Glad to have walked away from Royals fandom

Royals sign scumbag DV reliever

It’s odd having spent a sizable chunk of my life writing about a team I’ve grown to care less and less about, but I’ve definitely grown to care much more about baseball as a whole than what happens at Kauffman Stadium. Do we really serve ourselves best by rooting for laundry because it’s washed more in the city to which we’ve potentially randomly linked ourselves?

Oddly, the hiring of Mike Matheny to manage the club as Ned Yost retired was the last straw for me, a decision that isn’t really worth getting into too deeply here. Matheny—who, on top of being a genuinely terrible in-game manager, had engendered a toxic clubhouse culture in St. Louis—wasn’t really going to change the totals in the win-loss column much as there wasn’t an alternate reality where those Royals clubs were going to be anywhere near .500, but it doubled down on wrongheaded process so much that I just couldn’t continue committing any energy to following that club. He was fired three seasons later (the first of which was the pandemic-shortened 2020 season) having led the team tumbling down the standings in a very weak division, finishing in the cellar in year three of the Matheny era and getting shown the door by the new/old GM JJ Picollo.

Of course, the issue with the new/old GM is that we have little reason to believe he’s going to be much different than his old boss, Dayton Moore, who he’d worked with and been mentored by for more than two decades—his entire professional career. Moore paid lip service to character being vital to building the club but repeatedly showed that the litmus test for character could often just be that they were Christian and amenable to attending the organization’s bizarre annual anti-porn seminar. There was little rhyme or reason as to who Moore would champion or draw his ire.

When Salvador Pérez had his first child, Moore expressed his displeasure of the franchise cornerstone for having a child out of wedlock [I searched for an article talking about it, but I can’t find one—it may have been in the booth on a broadcast or in his book]. Of course, Moore’s Royals had no issue trading for Alcides Escobar, who had just ghosted his wife and the mother of his first child for a mistress. Or trading for Alberto Callaspo within a calendar year of being charged with felony criminal damage and misdemeanor assault charges in a domestic violence case with his wife and 17-month-old son. Or sending up a test balloon to see if fans would revolt if they signed Luke Heimlich, who had just gone undrafted after it had been discovered that he’d pleaded guilty to molesting his six-year-old niece when he was 15 years old, claiming that he had spoken with Heimlich extensively and knew in his heart that Heimlich was a person of character who deserved a chance to pitch professionally, all while bizarrely dragging Jarrod Dyson’s name through the mud by saying they’d given him multiple chances, implying that whatever Dyson had done was akin to MOLESTING A SIX-YEAR-OLD RELATIVE.

So is it surprising that Moore’s acolyte/replacement would needlessly sign reliever Aroldis Chapman, who served a 30-game suspension in 2016 for shooting off EIGHT rounds at his residence while in the heat of a domestic dispute with his girlfriend where he allegedly also choked her (he denied ever choking her)?

Of course, it’s not. They’ll tell their players to avoid the perils of pornography while continuing to play morality police when and only when it’s convenient for them to do so.

The financials of the deal aren’t particularly relevant. He’s a 35-year-old reliever who’s been in decline for three years and was below replacement level last year. It’s a one-year deal that screams deadline flip if he’s even remotely effective. But is that worth it? Is this what J.J. Picollo thinks being more transactional is?

Cue the fucking Trevor Bauer signing.