Kauffman Stadium is a wonderful baseball venue located southeast of downtown Kansas City, which is of course a fairly well-known suburb of Overland Park, Kan. The Royals don’t deserve the place. They are a retrograde and proudly stupid franchise — one that trashes its owns fans and American culture in general for being too impatient to appreciate the stealthy genius of, say, acquiring Yuniesky Betancourt — and yet they are headquartered in a forward-looking baseball stadium that represents the last time the team did anything worth imitating. That they let the Royals play there is akin to letting a kazoo band play the Sydney Opera House.

“this retro park takes your money in more ways than you are aware of and is just as homogeneous and sterile as a cookie-cutter in its manufactured nostalgia.” or, for old parks, “it’s crowded and smells like piss.” invariably, the reader stories are about why the fans are more terrible than all other fans, because they’re fat and racist and sexist (just like all other fans, apparently). i’m all for not treating each stadium like a unique, sacred cow, because a lot of the criticisms are salient. but it’s been just as predictable as stadium design the last fifteen years.

that said, i always enjoy reading pieces on the K by people outside the fanbase, because there is precious little bad to say about it. i wish more royals fans understood that.

Baseball had struck a great balance in the 1970s, and that had everything to do with the game’s brief willingness to try new things… That spirit is long gone now, buried beneath a lot of old-timey red brick and steel and the cheap sentiment and various daddy issues of baby boomers who get nostalgic over all the wrong things.

“Nostalgia” for neighborhoods that are safe, where the children are for the most part well-educated, and where many of the businesses are locally owned — those are somehow the “wrong things” to look back on?

Oh right, the past is a bore. Sorry. Didn’t mean to disturb the flow of Deadspin sarcasm.