KC Royals

It is with great disappointment that I bid farewell to any hopes of the Royals amounting to much more than an also-ran this year. The season started out with great hope: the pitching was excellent, and the offense, while not powerful, was providing just enough offense to win games. So, the logical question is, "What happened?"
The stand-up comic answer is "The Kansas City Royals finally realized that they were the Kansas City Royals."
A more serious answer, though, requires discussion of three problems, one of which was evident from the start of the year: lack of offense. As the weather heated up, the Royals' hitting did not. The offense consistently has shown that it will not be able to produce 4+ runs on a frequent basis. While it is true that the Royals are averaging 4.07 runs per game, the offense has produced more than 4 runs in only 10 of the past 34 games. Half of those were at the start of May, during the Royals' 5-game win streak. In the last 10 games, the Royals have scored more than 4 runs only once. (And I don't even have time to talk about the problem of players striking out a lot. There are several Royals' starters who average 100+ strikeouts a year. A team can survive with 1 guy who strikes out a lot. To have more than 1 is nearly impossible to overcome.) So, the offense needs to produce more runs and to produce them early in games in order to put pressure on the other team's offense. Right now, the Royals are constantly having to play from behind, and part of the reason for that is that they are not scoring runs in the early part of the game.
The Royals' problems, however, also lie in pitching. The team started to struggle tremendously when its closer, Soria, went down with an injury. The bullpen turned into the "blowpen," blowing saves left and right. With Soria back, things have improved little because the starting pitching has not been good. Now, starters do have bad games. A couple of the Royals' loses were the result of a bad outing by one of the starters. Several more were the result of bad pitching by the bullpen. The statistics overall show that the pitching needs to be better, but the pitchers can only do so much. The offense has to help the pitchers out when they have bad days.
In addition to offense and pitching problems, though, the biggest problem the Royals face is an economic problem. They simply cannot afford the players necessary to put together a consistently winning team. For example, the Royals had a potential 30 HR/30 SB player on their roster (Carlos Beltran) a few years ago. They couldn't afford to keep him around because his salary demands were too high. The money that the team gets from revenue sharing is not enough to help offset the vast costs required to put together a team of high-quality players. Unless something changes in the overall salary structure of baseball (i.e. a salary cap), then I see little hope of the Royals putting together a team that consistently is competitive in its division. The only chance that the Royals have is for a bunch of young players (all under relatively-inexpensive long-term contracts) all to mature at the same time, resulting in huge output for a couple of seasons. That could happen, but the Royals need about 5-6 position players and 4-5 pitchers to have those sort of years. That probably is not going to happen.
This year, certainly, it is not going to happen, which means many a day of turning off the radio broadcast early.