texas Rangers of the ’80s. Calling Buddy obsessed with winning was like calling the Texas State Fair obsessed with health. Every piece of evidence was to the contrary.

That ’05 Royals team finished with 106 losses, the worst season in franchise history. It would also come at a time when the team lost 100 games four times in five years, and spent money-saving contracts on over-the-hill veterans who were being asked to stop the flood with a roll of paper towels. The team drafted poorly, developed poorly, and spent poorly. And a once baseball-mad city had a generation of fans either apathetic to yet another lost season, or completely oblivious there used to be winning baseball played at the Truman Sports Complex.

I sat in a half empty Kauffman Stadium on too many summer nights, so quiet you could hear the cashiers at the Gates BBQ window yell, “Hi, how may I help you!?” from the concourse. So to watch this 180-degree turnaround in the City of Fountains is extraordinary. It’s incredible to witness a city fall in love with a team and a sport again. But it’s also a heart-filling reminder: MLB is where the impossible can be done.

The Pirates showed Pittsburgh last season the exact same thing. A twenty-year march off the plank evolved suddenly into a summer-long thrill ride, the Pirates making the playoffs and filling that beautiful ballpark on the river. The same thing had happened in Baltimore the previous year, a city that used to wrap itself in baseball watching a once-lost Orioles team finally play in October and gorgeous Camden Yards was full again.

In the NFL a few good drafts, winning the turnover margin, and an easy schedule can vault a team back into contention overnight. In baseball, the grind is long. It takes years to redirect that ocean liner. It can take a decade of good drafting, 5-6 years of savvy financial moves, scouting, development, and a total restructuring the front office. When you take a loser to a winner in MLB, and a ballpark that used to be a funeral home becomes a nightly beer-and-baseball-soaked party, it’s enlivening. It’s like your old bank being turned into a night club. And you can’t stop going to that club even though every time you go to the bar you see the place you used to pay your mortgage.

The Royals are a reminder that all of us who have been saddled with rooting for traditional losers have hope. Even if your squad seems to be obsessed with losing.

D.A. hosts overnights across the ever expanding universe of CBS Sports Radio Network. He has hosted The D.A. Show (aka “The Mothership”) in Boston, Miami, Kansas City and Ft. Myers, FL. You can often catch him on the NFL Network’s series “Top 10″ opining on Zubaz pants, Tecmo Bowl and Andre Reed’s HOF credentials. D.A. graduated from Syracuse University in ’01, and immediately started looking for ways to make a sports radio show more like a quirky 1970’s sci-fi television series. Follow D.A. on Twitter and become one with the Facebook page experience. D.A. lives in NYC, and is a native of Warwick, NY – a sleepy town existing somewhere between the suburbs and the sticks.