You Gotta Love These Guys!

You know it. I know it. ESPN, Sports Illustrated and Fox Sports know it. Tony Muser knows it. Mike Sweeney and the innocent batboy who collects the wood after each Royals strikeout -- they know it. The Royals won't go all the way this year.

Instead, they're the butt of a baseball joke.

Our "ace" pitcher, Jeff Suppan, won only ten games last year. Bright spots number exactly two: Carlos Beltran and Mike Sweeney. Aside from them, Salon.com puts it bluntly: "The Royals are really, really bad."

The computers at ESPN put the team dead last in the network's American League "power ranking." You have to look pretty hard to find someone who believes the Royals can limp to a fourth-place finish over the lowly Detroit Tigers in the pitiful American League Central. Our own Kansas City Star has picked them to finish last.

"This once-proud franchise has no direction and no immediate hope of contending," says the Hartford Courant.

"They have turned whining about being a small-market team into an art," says the San Antonio Express-News.

But there's more at stake than just this season: Two teams will likely be ejected from Major League Baseball.

"While the Twins have almost certainly slipped the contraction noose, the Royals could take their place on the gallows," says The New York Times. "Gone are the days when Ewing Kauffman was spending what it took to make the Royals a contender. Gone, too, are the days when the Royals drew two million fans."

But we believe there's hope for the Royals.

These days, going to the ballpark doesn't even have to be about baseball -- stadiums are crammed full of diversions. At Wahoo World at Jacobs Field, Cleveland Indians fans can pose for pictures with cardboard cutouts of their favorite players. Tampa Bay Devil Rays fans can get juiced at Ray's Bullpen Café at Tropicana Field. And Arizona Diamondbacks fans get to blow foam at the Ballyard Brewery at Bank One Ballpark. In hopes of bringing the same guilty pleasures to Kauffman, Royals owner David Glass will ask us to pass a second bistate tax in November. Until then, the team is not just playing with its organ. The stadium now boasts a Fun Zone for kids, including Sluggerrr's Playground. And at each home game, the Jumbotron airs a clip of players answering non-baseball-related questions such as "What is your favorite dessert?" or "What is your favorite movie line?" It's funny to watch Royals players try to imitate Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men: "You can't handle the truth."

You want the truth?

The Royals might suck, but that doesn't mean they can't score.

Just ask Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, whose researchers surveyed more than 3,000 women in Atlanta, Cleveland, Houston, Los Angeles, Milwaukee and New York and found that a significant percentage of them claimed to like baseball more than football, hockey and basketball. "Baseball has a unique opportunity -- unlike any other major professional sport -- to build on the inherently positive feelings women have about baseball and to make them ... more active participants in the game," Selig said when that study was released in 2000.

We decided it was time for all of Kansas City to be more active participants in the game. The very future of the team depends on it!

So what if the Arizona Diamondbacks are sporting World Series rings? Who cares that their fans got to stay drunk for most of October as the team kept getting further and further in the playoffs and ended up spanking the Yankees? Every fifth game, every torturous fifth game, they still had to watch Randy Johnson -- a 6-foot-10-inch lizard of a man -- unfurl himself over and over. They had to endure the sight of his sweat-drenched mullet tongues licking out from under his cap.

In Kansas City, every fifth glorious game brings another appearance by Jeff Suppan. With his bushy brown goatee and his beefy body, Suppan might not be Hall of Fame material, but he can be the ace of our staff any day.

The suits in the front office don't get it. They think our team is so flaccid that they have abandoned their "You gotta love these guys" command. But why? We still have Carlos Beltran's juicy lips, A.J. Hinch's inviting squat and Mike Sweeney's imposing thighs bulging out of that sexy new black uniform.

Fans should be arriving early at Kauffman Stadium just to watch these players stretch. Sometimes they help each other. It's worth the ticket price just to see Beltran straddle Chuck Knoblauch.

Sure, we've had our hearts broken as team owners traded away two of our favorites, Johnny Damon and Jermaine Dye. But it's time for Royals fans to come together and uncover the assets of the next generation of trade bait.

We know it's not going to be easy. That's why we brought in experts.

Venus Starr might not know much about the hot corner, but she knows what's hot. Venus was named Kansas City's most crushworthy female celebrity in the Pitch's annual Best-Of issue last fall. When the young beauty isn't helping customers slip into something comfortable at Westport's Arizona Trading Company, Venus plays guitar in the Stretchmarxxx.