At this time of year, when the average fan glances at the standings, it’s usually to get a sense of the various teams at the top battling for one of the six spots in each association giving access to the playoffs.
Today, I suggest you look at the ranking the other way around, from bottom to top. A priori, with their catastrophic start to the season, one might believe that it is the Oakland A’s who are languishing, by far, at the bottom of the general MLB rankings. Well no! They are penultimate. Worst team: Kansas City Royals.
Indeed, with less than twenty games remaining, Oakland is playing for an average of .313 (45-99) while for KC, the winning percentage is at .306 (44-100). The symbolic bar of 100 defeats has therefore already been crossed for KC!
Bright future according to rookie Lawrence Butler
Generally speaking, when we talk about the Oakland A’s, it’s more to talk about their potential future move to Las Vegas than their performance on the field. Sure, they’re having a horrible year, but still, it’s not as bad as expected. They even managed to post seven consecutive wins in June!
It should be remembered that the Athletics began their 2023 campaign with a pitiful 12-50 record, which represented the second worst start to a season for a team in the entire rich history of the MLB. They were thus destined to conclude the year with a record of 120 defeats. In this sense, they would have tied the sad record of the New York Mets of 1962, for the greatest number of defeats in a season in modern baseball history (1901-present).
For history fans, the 2003 Detroit Tigers came close to matching this record, concluding their campaign with 43 victories against 119 losses. You have to do it!
Let’s look at the glass half-filled: the situation in Oakland is not as bad as advertised, at least, on the ground. The team’s rookie outfielder, Lawrence Butler, agrees. Despite the mockery of many this year, including the author of these lines, Butler predicts a much better season in 2024 for his team. He believes that the team has a bright future with the players in place and that there will be progression.
Who knows, if in a few years Oakland will not imitate the Baltimore Orioles to become one of the best teams in the Majors after accumulating miserable seasons? The foundations are there, let’s put it that way.
To return to the Royals
The situation of the Royals is no longer seen as a glass half empty, it seems.
Let’s call a spade, a spade, what’s happening for Kansas City fans is disastrous. To think the team won the championship just eight years ago. It seems so far away, alas! The club is in distress. Salvador Perez is not getting any younger, much less Zack Greinke. THE poster boy of the team is Bobby Witt Jr. and he seems very alone on his island. Journalists who follow the team’s activities even wonder if the latter will want to stay with the collective for a long time! Who are the top prospects in the entire organization?
We pretty much suspected that the Missouri team was going to have a terrible campaign, but to be worse than the A’s is Kafkaesque.
Unlike the Californian team, they are well in the saddle in Kansas City. The new stadium project is progressing well. Something will have to be done on the field, because in the short and medium term, the sun does not look bright on the sky at Kauffman Stadium.
