New Season, Same Problems

After taking a hiatus for the off-season, the Royal Boycott is back on for 2010. As a refresher, I started boycotting the Kansas City Royals around the All-Star break last season due to not only their poor performance, but the front office's refusal to do anything about it. I'm not a sore loser, and I'm not switching my allegiance to another team. I'm simply refusing to give the Royals another dime until they improve the product they are providing me.

Think about it this way. If you went to a restaurant consistently, and every time you went, the food sucked, you'd eventually stop spending money there, right? Same concept here. The only real recourse I have against the Royals terrible front office moves is to stop helping them pay for it.

It made sense to come back and post today for 2 reasons. First of all, spring training is finally underway, with the entire team reporting for the first time yesterday. Secondly, I read an article by Bill Simmons today which encapsulated my feelings about the Royals in a couple paragraphs. The article was on the NBA, but the following could easily be applied to the Royals:

"Teams survive on TV money, season-ticket revenue and luxury suites. They don't care about the upper decks. They care about getting fat checks in March and April for the following season, then banking that money for a few months and collecting interest on it. They care about getting us to pay for a spring's worth of playoff tickets up front even though our team might survive only eight days in the postseason. And if they stink, they care about only one thing: creating an illusion of regret.

The illusion of regret is crucial. It's the single most important dynamic in the NBA right now. It drives every lottery drawing, every trade deadline and every free-agency period. It drives Knicks fans to make the decision in 2008, "I'm gonna ride this out for another two years JUST IN CASE we get someone good two years from now." It's driving more interest in this particular offseason than any in recent memory; as incredible as this sounds, people are anticipating July more than June.

The illusion of regret is also relatively evil, no different from America's lottery system that preys on the lower class: convincing people to pay for the unlikely chance that something good might happen, then making them feel like idiots when it doesn't."

This is exactly what the Royals do every spring. They sell you a bill of goods about how the team is improving, and how they made some great moves in the offseason. And year after year, we hold out hope that they're telling the truth. Well, I don't buy it this year. I bought in last year, but not this time. I plan on spending the next few posts going over the Royals off-season activity to see where they went right and wrong. SPOILER ALERT: They went mostly wrong. We didn't improve much on defense, and we may have actually gotten worse on offense.

On the whole, the Royals off-season was horrendous. The guys we let go make sense. If you read the blog last year, you should be able to guess that I applauded the moves to get rid of Jacobs and Olivo especially. However, picking up Rick Ankiel, Jason Kendall, Scott Podsednick and Chris Getz is not the answer. They are more expensive versions of players we already have. I'll go over each of these guys in detail in the next few posts.

I feel strongly that I won't regret this boycott in 2010. I expect another run at 4th or 5th place, and another near 100 loss season. I'm not going to get suckered in by any pre-season hype. I'm not even going to get suckered in if the Royals start out strong in April again. I'm not rooting for them to lose, but I just can't find a reason why I should believe the Royals will win.