I remember when the internet wasn’t everywhere. When I was in high school in the aughts, you had to go to a computer to log onto Myspace or Facebook or to browse ESPN. In my freshman year of college at the tail end of the decade, my school didn’t even have WiFi in the dorms—you had to physically plug into the ethernet ports. Connecting while traveling abroad meant buying a physical, temporary SIM card or a burner phone. And airplanes? Forget about it. That’s what the seatback screen is for.
Nowadays,
that’s not the case. On our most recent trip abroad, we had fast and reliable 5G service via a digital eSIM card. On the flight back, the plane had satellite internet via Starlink that I measured at a ludicrous-for-30,000-feet-in-the-air 138 megabits per second. Two weeks ago, we set off on a family vacation: an Alaskan cruise. Internet was, naturally, available for purchase on a per device basis.
But I didn’t buy the internet package. For the first time in over a decade, I didn’t have access to any Royals information whatsoever. No scores. No news. No social media posts. And let me tell you: it was bliss.
Make no mistake; I still love the Royals. I love baseball. I enjoy writing for a passionate audience. However, this season, and really the last few years, has worn me down. And the core reason, I’ve come to realize, is just how many Royals games just haven’t mattered in the standings for over the past decade.
Ever since the Golden Age Royals peaked in 2015 by winning a World Series, baseball in Kansas City has been a struggle. Teams have been bad early, and they’ve been bad often. And with the huge number of games every year, the deluge of meaningless contests has grated against my psyche like the relentless river smoothing out the rock.
I wanted to quantify just how bad it’s been over these last 11 years. While games played mathematically eliminated from contention might be technically correct, it doesn’t cover those games in June and July and August whose outcomes don’t change the trajectory of the team whatsoever, and it doesn’t cover those games in September where a decent team is just far enough out of realistic hope for wins to really make an impact. So I chose a big round number: 10 games behind first place in the American League Central. I took a look at when each team first got there, how many they played in a given season, and the percentage of games played 10 games behind.
The results are harrowing. The Kansas City Royals have fallen to 10 or more games behind first place every year in the last 11 seasons at least once. In total, they’ve played 1,626 games over that time period—nearly 47% of which have been played that far back in the standings. And the average time the Royals reached 10 games back? Game 63, which lines up around the first week of June.
Sports games are fun in and of themselves, but they are most fun when the games are played competently and when those games matter. And in nearly half of all games played over the last decade plus, those games just haven’t mattered; win or loss, the season’s outcome was all but settled anyway.
One time when I was a kid, I thought about shifting my allegiance across state lines. The St. Louis Cardinals were good. They had a fun hat with a bird on it. Why not root for them? That would be more fun, wouldn’t it?
But I just couldn’t do it. I cared about the Royals in a way that I didn’t care about the Cardinals and never would. The Royals were, are, my team. It’s irrational, but so is much about what we love. Relationships with sports teams are tied up in family, in history, in civic pride, in emotion. I couldn’t decouple my affinity for this team. I have tried not to care. It has not worked.
The first game I wrote about after I got back from my trip was Tuesday’s game against the Twins, which was a painful walkoff loss following an excellent start by Seth Lugo. Or, it should have been painful. When it happened, I just sort of shrugged. Another bullpen implosion, another day ending in ‘Y’, as it were. The Royals’ playoff odds were already below ground level.
I don’t have a point here much beyond this, but that’s fine. I’m just tired of meaningless baseball. I’ve followed so much meaningless baseball—and there was much of it before the Royals’ mid-2010s run, too. The weight of it has built up like plaque on my teeth, and I fear that it will be years before we experience meaningful baseball again.
