“So you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is: never try.”
— Homer Simpson

Maybe it was the over-the-top, Star Wars-inspired evil empire montage Fox used to open the 2004 ALCS between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. Maybe it was the exquisitely painful coverage of the Mistake by the Bay, Barry Bonds. Maybe it was the ESPN story about how A-Rod was ticketed for double parking his Prius outside Studio 54 because he didn’t know it closed in 1986 and then went 0-20 with five fielding errors during a Bronx home stand. Maybe it was because my backyard team, the Washington Nationals, is firmly nestled between “suck” and “blow.”

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Somewhere in that miasma, I decided to try to make baseball fun again. I wanted nothing to do with the East Coast bias of ESPN and SI.com. I didn’t want the plastic paradise of California. I didn’t want the harsh light of media focus to drown out the opportunity to learn about a new team and new fan base. I wanted to find 2007’s Detroit Tigers — the downtrodden franchise in flyover country (i.e. Real America) that comes from nowhere to make fans’ dreams of glory legitimate again. (Also like — fingers crossed — the 2007 Buffalo Sabres). I wanted a real team.

I was hoping for the Minnesota Twins.

I got … definitely not the Twins.

I set some ground rules. No teams from New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay area (too much media exposure). Also, no team that won the World Series this decade (eliminating Arizona, Florida, Boston and St. Louis). And no local teams (Peter Angelos can eat Charm City male genitalia. But $3 Nationals tickets are a delight.)

That left a number of teams stretching across the country from Seattle (intriguing) to Tampa Bay (gah). The remaining team names were dropped into a hat. In went my hand and out came the Texas Rangers. I made a face. Texas? I didn’t want to be on Clemens Watch 2007 once he decides to put down the cheeseburgers. With a nod to being in the nation’s capital, I changed the rules because I didn’t like the outcome.

So my fiancée picked four more names from the hat to assemble the final five (none were Gaius Baltar.) My teams for 2007 were narrowed to Texas, the Kansas City Royals, the Minnesota Twins, the Colorado Rockies and the Philadelphia Phillies. I was most excited about the Twins — Joe Mauer, Torii Hunter, Johan Santana, Francisco Liriano, Justin Morneau. They are small market team that smartly assembles pieces through the minor leagues and struggles to keep them on the team as their skill outstrips their original contracts. (Hmm, sounds familiar.)

But I could live with the others, except one.

“Not the Royals,” I said to no deity in particular.

“Oh, I like them,” she said. A former resident of Ft. Leavenworth (the military housing, not the military prison) just over the Kansas line, she attended Royals games as a kid. She once appeared on SportsCenter as the classic “Kid asleep at the ballgame.”

So she reached into the hat.

And, just by chance she swears, she picked the Royals.

This is how she repays me for the engagement ring.

So, the Kansas City Royals.

Believe it or not, the Royals were good within the lifetime of people you know. From the mid-1970’s to the mid-1980’s, Kansas City won two pennants, one World Series and more games than any team in major league baseball. (Deadspin provided a terrific primer for the uninitiated.) The Royals were like the Buffalo Bills of major league baseball, except for, you know, actually winning a championship.

Those days are long gone. The first hint is the slogan on their website, “True. Blue. Tradition.” When teams invoke their past as a marketing strategy, that warrants a “Raised Eyebrow” on the Scale of Fan Concern. Their Game Seven victory in the 1985 World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals was their last playoff game. The 2003 season was their only winning season these last 10 years. They lost at least 100 games in four of their last five seasons. Gods, even the New Orleans Saints used enough FEMA trailer rebates to buy a playoff win in that timeframe.

Of course, all that is about to change now that former Seattle Mariners pitcher Gil Meche will be donning a Kansas City uniform. He, the new sheriff in town that’ll bring baseball success back to western Missouri. He, of career numbers 55-44 and an ERA of 4.65. His new KC contract paid him $1 million for each career win.

"Our ownership was very supportive and directed us to go for this,” Royals GM Dayton Moore told USA Today. “Our players were excited about getting Gil Meche. And our fans are excited. Our fans are excited. They think it's great to see the Royals on SportsCenter in the off season doing something."

Uh, oh. The “Hey look. We’re doing something. We’re on SportsCenter!” excuse. That’s so alarming, it rates “Drudge Report Siren” on the Scale of Fan Concern. Here, let’s deploy that right now.

There’s a phrase that Washington Redskins fans spit through gritted teeth about their beloved ’Skins: “Winning the off-season.” By signing Meche and, uh, who else?, the Royals didn’t even do that. It’s bad, it’s real bad, it’s so really bad that this is offered by USA Today as reason for optimism:

“[Zack] Greinke, 23, is considered to possess one of the most promising right arms in baseball despite leading the American League in losses with a 5-17 record for the 2005 Royals. Yet he abruptly left camp last spring, upset and confused about what he wanted to do with his life. He says at that point he hated baseball. He considered going to college and says he even thought about mowing lawns for a living.”

So, faced with the choice of providing lawn care services for women who look and drink like Lucille from “Arrested Development,” plus risking accidental deportation during an ICE raid, or earn hundreds of thousands of dollars playing major league baseball with the Royals, baseball was only marginally better sweaty, minimum-wage labor. True. Blue. Tradition.

Maybe Mark Grudzielanek would like to trim my bushes.

The Royals play in Kauffman Stadium, now one of the older the stadiums in baseball (especially once Yankee Stadium goes the way of the wrecking ball.) Here is an outside perspective about the stadium and the Royals experience. According to Zubaz Brother Steve who lives in St. Louis, the Royals don’t even show up on Cardinals fans’ radar. But, he said, that is because they are in different leagues. The Chicago Cubs are the big rival in St. Louis. The big heat is when the Rams and Chiefs face off in preseason football every year. The Royals are such a nonentity I can’t even get a good hate quote from people on the ground in the state.

So how do I plan on providing updates on the Show-Me State Sadsacks? Infrequently for the sake of my sanity. They arrive in Baltimore in a few weeks for a four-game series with the equally pathetic Orioles. I might drag the fiancée up to Camden Yards for an exhibition that proves Homer Simpson correct when he was forced to attend a baseball game sans beer. “I never realized how boring this game is,” said the sage of Springfield.

The ace for your 2007 Kansas City Punchlines.

I’ll miss the end of the regular season because of wedding/honeymoon activities. But I’ll follow their game stories online and read their hometown paper, maybe check out a Royals “blog” or two. At least until my eyes start bleeding for the horror. I’ll be sure to inform the Zubaz audience how things are going. You depend on me for more than right-wing sniping and Star Wars articles. I’ll honor that trust.

"We've got a lot of young kids that may or may not be ready for the big leagues, but I think at some point the people in Kansas City are going to fall in love with these guys," Moore said.

I think we’re off the chart on the Scale of Fan Concern.

Questions? Comments? Bluthmobile? E-mail me at mlucinski@yahoo.com.

Michael Lucinski lives, loves and works in the Washington, D.C. area. He’s a graduate of the University at Buffalo and the George Washington University. At least I can find Kansas City on a map. It’s west of Manhattan.

And hey, check out some of my greatest hits:
Game 7 ecstasy and agony
A square peg in a round hole
Yo Joe? Hell no