Horrible, yet not worst!

Look at the standings.

The Royals no longer have the worst record in baseball. That particular distinction now belongs to the Pittsburgh Pirates -- at least, for however long it takes for the Royals to go on a losing streak at the same time the Pirates play a little .500 ball.

Whatever. This is, without bullshit, the happiest I've been looking at the standings all year. No joke. I've avoided talking about Kansas City for fear that I might instinctively open my veins at how horrible there were...and still are.

But the fact is that they've played some decent baseball lately, powered mostly by a winning record in interleague (what does that say about the National League?), and some smattering of wins before and after interleague. They're offense now actually exists, albeit on the scale of amoeba and other single-cell organisms.

And I've got to give some props to three players on the team: David DeJesus, who has simply sizzled since coming off the DL in late May, John Buck, who isn't on fire or anything, but is...productive, and fueling a lot of hopes that he might actually be as good as they were hoping he'd be when they got him in the Carlos Beltran trade, and Mark Teahen, who was demoted to triple A Omaha with the following line: .195/.241/.351, and since being brought back up has done some raking and is now at: .263/.316/.431 -- oh, and he also came over in the Beltran trade.

Oh, there's still plenty to work on -- Teahen and Buck still have pretty horrible k/bb ratios, and DeJesus is still managing to be fast yet seemingly have no real base-stealing ability, but with the career paths that Teahen and Buck were on last year it's simply wonderful to see them being productive enough to be major leaguers. And DeJesus is a stud whether or not he steal bases.

I just wish that they had taken DeJesus for the Royals' All-Star instead of Mark Redman -- at least David has All-Star numbers, even if he's only played in about half the team's games this year. Heck, they could've taken Jimmy Gobble or Elmer Dessens out of the bullpen before they took Redman, but...

...of course the move to make was to somehow find a way to make the Royals a bigger laughing stock than they already were, so they took Redman. Genius.