Five months ago today, I made the trek to Kauffman Stadium with a good friend to see the final game of the most wretched season in Royals history. They were shut out 5-0 by Jose Contreras and Shingo Takatsu in a game that pretty much defined the entire season, especially when Mike MacDougal threw only five strikes in his 17-pitch appearance. While getting autographs from virtually every player who ventured out to the players’ parking lot, I got the sense that these guys were just ready to go home and put 2004 behind them. Just ask D.J. Carrasco; those were almost his words verbatim.
Five months later, we’ve finally reached the day they’ve been looking forward to, the day of the first Royals baseball game of the 2005 season. No matter how terrible they’ll probably be this year, I can’t help but be excited and optimistic when I see everything back at zero, because anything can happen.
By the way, Zack Greinke walked two batters in 2/3rds of an inning during Wednesday’s “B” game against the Texas Rangers, prompting the headline “Greinke Gone Wild” on the Royals’ website. It’s unbelievable how much of a freak he is. If ANY other 21-year-old pitcher dished out two free passes in 2/3rds of an inning during an exhibition exhibition game, nobody would really care because that pitcher would be heading back to Single-A anyway. But when Zack – he of the 1.61 BB/9 IP last year – loses the slightest control of his pitches in his first outing since October, that becomes news because he’s already overmatched big league hitters for 145 innings. He’s headed towards Saberhagendom, hopefully without the injuries.A lot of you probably think that American Idol is one of the things dragging society down the drain, but since I like the show, I've started my own Idol Tracker on the KRB Sidebar. Here's how it works: there are still 16 contestants left after last night's elimination round, but I've gone out on a limb and chosen Carrie Underwood and Travis Tucker to be the two people who'll compete in the finals. The little green arrows indicate how well they did in the last round in my view, which is to say quite well. If they do poorly, I'll give them a red arrow. I'm probably only going to be entertaining myself with this "game", but one person entertained is enough to make the world go 'round ... or something like that.Lastly, I finalized my partnership with Most Valuable Network yesterday, so make sure to check out Royals Court for even more thoughts and insight into the Kansas City Royals. And yes, I'm taking the FREE CALVIN PICKERING! movement over there, too.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, March 03, 2005 at 3/03/2005 12:51:00 AM.
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