Barring unforeseen circumstances, this will be the last edition of "Rany on the Royals" for a while. It's not that I no longer enjoy writing about the Royals, because I do. It's not even that I'm fed up with the futility of covering a team that seems utterly hopeless, because as cynical as some of my recent columns have been, I'm actually more optimistic today than I have been in some time. The White Sox look to me like a paper tiger, and I fully expect a .500 team to contend for the division title well into September.

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No, the reason I'm ending this column is because I finally get it; I understand why Rob Neyer decided to end our conversations last fall. I didn't understand at the time, because I still had plenty to say about the Royals. But I was seeing our column from the perspective of a Royals fan, and what was great about "Rob & Rany" was that it didn't appeal to the Royals fan, it appealed to the baseball fan. It did so because the Royals were a perfect microcosm of all that goes wrong in baseball management: the once-mighty small-market team that had abandoned the principles that helped it reach the top, and was now paying the consequences.

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It happens every spring. Some unknown kid shows up for camp, just happy for the opportunity to hang out with the big club before he's shipped out to the minor-league complex. Only when he takes the mound, he surprises everyone by throwing harder and better than he ever has before. And when he toes the rubber in an early March exhibition game, he creates a huge buzz by overpowering hitters and lighting up radar guns from here to Kissimmee.

This year, the kid is Jeremy Affeldt. On March 3, the southpaw took the mound for his first appearance and put on a pitching performance so astonishing that it headlined not one, but two separate columns in the Kansas City Star the next day. Affeldt struck out five of the six hitters he faced, and since these were the Pirates, one or two of them might have even been threats to put the ball in play. One observer, not normally given to hyperbole, told me that Affeldt's outing was, in a word, Koufaxesque. (This from someone who saw Sandy Koufax pitch many times.)

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The 11th hour has begun. That, in itself, is a good sign. The Royals never got to the 11th hour with Johnny Damon. Jermaine Dye was shipped out of town at the slightest hint of urgency. But Mike Sweeney, whose contract expires with the 2002 season, is still in a Royals uniform.

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Sweeney represents the final chance at redemption for David Glass and the Kansas City Royals. For years, Royals fans have been fed the party line that the team had no money with which to pursue free agents, and that story washed down easy for a while, because in its place we were offered the promise of an exciting young ballclub that was built from within, a team that could be competitive without outside help.

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If the Royals are in a good frame of mind, it must be spring.

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If they're still in first place, it must be spring.

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Today, though, I don't want to talk about any of the blunders that Baird has made. Instead, I wanted to concentrate on the very first meaningful decision that Baird made after he was promoted to GM, one that yielded only a brief mention by the media at the time, but that has the potential to be among the biggest mistakes Baird will ever make.

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If you follow the Royals--or any part of the Kansas City sports scene--you already know this. Joe Posnanski sees the world through a different shade of glasses than most people do. Where you and I see the Carolina Panthers, 1-15 on the year, he might see the 1989 Dallas Cowboys. When a midwest thunderstorm rolls through town and starts dropping hail the size of watermelons, Posnanski will be thinking how nice it is that he doesn't have to turn on the sprinklers.

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I was wrong. The Kansas City Star's Bob Dutton informed me that Brown does, in fact, have an option left.

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Last year began with a feeling of hopelessness brought on by trading a 27-year-old outfielder for a 36-year-old reliever. The Royals haven't done anything nearly so stupid this during this off-season--not yet--but they haven't done anything to change the impression that they have become completely irrelevant as a franchise. They're not just a bad team, because some teams are bad as a necessary first step to becoming good. The Royals look like they're playing in the American League just as a favor to it for scheduling purposes.

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