Kansas City Royals: Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty?

This season has been remarkably bad for the Kansas City Royals, who are on pace to shoot well under par. That would be great if they played golf, but instead of a hole in one they are in need of a mulligan for their season.

Normally when a team or company has a year like this questions begin to percolate through many channels. The two most common questions are: Is the CEO still making the right decisions? And or, is ownership being too cheap? Let’s look at those from a Kansas City Royals perspective.

Royals fans have wondered this several times since Ewing Kauffman died in 1993. After a spell with a board of advisers, the Royals then began their descent into the abyss. Then, Royals fans gasped at the news that the CEO of notoriously bargain-friendly discounter, Walmart had bought the team. Would he run the team like he did while being the leader of Walmart?

Looking back to those early 2000 teams, it is easy to see the Royals being ran like a 2010s K-Mart team rather than the big blue retail giant. For those who may not know, K-Mart used to be a big competitor of Walmart, but due to poor leadership decisions, scandals, and not keeping up with current trends (such as investing more money into an online present like Amazon has), the demise was inevitable.

Yes, it is easy to see those Royals teams being ran on the cheap, especially considering the constraints that were put on then general manager Allaird Baird who would quickly trade young building blocks such as Carlos Beltran, Johnny Damon, and Jermaine Dye to name a few.

In those days, the Royals seemed to draft, build, and then trade a young star for players that didn’t pan out. At the time these moves seemed to point out that Baird was an ineffective leader. This obviously was not the case (since he remains as an executive in the game), so what was the problem?