You Gotta Love These Guys!
You know it. I know it. ESPN, Sports Illustrated and Fox Sports know it. Tony Muser knows it. Mike Sweeney and the innocent batboy who collects the wood after each Royals strikeout — they know it. The Royals won’t go all the way this year.
Instead, they’re the butt of a baseball joke.
Our “ace” pitcher, Jeff Suppan, won only ten games last year. Bright spots number exactly two: Carlos Beltran and Mike Sweeney. Aside from them, Salon.com puts it bluntly: “The Royals are really, really bad.”
The computers at ESPN put the team dead last in the network’s American League “power ranking.” You have to look pretty hard to find someone who believes the Royals can limp to a fourth-place finish over the lowly Detroit Tigers in the pitiful American League Central. Our own Kansas City Star has picked them to finish last.
“This once-proud franchise has no direction and no immediate hope of contending,” says the Hartford Courant.
“They have turned whining about being a small-market team into an art,” says the San Antonio Express-News.
But there’s more at stake than just this season: Two teams will likely be ejected from Major League Baseball.
“While the Twins have almost certainly slipped the contraction noose, the Royals could take their place on the gallows,” says The New York Times. “Gone are the days when Ewing Kauffman was spending what it took to make the Royals a contender. Gone, too, are the days when the Royals drew two million fans.”
But we believe there’s hope for the Royals.
These days, going to the ballpark doesn’t even have to be about baseball — stadiums are crammed full of diversions. At Wahoo World at Jacobs Field, Cleveland Indians fans can pose for pictures with cardboard cutouts of their favorite players. Tampa Bay Devil Rays fans can get juiced at Ray’s Bullpen Café at Tropicana Field. And Arizona Diamondbacks fans get to blow foam at the Ballyard Brewery at Bank One Ballpark. In hopes of bringing the same guilty pleasures to Kauffman, Royals owner David Glass will ask us to pass a second bistate tax in November. Until then, the team is not just playing with its organ. The stadium now boasts a Fun Zone for kids, including Sluggerrr’s Playground. And at each home game, the Jumbotron airs a clip of players answering non-baseball-related questions such as “What is your favorite dessert?” or “What is your favorite movie line?” It’s funny to watch Royals players try to imitate Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men: “You can’t handle the truth.”
You want the truth?
The Royals might suck, but that doesn’t mean they can’t score.
Just ask Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, whose researchers surveyed more than 3,000 women in Atlanta, Cleveland, Houston, Los Angeles, Milwaukee and New York and found that a significant percentage of them claimed to like baseball more than football, hockey and basketball. “Baseball has a unique opportunity — unlike any other major professional sport — to build on the inherently positive feelings women have about baseball and to make them … more active participants in the game,” Selig said when that study was released in 2000.
We decided it was time for all of Kansas City to be more active participants in the game. The very future of the team depends on it!
So what if the Arizona Diamondbacks are sporting World Series rings? Who cares that their fans got to stay drunk for most of October as the team kept getting further and further in the playoffs and ended up spanking the Yankees? Every fifth game, every torturous fifth game, they still had to watch Randy Johnson — a 6-foot-10-inch lizard of a man — unfurl himself over and over. They had to endure the sight of his sweat-drenched mullet tongues licking out from under his cap.
In Kansas City, every fifth glorious game brings another appearance by Jeff Suppan. With his bushy brown goatee and his beefy body, Suppan might not be Hall of Fame material, but he can be the ace of our staff any day.
The suits in the front office don’t get it. They think our team is so flaccid that they have abandoned their “You gotta love these guys” command. But why? We still have Carlos Beltran’s juicy lips, A.J. Hinch’s inviting squat and Mike Sweeney’s imposing thighs bulging out of that sexy new black uniform.
Fans should be arriving early at Kauffman Stadium just to watch these players stretch. Sometimes they help each other. It’s worth the ticket price just to see Beltran straddle Chuck Knoblauch.
Sure, we’ve had our hearts broken as team owners traded away two of our favorites, Johnny Damon and Jermaine Dye. But it’s time for Royals fans to come together and uncover the assets of the next generation of trade bait.
We know it’s not going to be easy. That’s why we brought in experts.
Venus Starr might not know much about the hot corner, but she knows what’s hot. Venus was named Kansas City’s most crushworthy female celebrity in the Pitch‘s annual Best-Of issue last fall. When the young beauty isn’t helping customers slip into something comfortable at Westport’s Arizona Trading Company, Venus plays guitar in the Stretchmarxxx.
