A Royal revival not as far away as you think

"People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring."

— Rogers Hornsby

The battering ram of winter has finally been repelled, and it can only mean one thing: the start of baseball season. The anticipation of a fresh start promises success for those teams whose seasons were derailed all too early last year, while in cities whose injured stars have finally recovered from last year's grinding summer excitement packs the stadiums.

As hope abounds even for the most unlikely of teams, every casual fan has a prediction for this year's World Series winner. If the St. Louis Cardinals — a team that won 82 games last season and barely made the playoffs — could sneak away with a championship, surely the Colorado Rockies or the Pittsburgh Pirates can replicate their feat, right?

Not exactly. The Cardinals caught a hot streak at the perfect time and, after barely beating the Padres and Mets in the playoffs, emerged as kings of the atrocity known as the National League. Then, in an error-filled, lackluster five-game World Series, they were able to beat the American League champion Detroit Tigers, capitalizing on repeated and embarrassing miscues by the young Tigers' pitching staff.

This sounds terribly negative, and I really don't mean to rain on the Cardinals' parade in quite this way; they won the World Series, and nobody can ever take that away (though, in truth, somebody should).

But even Cardinals fans must admit that their team caught extraordinary amounts of luck at just the right time, and chances are slim that a team of similar mediocrity will repeat the feat again this year.

So rather than forecasting which teams will manage to ride a hot streak to a world title — thereby mimicking every other baseball writer who lists the teams most likely to make the Fall Classic — let's instead pick one team that will definitely not be making the playoffs this year.

We won't be entirely negative, however. In most cases, this year's horrendously bad teams can be true contenders in only a couple years. Star prospects take time to develop, though, and in the meantime these teams will likely remain ensconced in insignificance.

So which long-suffering organization has the farthest to climb? Taking a four-hour drive from the home of last year's champion Cardinals brings us at the site of the worst team in baseball for the past three years: everybody's favorite bottom-dwellers, the Kansas City Royals.

In the off-season, general manager and former Atlanta Braves wonder boy Dayton Moore threw $55 million at Gil Meche, a 28-year-old pitcher with a pedestrian career earned run average of 4.65. In his six seasons in the majors, Meche just hasn't been very good — it's that simple.

But after an encouraging start to the season, shutting down a potent Red Sox lineup on Monday, Meche may yet prove his doubters wrong. It should still be pointed out, though, that his total salary is higher than the gross domestic product of six different countries. With that kind of money, Meche could buy 275 million Wendy's chicken nuggets — enough to feed Bartolo Colon for a week.

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Due to his stint as assistant GM in Atlanta, Dayton Moore arrived with a very good reputation for identifying and developing talent, but he has operated with mixed results so far in Kansas City.

In trading promising young left-hander Andy Sisco to the Chicago White Sox this off-season, the Royals only received the 31-year-old career backup Ross Gload in return — a light-hitting leftfielder who has never logged more than 234 at-bats in a season. Despite somehow hitting his way to a fluky .327 batting average last year, Gload is about as likely to repeat last year's limited success as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is to star on a PBS Chanukah special. Let's just say it won't happen.

The Royals do have promising 22-year-old Alex Gordon manning third base, however, a potential perennial All-Star good enough to relocate this columnist's latest fantasy baseball man-crush Mark Teahen from third base into the outfield. Gordon and Teahen will soon be joined by two star prospects, leftfielder Billy Butler and pitcher Luke Hochevar, forming a fearsome foursome for some further future success.

In the past, young stars on the Royals played in Kansas City only until reaching free agency, choosing then to cash out and leave for a bigger city and a more lucrative contract.

If the Meche signing indicates that Royals ownership is prepared to loosen the strings of its purse and increase the team's meager payroll, the organization may be able to change this pattern, retaining this impressive young core and competing for a playoff spot within a few years.

Unfortunately, the Royals are trapped in the American League Central, a division stocked with talented young teams that should not deteriorate very much in the coming years. The Tigers, Twins and Indians have all locked up their young nuclei in longterm contracts, and the White Sox are only one year removed from winning the World Series.

The Royals will need a great deal of luck to surpass their division rivals, but improvement is certainly on the horizon. While a World Series win in the next few years is essentially unattainable, if they can earmark a fraction of the money paid to Meche toward retaining their blossoming stars, a playoff berth in the (somewhat) near future is not out of the question.

Until then, they can always sit and wait for next year.