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Game 40 Thread: Yankees vs. Royals

Forty games already? Where has this season gone?

By Matthew LaMar
Peter G. Aiken-USA TODAY Sports

It takes a long, long time to evaluate baseball teams. Baseball is a marathon, after all, and any individual baseball contest in the 162-game season can tell an entirely different story than another. We have to wait dozens of games in order to properly evaluate a team.

Because humans love good round numbers, you'll see a lot of places that it takes '40 games' to properly get a sense of a team. There's nothing special about that 40-game mark, really, except for being a Round Impressive Number and being about a quarter of the way through the baseball season. 'Wait until 40 games,' coaches and front office staff will say, 'and then we can talk about the team.'

Well, we're at the 40th game of the season, and the Kansas City Royals are 16-23, fifth out of five teams in the American League Central, 15th out of 15 teams in the American League, and owners of the third-worst run differential among all 30 Major League Baseball teams. The Royals are bad, like 'on pace to lose 95+ games' bad. They're also pretty old. It's not great.

STILL: there are 120+ games to be played this season, and before losing two consecutive stinkers to these New York Yankees the Royals had been on a 6-1 run over their past seven games. A win tonight would make that 7-3 over their last 10, a nice move towards relevance.

The lineups:

Kansas City sends Danny Duffy to the mound. Against New York lefty Jordan Montgomery, the Royals feature a lineup with seven right-handers.

Beat those Yankees, men.

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