How Low Can The Royals Go??

ESPN' Rob Neyer (a long-suffering Royals fan like me) and The Baseball Prospectus' Rany Jazayerli have a great blog here. I really liked what Rany had to say about the Royals' woes (now 2-11).

I haven't been nearly as critical of the Glass family as a lot of Royals fans, in part because it's hard to argue that ownership is the problem when the Twins won three straight divisional titles under Carl Pohlad, and in part because you can't fire the owner, so criticizing him serves no useful purpose.

But if David Glass is half as committed to winning as he claims to be, he absolutely must do two things:

1) Clean house.  Bring in a GM from somewhere else, and give him the mandate to absolutely blow this organization apart.  A team so fundamentally bad that its pitchers can't throw strikes even when given a mandate to make that their highest priority is a team whose coaching staff is incompetent almost to a man.  If it means whacking two-thirds of the team's on-field personnel, so be it.

2) Stop meddling in team affairs.  Allard Baird didn't create this mess by himself.  Baird may be nice enough to take bullets for his owner, but all that has done is obscure the reality that the Glasses are much more responsible for the team's predicament than the average fan realizes.

Unless and until these two things happen, everything else about this team -- from Zack Greinke and Denny Bautista to Alex Gordon and Billy Butler -- is irrelevant.

Here's another reason to clean house. The losing tradition of the 90s into the new century has made it tough to KC around. Combine that with a small-market situation and you've got trouble. The Royals have become a joke in Major League Baseball.

It also makes what Pena and the '03 Royals accomplished seem more amazing.

(PHOTO: JEFF ROBERSON/The Associated Press)