Kansas City Royals Request a Little Patience

Watching Danny Duffy pitch in his last two starts has been the couch potato equivalent of being stung by a swarm of inebriated wasps: loud, painful, erratic, and ultimately defeating.  The man who recently embarrassed the Tigers in their inaugural Division matchup just a fortnight prior was flapping about the mound like a land-stricken mackerel, grasping for strikes in vain, accomplishing little.  Kansas City Royals fans across the continent grasped their pitchforked opinions to the internet, shouting at Duffy for an apparent “mental lapse.”

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It’s safe to say that the Kansas City Royals’ rotation is circling around mediocrity, if not outright failure.  Danny Duffy is a symptom of this sickness.  Yordano Ventura has lacked his rookie campaign’s brilliance.  Jeremy Guthrie and Jason Vargas, trusted bottom of the rotation sages, have also flirted with incompetence.  It’s been rough year for starting pitching in Kansas City.  Fans have the right to be frustrated.

But fans have no right, whatsoever, to give up on the Kansas City Royals.  If anything can be learned from last October, this baseball team doesn’t give up when confronted with overwhelming adversity. 

We all need to have a little patience.  We need to embrace patience.

Within the first week of playing, we lost Alex Rios to injury.  Within the first month, Alcides Escobar, Greg Holland, Ventura, Edinson Volquez, Lorenzo Cain, Mike Moustakas, among others, all lost time as a result of injuries or suspensions.  Before the season even began, the keyholder to the Kansas City Royals’ success, James Shields, became one with free agency.

And yet, we are winning.  We lead the AL Central. 

It is not out of the realm of possibility to expect that Duffy and Ventura will come around.  I’m not a religious man, but I do have faith.  I have faith in our team.

The definition of faith reads: “A belief lacking in proof,” but anyone who’s followed the Kansas City Royals in the last few years has plenty of evidence to support such belief.  Our beloved hot-corner man, Mike Moustakas, has risen like a phoenix from the ashes of two miserable campaigns into one of the most dominate position players in the American League.  Many fans demanded his trade or outright release before 2015.  Experts believed it to be a forgone conclusion.  Ned Yost and Dayton Moore ignored the wisdom of masses.  They had faith.  That had patience.

I implore all of you haranguing the Kansas City Royals to make sweeping changes to instead take a deep breath, calm down, and embrace a mantra of patience.  It worked before.  It will work again.

Next: Danny Duffy Facing Important Start