2008 Preview: Kansas City Royals

Somewhere out there is a place for the ghosts of bad owners, who walk around like Marley, groaning and toting the heavy chains they forged in life wrecking the team. You'll find Charles Comiskey there, still looking for a way to steal one last nickel from Buck Weaver. There's Mike Burke, whose Yankees went from perrenial champions to fifth place overnight and we don't have to politely blame the draft. (Maybe Ralph Houk...) And there's William Baker, who ran the Phillies as a joke, I guess, because he wouldn't spend a dime and the ballpark he named after himself collapsed one day and killed people.

When his Day of Judgement comes, it's damned likely David Glass will be optioned out to that cheap pavillion with a lousy view, where all the bad owners shuffle under the weight of their zillion-year penance. Glass bought the Royals in the mid-90s after the passing of avuncular Ewing Kauffman. The proud Royals, always in the thick of the pennant hunt, immediately packed their dignity, shoved it in a hole in the basement and jumped aboard the first non-stop to Stink-burg. Glass himself rolled up his sleeves and reshaped the team into a pile of manure, providing a model for George W. Bush's Middle East policy.

Yes, it's as bad as that. I'm dead serious here.

Before the Royals, Glass was the top guy at Wal-Mart, guiding them from Reagan-era evil-on-the-rise to Clintonian Middle American Tumor. His business model was to cut costs as well as prices, destroy competition on a global scale, and turn the vastness of the American interior into a parking lot at his superstores. With prices low, but nowhere else to work and shop, Glass turned Heartland enterprise into a giant Slurpee machine of toxic junk. Fortunately, baseball was still free from Glass's touch, but that was soon remedied—in the Bud Selig era, of course. Glass bought the Royals despite higher bids from competitors.

The Royals quickly jettisoned mid-lever players whose mid-level salaries threatened Glass's singular focus on awfulness. To demonstrate his absolute command of Missouri consciousness, Glass revoked the press credentials of two reporters who asked pointed questions about the Royals indifference to quality players. The disarticulation of the Royals, like Wal-Mart's bulldozing of business culture in some mid-sized town, was not to be questioned by the likes of us.

As the cost slashing—player salaries that is, thus team value—has continued, the losses have piled up like some morbid Glass-ian balance sheet. The Royals basball team declined the services of capable baseball players and the team averaged 94 losses (per 162-game season) since 1995. One good season spared them a 100 loss average over that time. Yay.

The Royals were good before Glass took over and terrible since Glass took over. Once proud, Kansas City baseball is terrible because of him and that's all you need to know.