Only a few days left until college football kicks off. This is a good time for us to recommend The Solid Verbal, a college football podcast we discovered last year. These guys cover everything...sometimes too much. With a couple of episodes a week, we find it tough to keep up with every show. But if you're a college football junkie, it should help satisfy your cravings.
This past week, they had Chip Brown (of Orangebloods and conference realignment Armageddon fame) on to preview the Big 12 season. It's a quality breakdown of the year to come.
8.29.2010
8.28.2010
ROYALS WRAP; OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP CARING AND IGNORE THE SUCK.
Well, our last post, burying the Royals on the first day of the season, certainly was popular with the Chinese spammers. Those guys gotta work on improving their algorithm so it will target posts that people actually read.
It's been a nice summer break. But college football is around the corner, meaning that relevant sporting events are about to return to the Kansas City area, and therefore our vacation is about to end. Time for some end-of-summer cleaning so that we can focus our attention on the area teams that actually give a damn.
We've attended two Royals games this year. We didn't buy the tickets for either one. Yes, while the Royals ultimately fulfilled all three conditions of our mandate from earlier this year, it was yet another case of too little, too late. The Royals haven't cared about winning baseball games for the better part of two decades, and therefore we finally--finally--stopped caring about going out to the Greater Raytown Amusement Park-cum-Stadium.
While it's the essence of anecdotal, this still isn't an especially good sign for the Royals. We're the third generation of our family to have had Royals season tickets at some point. If they can succeed in driving us away from the ballpark, then they must be doing something special. Honestly, though, they probably made the right decision in adding a playground to the outfield, since there's not much out at that park for a serious baseball fan to enjoy.
There are a variety of factors that contributed to our absence. The first, as already noted, is the putrid product on the field. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 15 times, shame on me. As usual, there's been precious little about this team throughout the year that makes you want to spend money to watch it. Yuniesky Betancourt looks like he's going to lead the team in home runs, for pete's sake. The other day, the Royals ran a lineup out there that had a total of ~21 home runs combined. There were about 14 players in baseball who had more homeruns than the entire Royals lineup had that day. There aren't enough expletives in the English language to properly express the absurdity of that.
And why pay to watch the games when you can see most of them on TV, anyway? The oft-expressed fear that fans would stay at home to watch on TV instead of coming out to support the team finally came true in this household, this year. This option is even more attractive when you consider baseball's inane rules against showing replays of any close plays in the stadium.
Perhaps the biggest reason for our absence from the ballpark was the constant reminder, during the two games we did attend, of how the Royals and Jackson County royally dropped the ball when it came to the opportunity to build a downtown ballpark. Now that the initial shininess of the new stainless and concrete bunkers in the outfield has worn off, we're left with the continued reality that the stadium remains in Raytown, far removed from any entertainment, nightlife, viable public transportation, or the center of discretionary spending in the metropolitan area.
Simply put, why should we spend 30 minutes to watch crappy baseball on a weeknight in a crappy part of Kansas City, when we could have been driving 10 minutes to watch (probably still crappy) baseball in KC's revitalized downtown? We easily would have attended at least 20 games this year in a downtown ballpark.
Sprint Center has only served to reinforce the sense of an opportunity lost. Even without an anchor tenant, the excitement and atmosphere Sprint Center is able to generate downtown for various concerts as well as events like the Big 12 tourney is incredible. Our friends who have left Kansas City for other opportunities but who have returned in the last couple of years to visit all say the same thing: being down around the Sprint Center and the P&L District doesn't feel like being in Kansas City. Probably because we're used to KC screwing things up however it can, like voting to keep its baseball stadium in the Zubaz Capital of the World.
Imagine that atmosphere an additional 81 night a year.
(Let's take a moment here to congratulate Kansas City, Kansas, on continuing to develop a nice sports and entertainment district out at the Legends. With the construction on the Wizards' new stadium progressing rapidly, we may soon see a summer sporting facility that outclasses the "New K" in terms of atmosphere and fan enthusiasm.)
But back to baseball. The fitting end to this Royals season, like so many others recently, is to let it slip irrelevantly into the night while football takes the stage.
A word of advice to David Glass and Royals management: congratulations on receiving the 2012 All Star Game, but don't miss your opportunity. You'll want to open up those tight purse strings and put a legitimate team on the field that year. Otherwise, the national media will be writing stories not only about your half-hearted stadium renovation, but also about the consistently crappy product you placed on the field that, as usual, is 15 games out by the All Star Break. If you're ever interested in gaining some measure of respectability, 2012 is the year to make your move. Also, since we assume you're going to tie season tickets to All Star Game tickets, putting a legitimate product on the field is the only way you'll be able to avoid the embarrassing prospect of setting a new franchise record for lowest actual attendance.
