Sam Mellinger, who I think really gets it, wrote a blog last week about why the Royals should trade Joakim Soria. The logic is solid. It totally makes sense. With one caveat: the Royals front office can’t get fair value. This organization has shown themselves to be incompetent at getting value when trading anyone, let alone a star player. Minnesota could get four future Yankees for Soria. The Royals would be lucky to grab a couple .270 hitters who can put up 15 home runs and a middle reliever who replaces Ramirez or Nunez from last year’s trades.
More likely they get a couple .240 hitters who put up 10 dingers while being injured for 1/2 of the season, and a closer who blows a couple fewer leads than Kyle Farnsworth would.
Kansas City has had tons of prospects. The ones that turn out we trade for more prospects. The ones that don’t perform (or get injured and “we’d like to see what they can do in a full season”) we keep. From 1996 to 2008, there has been at least one former Royal on the WS winner’s post season roster. Tom Gordon, Kyle Snyder, Jeff Suppan, Jermaine Dye, Johnny Damon, Jeff Conine, Jay Bell, David Cone (x3) and Chili Davis, Jeff Conine and Jim Eisenreich, and David Cone (again). The exception was 2002 (Tom Goodwin was on the Giants losing roster). 2009 is guarenteed to continue the trend, with former Royals on both the Yankees and the Phillies. The best former Royal not on that list is number 9 on the top 10 home runs as a Royal list. He did it in just five and a half seasons in blue. If he were still a Royal, he’d be pushing Brett for the top spot next season or the season after.
During that same time, the Royals have a winning percentage of .422.
If you go back to 1991, the year George Brett became a DH and the Royals started rebuilding, their winning percentage is .440. They’ve had just four winning seasons. How do you explain it? None of the players are still here. None of the coaches are still around. Even the owner is different. Good players come to Kansas City and either get hurt or vastly under-perform. Players with great promise fell apart (Bob Hamlin and Angel Berroa to name a couple Rookie of the Year winners). Only the Expos/Nationals have gone longer without a playoff appearance.
What gives?
Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright offers one possible explanation in “Evil and the Justice of God”: “There is a great deal to be said for the view that all corporate institutions have a kind of corporate soul, an identity which is greater than the sum of its parts, which can actually tell the parts what to do and how to do it. This leads to the view that in some cases at least, some of these corporate institutions can become so corrupted with evil that the language of ‘possession’ at a corporate level becomes the only way to explain the phenomena before us.” (Intervaristy Press, pg. 38-39)
I don’t think the Royals have a demon. But maybe Wright is on to something. It seems that no matter how the parts change, the same result occurs. It’s as if there is something overarching that moves this team toward mediocrity. The culture of under-performance, while not demonic, reaches back to the earliest part of the post-Brett era and seems to be embedded as deep as a soul would be. I still think a salary cap would help. But every other team in baseball save the Expos have had some measure of success greater than Kansas City. I’m not sure that I have much of an explanation left.
Anybody know a good priest?
