My old pal Steve in Chicago is a big baseball fantasy geek, and is a lifelong Cubs fan. He's sort of adopted the Royals as his AL team, because he despises the White Sox, and he sees the Royals on Chicago TV every time we play them.

He follows a Baseball Fantasy Guru guy named Joe Sheehan. This was published today on his evaluation of the Royals going into 2019:

The Royals have moved into the ionization blackout period, during which they will attempt to build a good team from the ground up in near-total anonymity, probably losing at least 90 games in both 2019 and 2020. The first season after their championship window closed was ugly, as the team slipped to 58-104 on the field and saw all of its attendance gains from the 2015 title disappear.

That Was Fast

2013 1.75M
2014 1.96M
2015 2.71M
2016 2.56M
2017 2.22M
2018 1.67M

People in the area are still watching the games on television, which bodes well for the team’s ability to keep their coffers filled with a new local-TV deal, hopefully upgrading from what Sam Mellinger described as “widely believed to be one of the worst for a team in major professional sports.” Kansas City is ranked #32 in market size, making the Royals a legitimate small-market team. Their regional appeal was helped by the championship, but they remain behind the Cardinals and even the Cubs for popularity through the Midwest.

I’ve been hard on the Royals over the years, turned off by the way an oligarch who competed viciously to turn Wal-Mart into a global behemoth, bankrupting smaller competitors along the way, became the worst sort of welfare queen when it came to baseball. I remain insistent that David Glass and his ilk should have their significant personal fortunes, the prestige value of owning a baseball team, the subsidies paid by the cities and states in which they play, and the inevitable rise in franchise value all be part of any conversation about what they can “afford.”

With that said, there are real small-market teams in MLB, and the chart above shows that those fans are as fickle as any others. The additional ticket sales created by the Royals’ championship run took just three years to wash out, and they won’t return until the team is good again. For now, the Royals will live off their cut of the considerable baseball revenues generated by their partners until they can get the locals excited again.

In having these conversations over the years, I’ve come across the idea that rooting for a small-market team is somehow more pure than rooting for the Yankees or Dodgers or Cubs. The truth is, fans are pretty much the same everywhere. There’s a core who will be with a team thick and thin, and then a much larger group you can reach if you do well on the field. Both groups are larger in bigger cities, but the idea that fans of the Royals or Brewers or whomever are entitled to seeing their teams subsidized by the league because they’re somehow better fans is belied by the chart above.

Maybe, three years past Eric Hosmer’s dash to the plate, a lot of kids are being Raised Royal, but their moms and dads spent the summer Supporting Sporting.

The fans who do show up at Kauffman Stadium next year are unlikely to see a winning team, but the signing of Billy Hamilton will make it a touch easier to watch. Hamilton has been overmatched at the plate in MLB, with a .299 OBP over his five-year career that has been unchanged the past two seasons. Once he drops the bat, however, Hamilton is still as watchable a player as there is in baseball. He’s still one of the fastest men in the game, a plus defensive center fielder and exciting basestealer.

I want baseball to be a game where the likes of Hamilton can be stars, not because of any inherent value to the type, but because baseball is better when a variety of player and team archetypes can lead to success. For most of its history, and surely during the time I came to love it, baseball was a game where both strength and speed were rewarded.

One of the most visible ways in which power pitching has changed the game is that it has overpowered the Hamilton class. There’s a high minimum strength standard now, and if you don’t reach it, you can’t play. Billy Hamilton doesn’t have a career .245 batting average because he’s obstinate but, rather, because you can’t beat modern pitching by “just slapping the ball and running.” The game that Willie Wilson could play 40 years ago, that Otis Nixon could play 30 years ago, that Ichiro Suzuki and Juan Pierre could play even a decade ago, is gone. (The Larry Bowa/Freddy Galvis comparison within this piece also makes the point.)

Billy Hamilton’s career is just another thing we’ve lost to pitchers becoming witches. Everything comes back to velocity. Everything.

Anyway, Hamilton adds to the Royals’ collection of very good basestealers. The Royals will lead the AL in steals next year, and there’s some chance they’ll have the three highest individual totals in the league with Hamilton, Whit Merrifield, and Adalberto Mondesi. They won’t win, but they’ll be entertaining.

2B-R Merrifield
SS-B Mondesi
LF-L Gordon
DH-R Soler
1B-L O’Hearn
C-R Perez
RF-L Phillips
3B-R Dozier
CF-B Hamilton

The Central teams generally get short shrift in my baseball watching not out of bias, but game times. Bad teams get short shrift for what should be obvious reasons. So the 2019 Royals project to be down on the list of teams I see, and yet...I’m kind of interested? What if a team just decided to try to steal 300 bases? This group probably can’t get enough baserunners to pull that off, but it would at least be a hook, like Savannah State going Loyola Marymount-on-uppers in its final year in Division I.

If Brett Phillips plays, which isn’t a certainty, this is one of the best defensive outfields in baseball, too.

Bench-R Cuthbert (IF)
Bench-R Owings (UT)
Bench-B Herrera (OF)
Bench-R Gallagher (C)

There was a time when Chris Owings was one of the fastest players in baseball, too, so sure, let’s just collect them all.

SP-R Keller
SP-L Duffy
SP-R Kennedy
SP-R Junis
SP-R Lopez

As with the lineup, this isn’t an unattractive rotation, even if Brad Keller is due for some significant sophomore year regression. Danny Duffy’s window for stardom has closed; he’s 30 and has never reached 30 starts or 180 innings in a season, and the stuff that made him a constant target for trade rumors has taken a step backwards. The Royals need to treat him the way the Rays treated Nathan Eovaldi, trying to turn any stretch of health and effectiveness into a trade.

The Royals have very little behind this group, and no reason to invest in making their backup rotation much better.

RP-R W. Peralta
RP-R McCarthy
RP-L Hill
RP-L Flynn
RP-R McWilliams
RP-R Fillmyer
RP-L Skoglund

The Royals took Rays righty Sam McWilliams with the second pick in the Rule 5 draft. After the success they had with Keller, a Rule 5 pick in 2017, the Royals have every reason to go back to the well. I’ve listed him in the bullpen, where Keller started last season, but he’s been a starter throughout his five-year pro career. Add Chris Ellis, the seventh pick in the Rule 5 draft, to this mix as well -- the Royals traded for him from the Rangers after the draft.

Last year, the Reds were my pick for the game’s most watchable bad team. The Reds should be better this year, but even if they’re not, the Royals will take away their title. With the speed and defense on the field, with interesting pitchers like Jake Junis and Jorge Lopez, the Royals are a notch above the truly dreadful teams, even if their record may not reflect it.
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