The Agony of Rany Jazayerli, Royals Fan

The Kansas City Royals currently have the worst record in baseball. They last made the playoffs in 1985, going on to win the first and only World Series Championship in team history. Since then, it’s been a postseason drought of over a quarter century. The Royals have had a winning percentage above .500 only three times in the past twenty years. They have failed to reach the playoffs in my lifetime.

Which doesn’t bother me so much, because I’m a Mariners fan. We can discuss that particular indignity later, but for now, this post is about the Royals, and their fans, and one fan specifically, a gentleman named Rany Jazayerli. Mr. Jazayerli is known around the internet baseballing world as co-founder of Baseball Prospectus, a board certified dermatologist, and, as he puts it on his personal website, “pathetic Royals fan all the time.” Recently, this last designation has come under fire. Despite a mounting case against such behavior, Rany has been known in years prior to be a relatively optimistic Royals fan, objective yet hopeful. Times are changing. In his latest blog entry “Time Out,” Jazayerli lays out an opus of angst and frustration, questioning his dedication to the Royals and the time commitment required to maintain his intense fandom. The post is a cathartic read for any fan of a struggling franchise, equal parts rational appeal and emotional outburst. To wit:

"I can put up with the losing. I can put up with the delayed gratification, even if that delay now amounts to most of my lifetime. But I can’t put up with stupidity. I can’t put up with a team that has only one solution for every problem that develops: keep doing what we’re doing, only do it more."

I can sympathize. Like I said, I’m a Mariners fan. I have my own set of grievances and lists of complaints. I can launch into a diatribe about botched draft picks and mishandled trades at a moments notice. I can hardly even look at Adam Jones and Shin-Soo Choo. The spectre of Bill Bavasi forever haunts me. And I’d be lying if I said my fandom hasn’t lapsed occasionally—that I haven’t wondered if there weren’t better uses of my time than futile devotion to a flailing sports organization. The baseball season is dark and full of terrors. It can feel so amazingly long. One hundred and sixty-two games of subpar baseball can take a lot out of a person.

So I think this kind of disillusionment is normal, hell, it might even signify some sort of weird growth and maturity. Being a sports fan is a strange and silly practice, maybe taking a step back and recalibrating ones perspective is a necessary part of the process from time to time. There are also all sorts of things to like about baseball that have nothing to do with the home team you root for. There are other teams out there, many with good players on them! There’s fantasy baseball, and statistical analysis, and more baseball blogs written by more talented people than you could imagine. There’s Twitter and draft coverage and endless Hall of Fame debates. We can’t go twenty-four hours without some baseball player or media person doing something extremely entertaining and/or stupid that has nothing to do with the game on the field. So stay strong, fans of terrible baseball teams, find the joy where you can and hold on to it. And if that starts to lose its luster, you can always write the occasional 3,300 word blog post to get the anger out of your system. There’s no right or wrong way to do this.

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Kyle writes baseball nonsense at The Trance of Waiting. You can follow him on Twitter @AgainstKyle.