Rany off the Royals: Royals blogger Rany Jazayerli’s exit interview

Rany Jazayerli started blogging about the Kansas City Royals because his favorite team was driving him crazy and he needed to tell someone.

In 1995, he co-founded Baseball Prospectus, a website dedicated to sabermetrics, the wonky discipline from which stats emerge about, say, how many runs the Royals outfield has actually saved this year. Later, he created his own outlet, Rany on the Royals, a blog as exhaustively detailed as it is entertaining. And he’s also a regular contributor to Bill Simmons’ sports and pop-culture blog, Grantland.

It’s a lot for a family man with another full-time day job to handle — enough, in fact, for him to set aside his blog.

The Chicago-area dermatologist, a father of four, had planned to table his sportswriting long before the Royals’ unlikely playoff run this fall — a decision that has given his recent entries even more power than the Royals’ thrilling postseason alone would have. Jazayerli’s posts this month have been fueled not only by a how-in-the-heck awe (with small doses of frustration when called for) but also by the knowledge, his and ours, that an era is ending. (Next season — one hopes, anyway — there’s always Twitter.)

With the Royals mere hours from a decisive World Series game 6, Jazayerli consented to an exit interview with The Pitch, conducted by e-mail.

The Pitch: Why are you stopping your blog?

Jazayerli: Well, it’s kind of hard to top this season, isn’t it? But I had decided before the season began that it was time to go. I was 32 years old and had two kids when I started it. I have four kids now, and I turn 40 next June. Spending my free time writing about the Royals means ignoring more people who need me than it used to.

On top of that … it’s hard to say this without sounding arrogant, but I feel like I’ve accomplished almost everything I set out to accomplish when I started writing about baseball as a first-year medical student back in 1995. I have standing offers to be a full-time sportswriter, but I enjoy being a physician too much — and frankly, the pay cut would be too great.

What did you learn from writing your blog?

I’d like to think I learned a little about writing. The only way to learn your craft is to practice it, over and over and over. And I hope I’ve learned to deal with the day-to-day ups and downs of a baseball season a little better. Even the worst teams win 50 times a year; even the best teams lose 50 times a year. Even bad teams make smart decisions, and vice versa. And no team is all bad or all good. I hope that, even when I disagree with what the Royals do, even when I think they’ve done something horribly stupid, I keep perspective a little better than I used to. I’m not perfect myself.

How will the way you watch baseball change when you stop blogging?

For a moment, it will be weird to watch a Royals game and have a reaction to something and realize I don’t have an outlet to share that with people. And then I’ll remember that I still have Twitter.

What are your go-to sources for baseball news and stats?

Twitter is an amazing, exhausting, all-consuming resource — it really is my news feed when it comes to sports. I feel like I get a more thorough exposure to news sources and different opinions via Twitter than from any one website. ESPN.com is still my go-to place for breaking stories. MLB.com and their various apps are the best way to watch highlights of games. Baseball Prospectus, Fangraphs and my colleagues at Grantland all do very good analysis.

What’s your Royals origin story, and how did you come to blog about the team?

I grew up in Wichita, identified as a fan of the team from my earliest childhood, and finally fell headlong into being a die-hard fan in 1989, when I was 14. By the time I was in college, in the early 1990s, it was clear that the Royals were not the most well-run franchise in the game, and in particular that they had a complete disdain for sabermetrics, which was still considered some sort of voodoo science by most teams in that era. When the Royals did absurd things, I felt like I had to tell somebody that they were doing it wrong.

Did you ever reconsider your fandom during the bad years?

I never seriously considered just abandoning the Royals and adopting a new favorite team. That’s like divorcing your parents and choosing new ones. You might become estranged from your parents, but no one can ever take their place. I was estranged from the Royals at times, and I would root for other teams in a pennant race — the Red Sox, the A’s — as a surrogate, but it was always with the understanding that it was just until the Royals finally got their shit together.

What are your thoughts on fair-weather fans?

I almost envy them in a way, to be able to enjoy the good times and not weather the bad. Look, if fair-weather fans didn’t exist, teams wouldn’t have any incentive to improve. Good for them that they haven’t endured a generation of misery like the rest of us have. But this doesn’t mean as much to them as it does to us. It can’t.

Have the Royals been winning because of Ned Yost or in spite of him?

They’re winning because of Yost and because Yost is managing differently now than he did all season. He read the memo that October baseball is different than regular-season baseball, and he deserves all the credit in the world for finally making that adjustment. He’s doing what we’ve been asking him to do all year, and he’s doing it at the perfect time.

Are you superstitious?

I am religious — I am a devout Muslim — but I don’t believe in superstition at all. Sometimes I’ll do or say silly things because it’s fun to think that where I sit in the stands actually can influence whether Salvador Perez hits a home run, but I don’t really believe any of that matters.

That said, as someone who believes in an omniscient creator, the last month has made me wonder if there’s some kind of purpose or meaning to this season. If the Royals find a way to win the World Series against all odds … well, there are a lot of little things which make you wonder if an unseen hand was guiding them.

Win or lose, how will this season change the future of baseball in Kansas City?

It makes baseball cool again. It makes the Royals cool again. I’ve always felt that Kansas City was a baseball town underneath, just waiting for a team worthy of its devotion. Now that it’s gotten one … I mean, have you seen what World Series tickets are going for? I expect attendance to crack 2 million next year, and if the Royals can continue to be a playoff contender, there’s no reason they can’t pull in 2 million or more every year going forward.