FanPost

Response to All-time Post-Strike Royals Team

"The Past: Our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for improvement, not repetition."  

In the case of the Kansas City Royals and its legions of fans from Manhattan, New York (my current locale) to Manhattan, Kansas (the heart of the classic Powder Blue Midwest) to Battle Creek, Wyoming (the current Mariner slave vs. Royal free radio territorial expansion debate featured by Will) the recent past has sucked far harder than we would like to remember...or believe.  Rehashing the Royals history over the past decade is like eating a shit sandwich with nothing to wash it down.  Sometimes, you just want to stop eating shit and root for a team that wins, oh, more than 4 times in a month, like the Yankees, or even the White Sox.  

I'll admit that sometimes I am in this camp, and after too many one-run losses and Buddy Bell-isms, sometimes it strikes me that as a Royals fan I don't even have any piss to wash that shit down with, but then I think long and hard about where I've been.  Yeah, I could just get up and quit, buy a Derek Jeter jersey and the only thing in my baseball life even resembling eating a shit sandwich would be having to swallow the media soap opera drama surrounding A-Rod, a guy who won an MVP award just two years ago.  Please.  Royals fans eat shit sandwiches.  In bitching about A-Rod, the worst thing Yankees fans have to swallow is a cupcake.  

But, I'm not here to whine about the Yankees, or their fans.  They are just a convenient vehicle with which to make a larger, insider's point about what it's like to be a Royals fan to the indifferent outsider.  If I were to sell my soul to The Cashman and G. Satanbrenner and become a Yankees fan, the Royals recent past would cease to mean anything to me.  Watching the Royals from afar would only register in my head like a B-grade comedy film, like running across one of many daytime reruns of the edited version of "Major League" on Comedy Central.  Like the Royals, the movie sucks now because the good parts have all been cut out edited and it's not the 1980's anymore, but I would still get a kick out of Wild Thing Vaughn and Roger Dorn booting the ball around the field and losing 19 straight games.    

But for the true Royals fan, someone who remembers or even knows about the good days with George and Bo but over the past decade has had to sit through losing season after losing season, well, it is EXACTLY what it sounds like - watching the same shitty team in the same edited movie over and over again.  After the umpteenth rerun, the laughs turn into cynicism and the Roger Dorn errors become more pathetic than funny because you start to think about other things--like how the guy who plays Pedro Serrano only gets to do Geico commercials even after getting elected President only to be assassinated by terrorists on "24"; how Tom Berenger has completely disappeared altogether, how the 1980's perennial Oscar contender Charlie "Wild Thing" Sheen is now in drug rehab, and how no less than four years ago I had a gut belief that Jeremy Affeldt would be a 20-game winner someday.  When it comes to the "Bo knows he's left the building and left behind a vortex of perennial sucking" Royals fan, no matter how unbelievable the funny, no matter how funny the unbelievable, the bottom line is that if you have to watch that same movie one more time the detriment to your general well being is analogous to that of someone who gets kicked in the nether region, repeatedly, ...by an elephant.  

In other words, a true Royal fan will admit that, yeah, on a humor level it's funny that Matt Stairs pegged Ken Harvey in the back with a relay throw in 2004, it's also funny that the Royals once had a promising young outfielder named Mark Quinn who would become an afterthought after he injured himself in a kung fu fight with his brother, it's funny that Angel Berroa was ACTUALLY the 2003 ROY; and it's even funnier that Elvys Hernandez literally ate himself off the Royals roster.  "Home Run Tony Cogan's" list of post-strike, sub-mediocre Royals is the emotional rollercoaster ride of posts.  It is ingeniously funny in memory but infinitely tragic in the heart.  Ultimately a true Royals fan has been in the shit and back again for too long, and while you gotta laugh at yourself sometimes, throwing some punches is more fun than being a perennial punchline.  

The dark ages are behind us.  Embracing the Royals' mediocrity may seem therapeutic in the short run, but back in the day supposedly so was bleeding a person with the flu. It's time for the Royals to move on past the Honda Aliceas and the Suzukis. We drive a Meche-Benz now, and even though there's still a run-down 1975 Buddy Bell station wagon  sitting in our garage, GMDM is here to save the team and by God he has the "hoo-rah" buzzcut to show us that he means business.    

In all seriousness though, if you're a Royals fan and still can't sleep, recite the names of the Royals acquisitions during the last calendar year in your head "Ray, Day, LaRue, De La Rosa, Bannister, Soria, Gload, Rowdy Hardy, Bale, Lumsden, Cortes, Johnson, Pimentel, Hochevar, Moustakas, Rubi Koko..." Say that five times fast and stop; marinate on it for a second.  Do you know what those names mean, fans?  Neither do I.  I have no idea.  Perhaps I never will.  Nonetheless the unfamiliar buildup I feel in the back of my mouth is the sweet taste of the hope of future success.  Don't get too excited though.  Any and all of those people could end up the next Tony Cogan or Neifi Perez.  Nonetheless, before we move on to the high life we have to cut ties with our low life past.  We have to exorcise our demons by regurgitating names like Obermueller, Sedlacek, Knoblauch, and Dermal.   Thank you Home Run Tony Cogan.  And thank you for reading this rambling and childishly philosophical post.  Just had to get that off my chest.  I can now return to my normal activities, like working, and watching the Royals storm back in the second half of the season to win the AL Central.

This FanPost was written by a member of the Royals Review community. It does not necessarily reflect the views of the editors and writers of this site.