Royalties & Cardinalate

Tonight, I find myself scouring the web for articles proclaiming the Royals the surprise team of 2002. Of course, I don't find any. Why this maniacal need to discover validation for a team that I really don't have anything to do with? I don't know. Perhaps there is a pervading sense of impending doom arising within me already. The Royals have done nothing but disappoint for eight years now. It'll take more than one great game to shake off the effects of that span. I can still picture, in my mind, the newspaper headlines in August of 1994. There was no doubt that the season was shot - all signs pointed to it. And I was getting it from two ends: not only were the Royals fresh off a 13-game winning streak, but I was a fresh-faced jay setting up house in the big city, within a really, really long toss of Wrigley Field. For eight months, almost every day, I walked past the perimeter of the ballpark. Always, I would cross the street to walk next to it. Occasionally, I would peer through cracks and openings, hoping to catch a glimpse of green. Silent ballpark. Frozen winter. Dead ivy hanging brittle on the old brick walls. Perhaps it's not just the Royals. For a long time now, baseball has perpetually let me down. Not so long ago, I loved baseball strictly because of the mythology, the history and the legend. Then, about five years ago, in a time of great chaos in my own personal universe, I discovered sabermetrics - the quantitative analysis of baseball results. For me, in another vein, this filled the same fundamental need that writing fiction does, though on a more superficial level. It allows me to exist in an orderly universe, to hide away from the chaos of everyday life and exist in realms that make sense, at least to me. Hmmm. It's late and I've digressed to the point that I no longer recall what it was that spurred me to update this log for the first time in seven months. The season just started. The Royals are undefeated. Tomorrow, I head out to the K to take in my first game of the season. The editors at the Star accepted my ideas for revamping the standings in the morning paper. Now we run runs scored and runs allowed. Things are good. It'll be an interesting season and now that the seal has been taken off this blog, we'll see what pours forth till autumn.