While reading the posts over at RoyalBoard, I got the impression that some Royals fans aren’t feeling too confident about the Royals breaking 100 this year. This is undoubtedly a result of enduring year after year of ineptitude. These fans have watched a lot of bad baseball over the years, and are definitely bitter because of it.
If your team just won the World Series the year before and then lost the second game of the season 14-3, you’d probably just brush it off as a bad day and look forward to the next series.
If your team had lost 389 games over the previous 4 seasons and lost that second game 14-3, you’d suddenly feel as if all was lost. Understandable.
But we here at Breaking 100 are all about the positive. Even though the Royals are on a pace to lose 154 games (according to Bill James’s Pythagorean Formula), we still hold out hope that they will win at least 63 games. All is not yet lost, since it indeed is very early in the season. Additionally, while the Royals did look awful in game 2, their Opening Day performance wasn’t really that bad. They didn’t hit, but the pitching and defense were good enough to win on a lot of nights.
The old time baseball guys like to say that teams will win 50 games and lose 50 games. It’s what happens in the other 62 that make or break a team. Two games in, we can say that the Royals still have 48 games of play in the loss column. There’s still plenty of time to put together a respectable season. In fact, the Royals could be .500 (a very respectable mark) by the end of this weekend.
Unfortunately, the schedule makers didn’t do the Royals any favors. The White Sox come to Kansas City for a three game weekend series. The Sox are off to a slow start, having lost 2 of 3 to the Indians, so they will be eager to win some games. The Royals then will head to New York to face the Yankees for three games, followed by a trip to Tampa Bay and to Chicago for a rematch against the White Sox.
We can project a couple of scenarios for the next week or so. The pessimistic (possibly realistic) view has the Royals playing more like their game 2 performance, having them come off their road trip with a record around the 2-12 mark. Ugh.
More optimistically, let’s say the White Sox are still having trouble getting into gear and Jeremy Affeldt and Denny Bautista pitch well and the Royals take 2 of 3, giving them a 2-3 record overall. In New York, we’ll say they lose 2 of 3 and then take 2 from the Devil Rays. This would give them a 5-6 record heading to Chicago. Assuming Chicago’s getting things going by next week and they take two of three, the Royals could head home with a 6-8 record. Certainly, that’s a record that should provide enough hope to Royals fans to want to head out and catch a few games of their long home stand at the end of April.
It may even cheer up a poster or two over at RoyalBoard. Though I’m not too optimistic about that.
Let’s go get ‘em.
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