And though Major League Baseball didn’t commission a study on gay men’s attitudes toward the game, we know there are plenty of guys in the stands who share an extra appreciation for loaded bases. For the men, we’ve recruited Richard Thomas, who embodies that hard-to-find combination of jock and drag queen. Thomas has spent the last twenty years shaving very close and donning sequined gowns to portray the likes of Diana Ross and Whitney Houston; Richard’s alter-ego, Ramona Baker, has competed in the Miss Gay America pageant. But ball diamonds are a girl’s other best friend, and Baker has spent plenty of time putting on baseball caps and gloves, most recently for the gay Heart of America Sunday Softball League. These days he plays for Wetherbee’s, a gay bar north of the river, and has taken several teams to the Gay World Series.
Our experts sat through games with binoculars in hand. They judged each Royal not on his ability to run, throw, hit or catch, but on how he looked running, throwing, hitting and catching. Sadly, we were unable to judge all 25 members of the Royal roster. Some were subprime. Others will be major players for the team in the coming weeks but have been kept from the lineup because of nagging injuries. We balked at rating players we hadn’t seen in the flesh, though we look forward to Mark Quinn’s deep threat and Roberto Hernandez’s fast balls.
The news that Chad Durbin, who pitched two games, had been exiled to Omaha nearly drew tears from our judges. We have included Venus and Richard’s enthusiastic comments about Chad in an attempt to convince manager Tony Muser to bring the boy back. He should be giving us a big O — not wearing one on his cap.
Rating Guide:
Four balls: He makes our fountains erupt.
Three balls: He’s a bull in our pen.
Two balls: We’d keep him on our bench.
One ball: Send him to Omaha.
Chad Griffin Durbin
No. 33
By athletic standards, pitcher Chad Durbin’s debut this year against the Chicago White Sox was a pitiful display. He gave up one hard-hit ball after another — eight hits in all, including two home runs. Manager Tony Muser yanked Durbin from the game early in the fifth inning. The Royals chose Durbin in the third round of the 1996 draft. In 2000, he became the thirteenth-youngest pitcher to start a game for the Royals. Since then, he has gone from young phenom to giant question mark. Will he or won’t he become a consistent starter at the major-league level? Baseball fans can take heart; Durbin has shown resilience before, enduring seven straight losses last year with what ESPN described as “poise.”
And the 24-year-old Durbin earned at least one fan as he faced Chicago.
“He’s king of the mound,” said Venus.
At 6-foot-2-inches and 200 pounds, Durbin is not the thick-necked, bench-pressing machine a lot of baseball players have become. Durbin’s muscles bulge enough to make him sexy but not freakish.
“Uh oh,” Richard gasped, getting a close-up look at the pitcher’s full-color photo in the Royals’ 2002 yearbook (available for $10 from a friendly vendor). Richard said Chad’s intense eyes and fresh face reminded him of film star Josh Hartnett.
Durbin won Venus’ heart when he patted the ass of catcher A.J. Hinch during a meeting at the rubber. “Baseball is such a sexual game,” she said.
Venus:
Richard:
Jeff Scot Suppan
No. 37
With ten wins each of the last three years, Jeff Suppan clearly has a steady rhythm going. The 27-year-old Oklahoma native is one of the league’s most-frequent starters — he might not be explosive, but he’s not going to have trouble getting it up for a game, either.
We love his big, brown eyes, and if mustache rides are a dollar, we might pay two bucks for a chance to mount Suppan’s full goat. “He kind of looks cool,” Venus said. “He looks like he’s hiding something.”
Suppan came to the Royals from Arizona in 1998 and was named the team’s Pitcher of the Year in 2000 and 2001.
The program lists Suppan at 6-foot-2-inches and 210 pounds, but Suppan looked heavier than that to Richard. “He’s just a big boy,” Richard said. “That’s a good thing.”
Venus:
Richard:
Phillip “Cory” Bailey
No. 58
Relief pitcher Cory Bailey’s promotional photo shows a plain, pudgy-cheeked white man. Based on the picture, Venus assumed he was the kind of party geek who passed out on the couch and woke up with a permanent-ink mustache. “Not really a party crasher — he’s the guy everybody likes to crack at the party.”
Seeing him pitch, Venus changed her mind. “He chews his gum with attitude,” she said.
He also pitches with attitude. An umpire ejected Bailey from a game last July for trying to hit a batter. Bailey, 31, is 6-foot-1-inch and weighs 210 pounds.
Richard’s take on Bailey was an intimate one, which might be loaded with subliminal meaning: “He looks like one of my daddy’s friends who smokes cigars and drinks brandy.”
Venus:
Richard:
Michael John Sweeney
No. 29
First baseman Sweeney, 28, is the rock around which this year’s Royals team has been built. And Richard certainly was impressed with the round-faced Californian’s rock. “He’s got the chest and all,” he said. “He’s like a teddy bear. He’s huge.”
