What is there to say about the Royals?

Seriously? They have lost 90 games in a season for the 6th time in 7 years.

They will have a new manager next year as Buddy Bell decided he had better things to do than mind the store.

No doubt another retread will step into his shoes (Jerry Narron? Lee Mazzili?) and the Royals will continue to stink.

Don't blame it on being a small market. They've had plenty of time to develop a farm system with those high picks. Plus they had an outfield of Johnny Damon, Jermaine Dye and Carlos Beltran... and the sum total of the trades involving those stars is John Buck and Angel Berroa.

Don't blame small market for trading Dye for Neifi Perez. That's small brains in the front office.

What the heck happened?
When I was growing up, I used to think the baseball post season worked like this:

All the teams played 162 games and at the end of the year, the Phillies, Dodgers, Yankees and Royals would play in the playoffs. In fact in the 1970s and 1980s, Yankees/Royals was a more fierce rivalry than Yankees/Red Sox.

Who was a bigger star than George Brett?

What team had weapons on the basepaths like Frank White or Willie Wilson? Or hitters like Hal MacRae or Al Cowens?

What bullpen could throw an Al Hrabosky at you... and then Quisenberry?

Pitchers like Splittorff, Leonard and eventually Saberhagen were dominant.

Even players like Willie Mays Aikens, John Mayberry, U. L. Washington and Amos Otis gave the team a bad ass quality.

Who couldn't cheer for the ultimate fat slugger, Steve "Bye Bye" Balboni? And who wasn't mesmerized by Bo Jackson?

What happened?
Why did the team that personified consistency (16 out of 20 seasons above .500 in one stretch including 7 post season trips, the 1980 AL pennant and the 1985 World Championship) suddenly only have 1 winning season since 1995?

I'll tell you what happened:

Ewing Kaufman died.
Kaufman was everything an owner of a baseball team should be. He cared about the team and the community and fought to keep putting a winner on the field until he died in 1993.

And I bet he had something to do to avoid making a cookie cutter multipurpose stadium and instead having a beautiful baseball only park. Once Shea is torn down it will be the only stadium from the 1960s and 1970s construction era to survive... and it is still a beauty.

So more than a farm system or pitching, the Royals need a charismatic billionaire.
They need someone with some forward thinking to turn around this once proud franchise in a potentially baseball crazy city.

They need a Mark Cuban.

Yeah, Cuban is an overgrown man child... but he also turned around one of the most forgettable franchises in sports into one of the most exciting.

Baseball needs an owner who wants to turn a team around for the long haul instead of breaking the team up every time they ask for minimum wage.

There must be a crazy billionaire out there willing to do it.
What's Trump doing these days?