Kansas City Royals: New owner must stop 100 loss era

One of the first challenges for new owner John Sherman is to keep the Kansas City Royals from disengaging fans with non-competitive baseball.

The last twenty years of Royals baseball has been book-ended with horrible baseball and an exhilarating four-year period that included two trips to the World Series and a championship in between. As great as that short-run was, it has been difficult being a Kansas City Royals fan the last two decades.

Keep in mind that this franchise did not lose 100 games during its first 30 years of existence. Even being an expansion team, which can expect to suffer through a handful of seasons with triple-digit losses, the Royals did not suffer that fate.

It was not until the new millennium that the financially challenged Kansas City franchise began to lose games at an alarmingly high rate. Since the birth of the Royals in 1969, only one other team has compiled more 100 loss seasons, that being fellow American League Central rival the Detroit Tigers. Detroit had the decency to spread out their horrible years.

All six of the Kansas City campaigns to reach this dubious mark have happened in the last 18 seasons. Since 2002 there has been a 33 percent chance you were going to watch a Royals team lose 100 games and that is unacceptable.

Dayton Moore could be an easy target here, however, he has only been the GM in three of those six seasons and one was his first when he inherited a mess from Allard Baird. The common denominator is they have all occurred under the ownership of the Glass family.

I do not want to throw them under the bus, it was a possibility that the franchise could have gone to someone else and there would not be a major league team in the City of Fountains, so there should be some gratitude. Plus winning a world title buys a lot of grace. However, there is no denying that cost-cutting measures have kept the team from being competitive far too often.

The next step is not only rebuilding the franchise but rebuilding the relationship with the fans. We need to see free agent signings that excite us, not veteran players who will continue to put up below-average numbers. We need to be able to re-sign some of the players who come up through the minors and do well in the big leagues, not lose them to free agency or trade them for prospects that lead to more 100 loss seasons.

There is nothing better than a packed Kauffman Stadium with fans cheering on the Boys in Blue during a pennant race and playoff games. We need to see this more often.