When cocked at the ready to hold a runner at first, Sweeney shows the complete package — shoulders, arms, hips and oh, those gigantic thighs, straining at the fabric of his pants. Sweeney is 6-foot-3-inches tall and weighs 225 pounds.
Venus thought Sweeney was handsome enough, but “you don’t want him to talk,” she said. “If you woke up with him the next morning, you’d say, ‘What was I thinking?’ He’s the one-night-stand of the Royals.”
Sweeney also carries a little baggage — as in the Bible he thumps a little too much. To Venus, the heavy dose of Christianity was a turn-off. “I never thought Jesus was sexy,” she said. “Then again, it makes [Sweeney] seem more of a challenge.”
But the Royals’ highest-paid player doesn’t carry the Bible onto the field. If anything, he sends a message of a different kind. Venus likened him to a sleazy record producer with slicked-back hair who wears a leather jacket without a collar and hangs out at the Hurricane — “the all-American choad.”
Venus wasn’t particularly impressed with his “bad-ass vibe, that ‘Do you know who I am?’ kind of vibe.” Then she said, “Wait, he just grabbed himself.”
Venus:
Richard:
David Andrew McCarty
No. 6
At 6-foot-5-inches and 215 pounds, backup first baseman Dave McCarty is the second-tallest player on the team. He uses every inch when he stretches to shag throws from the infield.
“Tall and skinny. I like that,” was Venus’ assessment.
The 32-year-old Houston native came to Kansas City in 2000 and has been stationed in the outfield, at first base and as designated hitter. In addition to his versatility, McCarty brings blue eyes and a little of that clean-cut, country-boy persona to the team.
Venus initially thought his on-field attitude was cool, but watching him at first base changed her mind. “At first, I thought he didn’t care,” she said. “Now I think he’s kind of clueless.”
Venus:
Richard:
Carlos Manuel Febles
No. 3
Ever-ready second baseman Carlos Febles seems to throb in anticipation of each batter. “I play ball just like that,” Richard said. “He’s high-energy, high-strung.”
Febles joined the Royals’ major-league squad in 1998. Since then, his enthusiasm has sent him to the team doctor and the disabled list more often than it has to the ESPN highlights reel, though a collision in New York with Jermaine Dye last year sent him to both. He tore a ligament in his knee and missed 44 games.
At 5-foot-11-inches and 185 pounds, Febles does not appear to have hurt anything crucial. In Venus’ view, his ass and lips seemed to be working just fine.
Team promotional materials point out that with Febles in the lineup during the last two years, the team lost only six more games than it won. Without him, the team lost a lot more.
Richard surmised that his own similarities to the second baseman might go beyond the playing field. “Anything like me, and he’s really good in bed,” he said.
Venus:
Richard:
Neifi Neftali Perez
No. 8
Shortstop Neifi Perez is the one player on the Royals with enough guts to go with the old-school knickers look. His pants are cut just below the knee, a style Venus dubbed “adorable.”
Perez is a switch hitter; he can bat from either side of home plate. Like Febles, he was born in the Dominican Republic, but he came to Kansas City by way of Colorado. For the Rockies, he earned a Gold Glove as the best fielder in the American League.
The 28-year-old is what the Royals got in exchange for parting with Dye.
At 6-feet and 175 pounds, Perez is no Adonis. “He’s skinny, no bigger than a gnat’s ass,” Richard said. “Neifi Perez ain’t doing nothing for nobody. He’s not anything that I would want to take home.”
Perez’s appeal is not increased by his tendency to point his toe in the style of a department-store mannequin when he is standing around between pitches. But he is not without his selling points. Venus sensed he would be a nice neighbor. “He looks like he’s just an all-around cool guy.”
Venus:
Richard:
Joe Gregory Randa
No. 16
Third baseman Joe Randa lives in Leawood. He makes regular appearances on the radio. He also might have the fattest ass on the Royals roster.
It drew “eeews” from Venus and “ahhhs” from Richard.
“Joe Randa’s got a black man’s butt,” Richard said. “He’s got a body that goes with his legs.”
Randa is 5-foot-11-inches tall and weighs 190 pounds. The 32-year-old Milwaukee native is a product of the Kansas City minor-league system. Traded away in 1996, he returned in 1999. He brought back his permanent stiffy of a smile, which goes a long way toward explaining his nickname: the Joker.
