Brian Hipp, a Royals fan, writes:

As one of the 13k+ at the Royals-Twins game last night, I'll tell you where the buzz is.

Everyone out here is a Chiefs fan. In general, the Royals are regarded with pity, disdain, but mostly indifference. No one takes the Royals seriously. And for good reason. Even now, as we are finally playing well and challenging the Twins for first place, management is openly shopping our best player, Beltran, who is not even a free agent until after next season. Keep that in mind about the ownership of this club. No team starts unloading their best players two years before free agency, but the Royals do! And given Allard Baird's track record (Johnny Damon for Blake Stein, Jermaine Dye for Neifi Perez), fans don't have a lot of faith in his ability to get anything of value for Beltran. Just don't trade with the A's!

Also consider that Mike Sweeney can walk after next season if we don't reach .500, that mythical plane of baseball nirvana we haven't attained since 1994. People recognize that if we lost 100 last year with Sweeney and Beltran, we might become the Tigers without them. Most reasonable people think that trading Beltran for prospects will greatly diminish the chance of locking Sweeney in. But then again, maybe that's David Glass's point in trading Beltran.

We haven't sniffed the playoffs since 1985 when we won it all, and we just lost 100 last year. I wish we'd get more fans out there at the K, but no one takes the team seriously. And it's hard to. We look across the state at hated St. Louis, see a real baseball franchise, and it makes us jealous. We look at the Chiefs, a team that despite its recent problems was very successful throughout the 90s, signs free agents, and signs its own players. The Royals haven't done any of those things. It's just hard to get too fired up when you only trust the team to do wrong thing.

The Royals are kind of like your kid's tee-ball team. It's fun go watch a game every once in a while because it's cheap, baseball is fun to watch, and there are a few exciting players. But most parents don't take it too seriously because pretty soon the season will be over, the players will soon be on different teams, and there's no chance of winning anything meaningful at the end of the season.