There's no helping these sad Royals
Bell not going to enjoy what could be his last shot
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 Nats name Riggleman Jim Riggleman was officially introduced as the manager of the Washington Nationals. |
As city milestones go, Buddy Bell’s hiring by the Kansas City Royals doesn’t exactly rank up there with the pairing of white bread and barbecue.
Tinker Bell might have been a better choice to manage the inept Royals. Tinker, at least, had that magical pixie dust thing going for her.
Even pixie dust isn’t enough to make these Royals fly. This is a team so unaccustomed to the idea of winning that it gave up four unearned runs to blow a five-run, ninth-inning lead the other night in Anaheim — er, Los Angeles.
The Royals aren’t merely bad. They’re awful, which makes you wonder why Bell would give up a nice seat on the bench with the Cleveland Indians to take over a team that loses three games for every one it wins.
Probably because the New York Yankees weren’t calling.
The problem with wanting to manage in the major leagues is that good teams rarely need new managers. Joe Torre isn’t leaving the Yankees any time soon, Mike Scioscia is entrenched in a town near Los Angeles, and Bobby Cox is in his 16th season with Atlanta.
That leaves few options for guys like Bell, who was so eager to get what might be his last shot at managing that he’d have us believe the Royals are this bad only because they are in the midst of rebuilding.
Truth is, the Royals have been bad for a long time. So bad, they haven’t even gotten a whiff of the playoffs since winning the World Series 20 years ago. The team has only one winning record since 1994, can’t keep its best players, and has one of the lowest payrolls in baseball at about $39 million.
“It’s going to take some time to figure this out,” Bell admitted Tuesday.
More time than Bell has, that’s for sure. Hired today, fired in a few years, that’s the pattern for most managers who take on hopeless causes.
Bell is a prime example of that himself. His first managerial gig was with the Detroit Tigers, who promptly lost a staggering 109 games in his first year before rebounding to 79-83 his next year.
The euphoria of a near .500 team didn’t last long, though. The Tigers slipped the next year and, when Bell made the mistake of asking management to clarify his status, they did so with a pink slip.
Bell had one winning season in Colorado, but just barely at 82-80. Soon he was out of a job again, when the Rockies went into a funk.
That’s not to say Bell isn’t a good manager. He might be a very good one, but the economics of baseball may never let him prove it.
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