Venus:
Richard:
Edward Charles “Chuck” Knoblauch
No. 11
Left fielder Chuck Knoblauch is a Royals virgin, having moved here from the New York Yankees, where he was on the roster of three World Series teams. He won a championship with the Minnesota Twins before that. Venus was less impressed by his fistful of rings than by his Ryder truck. “Anyone from New York who moves to the Midwest steals my heart,” she said.
A Houston native, the 33-year-old Knoblauch is 5-foot-9-inches tall and weighs 175 pounds. Venus liked his dimples and thought he had a nice laugh, as exhibited on the giant video screen over left field. “He’s kind-hearted as hell,” she surmised.
The charm was lost on Richard, who couldn’t understand why the Royals brought the guy to Kansas City at all (even if his name sounds like knob-lock). “Trust me. He’s too short,” Richard said, holding his pinky in the air. “You want a man with the full-meal deal. You want supersized.”
Venus:
Richard:
Carlos Ivan Beltran
No. 15
Like Perez, center fielder Carlos Beltran swings both ways. He was last year’s Royals Player of the Year. His original scouting report termed him a five-tool player.
At 6-foot-1-inch and 190 pounds, Beltran rules center field, a position that seems lonely to Venus and therefore cool. His cachet was confirmed in the way he loped out an infield grounder, taking his time on the way to first base. “It seems like kind of an ‘I don’t give a fuck’ attitude,” Venus noted.
Beltran was born in Puerto Rico on April 24, 1977. He has a pet monkey.
As for the five tools, Beltran has speed, a strong arm, a good glove, and the potential to hit for both average and power.
“I wonder what else he’s good at,” Richard said. “That’s the man right there. That boy … makes me start drooling just looking at him.”
Venus:
Richard:
Michael Anthony Tucker
No. 24
For Richard, right fielder Michael Tucker’s appeal was wrapped up in his resemblance to a Topeka drag queen he knows. With his wide-set eyes and narrow face, it is not hard to imagine Tucker in rouge and lipstick as a pretty convincing woman. He’d be a big one, though, at 6-foot-2-inches and 195 pounds.
Tucker is another of the Royals’ prodigal sons. The team drafted him in the first round in 1992. He actually played for the major-league club in 1995 and 1996 before the Royals traded him to Atlanta for Dye. Tucker then swung the bat for the Cincinnati Reds and the Chicago Cubs before the Royals made a trade to bring him back this year.
Tucker, 30, is “kind of creepy looking in a stalker kind of way,” Venus decided.
But he’ll always have a place in Richard’s dugout. “He’s cute in his own way,” Richard said. “He looks pretty well stacked.”
Venus:
Richard:
Luis Rene Alicea
No. 12
Platoon infielder and sometime designated hitter Luis Alicea is the team’s “regular dude,” according to Venus. “If I saw him at Sun Fresh I wouldn’t even assume he is a baseball player,” she said.
One more Latin-American switch-hitter (we’re sensing a trend), Alicea is 5-foot-9-inches tall and weighs 175 pounds.
Richard enjoyed Alicea’s “mocha Latino look.”
Venus:
Richard:
Andrew Jay “A.J.” Hinch
No. 7
Catcher A.J. Hinch is not afraid to get dirty. Venus liked that.
It makes him patriotic, she said. “When I think of dirty pants, I think mechanic. When I think mechanic, I think Ford. When I think Ford, I think of America,” she added.
He didn’t cast quite the same spell over Richard. “He’s a cute guy, but I don’t think he’s all that,” he said.
Hinch is 6-foot-1-inch and weighs 205 pounds. He was part of a United States Olympic team that won a bronze medal.
But with his behind-the-plate squat and his backward hat, Hinch also won Venus’ affection. Bat in hand, the 27-year-old Iowa native straddled the plate, causing Venus to observe that “No. 7 has quite a package.” Catchers wear cups, which can enhance the appearance of a player’s natural equipment, though that revelation quelled none of Venus’ enthusiasm for her “all-American boy.”
Venus:
Richard:
Rate-a-Royal!
Here’s a big, wet kiss to our celebrity Royals raters, Venus and Richard. But as summer in Kansas City begins to heat up, why should those two have all the fun? After all, if your Kansas City Royals really want to hit a home run with fans this year, some eye candy on the field is just as important as the cotton candy at the concession stands. Sure, everyone goes to the stadium for the hot dogs — but we want to know which wieners you really like.
Write your own 250-word essay on which Royal has the hottest number and why. Explicit language is encouraged.
Send entries no later than Memorial Day. By July 4, Pitch editors will have announced a winner, who will get free tickets to a Royals game. And we’ll publish all entries at pitch.com.
Mail to: Pitch Rate-a-Royal, 1701 Main, Kansas City, MO 64108 — or enter your essay online.
