The Royals playoff odds are pretty good

It's really hard -- as a Royals fan, as a Kansas City fan in general for that matter -- to believe something good is going to happen. If there's still a faint trace of a fraction of a chance that a pro sports team could defy 99.6 percent odds, it'd have to be the Royals. They do, of course, have the longest playoff drought in American sports after all ... until tonight ... maybe.

From the moment you started reading this to constantly disappearing present, the Royals have inched closer to their first playoff berth in 29 years. Robinson Cano is a few seconds older. Felix Hernandez's next start fades away a little more, sorta like Marty's brother in Back to the Future. Tom Wilhelmsen will have had a little more time to think about how his crucial spot start could be the M's last gasp.

But until the playoff spot is clinched and that fact is confirmed by every major news outlet in America, it'll be hard not to have the #Yosted-est #Yosted collapse of all time lingering in the back of your mind.

It's very unlikely, and perhaps even Ned can't tempt the phlegmatic ghost of probability into aberration.

But it could still happen.

However, here's a scenario illustrating how likely that is:

Imagine you're sitting on your couch tonight, getting ready to turn on the game and suddenly there's a knock at your door. You corral yourself from the casually wandering trajectories of your catalepsy into a semi-cognizant clump to answer it. Behind the door stands Franz Ferdinand -- both the band and the archduke of Austria whose assassination triggered the first World War.

The archduke, obnoxiously accompanied by the band of the same name, barges into your home and demands your compliance to a list of demands he begins to read as he rolls open an antique scroll. He's speaking a sort of Romanian-Czech hybrid of mouth sounds that you inexplicably understand very well.

His first demand is that you immediately demonstrate and explain to him the magic of the in-home microwave. Still in your televisional stupor, you quickly comply by preparing a single hot dog in a mason jar full of water and placing it in the appliance to cook. The band will quarter, and consume it during the top of the third inning.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand's second command dictates that you produce a specie of American currency -- in coin form -- and stand on your coffee table. This provides the platform for his third and final command. He orders you -- this time in Hungarian -- to flip the coin so that it lands heads-up twelve times in a row. If you fail to do this, you will be beaten by guitar necks, drum sticks, etc. until you expire, at which point he will annex your home as a colony of the Holy Crown of Hungary. You flip tails on the first toss. He watches the entire game from your spot on the couch after the Scottish rock band pummels you into the afterlife.

The Royals win 4-2.

Okay, so really the Royals missing the playoffs is only as unlikely as the coin flip stuff. The Franz Ferdiands-microwave junk were just garnishes so we wouldn't get bored.

Simply put, the Royals' odds of screwing this up are about as likely as that story.

It's difficult to comprehend a playoff game featuring the Kansas City Royals, but it looks like it's actually going to happen.

Weird.