And that should about wrap it up for the Royals. On to football!
It's been a nice summer break. But college football is around the corner, meaning that relevant sporting events are about to return to the Kansas City area, and therefore our vacation is about to end. Time for some end-of-summer cleaning so that we can focus our attention on the area teams that actually give a damn.
We've attended two Royals games this year. We didn't buy the tickets for either one. Yes, while the Royals ultimately fulfilled all three conditions of our mandate from earlier this year, it was yet another case of too little, too late. The Royals haven't cared about winning baseball games for the better part of two decades, and therefore we finally--finally--stopped caring about going out to the Greater Raytown Amusement Park-cum-Stadium.
While it's the essence of anecdotal, this still isn't an especially good sign for the Royals. We're the third generation of our family to have had Royals season tickets at some point. If they can succeed in driving us away from the ballpark, then they must be doing something special. Honestly, though, they probably made the right decision in adding a playground to the outfield, since there's not much out at that park for a serious baseball fan to enjoy.
There are a variety of factors that contributed to our absence. The first, as already noted, is the putrid product on the field. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 15 times, shame on me. As usual, there's been precious little about this team throughout the year that makes you want to spend money to watch it. Yuniesky Betancourt looks like he's going to lead the team in home runs, for pete's sake. The other day, the Royals ran a lineup out there that had a total of ~21 home runs combined. There were about 14 players in baseball who had more homeruns than the entire Royals lineup had that day. There aren't enough expletives in the English language to properly express the absurdity of that.
And why pay to watch the games when you can see most of them on TV, anyway? The oft-expressed fear that fans would stay at home to watch on TV instead of coming out to support the team finally came true in this household, this year. This option is even more attractive when you consider baseball's inane rules against showing replays of any close plays in the stadium.
Perhaps the biggest reason for our absence from the ballpark was the constant reminder, during the two games we did attend, of how the Royals and Jackson County royally dropped the ball when it came to the opportunity to build a downtown ballpark. Now that the initial shininess of the new stainless and concrete bunkers in the outfield has worn off, we're left with the continued reality that the stadium remains in Raytown, far removed from any entertainment, nightlife, viable public transportation, or the center of discretionary spending in the metropolitan area.
Simply put, why should we spend 30 minutes to watch crappy baseball on a weeknight in a crappy part of Kansas City, when we could have been driving 10 minutes to watch (probably still crappy) baseball in KC's revitalized downtown? We easily would have attended at least 20 games this year in a downtown ballpark.
Sprint Center has only served to reinforce the sense of an opportunity lost. Even without an anchor tenant, the excitement and atmosphere Sprint Center is able to generate downtown for various concerts as well as events like the Big 12 tourney is incredible. Our friends who have left Kansas City for other opportunities but who have returned in the last couple of years to visit all say the same thing: being down around the Sprint Center and the P&L District doesn't feel like being in Kansas City. Probably because we're used to KC screwing things up however it can, like voting to keep its baseball stadium in the Zubaz Capital of the World.
Imagine that atmosphere an additional 81 night a year.
(Let's take a moment here to congratulate Kansas City, Kansas, on continuing to develop a nice sports and entertainment district out at the Legends. With the construction on the Wizards' new stadium progressing rapidly, we may soon see a summer sporting facility that outclasses the "New K" in terms of atmosphere and fan enthusiasm.)
But back to baseball. The fitting end to this Royals season, like so many others recently, is to let it slip irrelevantly into the night while football takes the stage.
A word of advice to David Glass and Royals management: congratulations on receiving the 2012 All Star Game, but don't miss your opportunity. You'll want to open up those tight purse strings and put a legitimate team on the field that year. Otherwise, the national media will be writing stories not only about your half-hearted stadium renovation, but also about the consistently crappy product you placed on the field that, as usual, is 15 games out by the All Star Break. If you're ever interested in gaining some measure of respectability, 2012 is the year to make your move. Also, since we assume you're going to tie season tickets to All Star Game tickets, putting a legitimate product on the field is the only way you'll be able to avoid the embarrassing prospect of setting a new franchise record for lowest actual attendance.
And that should about wrap it up for the Royals. On to football!
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