The KC Royals will soon ask for your tax dollars. How about a winning team first?
At one point Wednesday, the Royals already trailing by four runs in the fifth inning, the Kauffman Stadium scoreboard reset to a line of zeroes.
Score, hits, errors, all of them.
And for a moment, a technical glitch erased the evidence of all that had gone wrong. That afternoon. That month. That half-decade.
If only it were that easy, right?
But nothing has actually come easy, recently or otherwise, which is kind of the point. An organization publicizing grand plans for its future home — plans it will need to persuade and sell to the public — cannot escape the results of the present.
We can’t ignore the relationship between the two.
After an offseason marked by its change — leader of baseball operations, manager, coaching staff and so on — the aftermath is the constant that has hovered over the franchise for the better part of three decades, save a few exceptions.
Losing.
Except they’re somehow, some way doing it at an even higher rate than nearly ever.
The Royals fell to 4-15 after Wednesday’s sweep courtesy of the Rangers, and worse yet is their record inside Kauffman Stadium: 1-12.
They’ve never been worse at the home field they are attempting to ditch in the near future. And they have never picked a worse time to be this bad.
The Royals will soon hope to garner voter support for a $1 billion, partially taxpayer-funded stadium to secure their future, but they must first demonstrate a different future for the team they put inside of it. Or at least the possibility of a different future.
If county taxpayers had a reason to expect a competitive team, year in, year out, they’d probably sign on for a state-of-the-art residence, which would entail the extension of the three-eighths-cent sales tax originally approved to upgrade the existing facilities.
But what reason do the taxpayers have to expect that? Hope?
The Royals haven’t publicized the exact timing of their downtown blueprint — only their intentions to explore the possibility, followed by the acknowledgment that they have narrowed to a select few final sites. But as the standings look worse by the day in the meantime, this is absorbing the feeling of, hey, trust us, if the stadium is approved, the results will follow.
OK, sure. But you go first.
To be honest, I never bought into the thinking that the win-loss record of one single season should determine where the team spends the next 50 seasons. One is small-picture, the other big-picture.
But the small picture here is the big picture to those who will ultimately vote on the project, and that’s why it’s very much relevant. This looks like all the others. The first three weeks of 2023 tuck quite neatly into the full slate for 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018 and a whole host of others that preceded John Sherman’s ownership.
This opening month could have significant ramifications, should the Royals still desire to put a stadium vote on this August’s ballot.
One lousy month will not be on that ballot.
The history it represents just might be — if you give the voters a reason to feel the familiarity of that recent history.
They’re feeling it now. In the eighth and ninth innings Wednesday afternoon, I left the press box and walked through the concourse to talk to fans about the potential of the downtown stadium. There is a required a small-sample size alert because I spoke to a couple dozen people, but two-thirds of those who told me they don’t currently support the idea of the team moving downtown (16) said they would change their minds if the Royals change their results (11).
“If you were asking me this in 2015,” said Nick Matlack of Olathe, referencing the World Series championship season, “I’d have a different answer.”
This is a real thing.
The Royals need to prove they are capable of addressing the product on the field before they can adequately address which field they will place their product.
They aren’t required to make the playoffs to secure the label of competitive, but goodness, how about some signs?
All of the conversations about the Royals right now elicit the same responses. Anger. Frustration. Disappointment.
Honestly, I still think this team is in a better spot than it was a year ago — they have an actual pitching plan, for starters — and I understand some of those improvements will be a slow burn. But sure wish I had some evidence to support my belief. If you’re on the other side of the argument, you come with ammunition I don’t have.
The Royals have the seventh-worst earned-run average in baseball. Their bullpen, which offered the most optimism for improvement, has the second-worst ERA in baseball. Their pitching staff allows the third-most hard contact, per Fangraphs’ metric.
Their lineup has scored the second fewest runs in MLB and accounts for the worst OPS (on-base plus slugging percentages) in the league too.
The early-season successes of starting pitchers Kris Bubic and Brad Keller have been washed by an injury and a regression to the mean. Last season’s success story (Brady Singer) is this year’s worry.
All we know about this team is 4-15. Oh, and 1-12. What was once true early in the season — at least the losses were competitive — is true no longer. The Royals were outscored 52-15 over a six-game homestand.
They have won four games in a 21-day span to open the season. The Kansas City Chiefs, participants in one game per week, finished their season with four wins in a 21-day span.
The Royals are 286-440 since the start of the 2018 season. Many of those responsible for at least a heavy portion of those numbers are no longer with the team.
But when the current results mirror the history, they tend to become part of the history. They are lumped in with the history.
Them’s the breaks. Or it’s on the current group, I should say, to break it — particularly when the long-term future is at stake.
On Tuesday, the team was booed by the home fans. A mere 18 games into the season. You can’t convince me the past history has nothing to do with the present feeling. The fans have grown tired of the six-year run.
And if you think it might be unfair that I approached fans for their perspective in the middle of this kind of run — if it might have swayed the results I received — well, that’s precisely the point.
That is the timing of all of this.
This story was originally published April 20, 2023 at 6:00 AM with the headline "The KC Royals will soon ask for your tax dollars. How about a winning team first?."