Listen: We know we haven’t posted in a while. But it was hard to make fun of the Royals for a while. At one point in the season, they were 17-14 and at the top of the division.

Even when the laws of averages caught up with them and they started to lose a few games, there was still some excitement. Alex Gordon may have finally figured it out. Escobar plays a mean shortstop. They came the waves of new talent: Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Danny Duffy, etc.

Then…

Hell, I don’t know. The Royals started to play bad baseball again. Like, comically bad, must be made fun of, I’ve found inspiration again bad.

It is no coincidence that the Royals, losers of 5 in a row, are now nearing a pace necessary to lose 100 games. It’s also no coincidence that the recent revelation of how bad this team is comes when Kyle Davies is on the mound. After his rehab assignment, he seems to be in mid-season form. And by that, I mean he gave up a lot of runs and a lot of hits.

He also did something smart, presumably to help his bloated ERA – he made an error, throwing the ball up the first base line. Those runs, you see, don’t count against his ERA. Smart, huh?

So, the Royals are back to their losing ways.

And we’re back to writing.

We'll let you know when the Royals find the bottom. It's what we do.

We’d call this the Titanic, except for the fact that we never expected this ship to float.

The Royals are in a freefall, a downslide, a faltering, a … well, you get the idea.

Suddenly, we’re having trouble hitting the ball AND pitching the ball at the same time, and for years, it’s always seemed to be one or the other.

With a 6-5 extra inning loss, the boys in hometown blue are suddenly nine games out of first place. We’re not mathematicians, but that’s not good.

There are two things that make the current slide even more disconcerting: The Royals look more and more like the awful teams of the past, with one major exception, which is the scary part: the demise of Joakim Soria’s badassedness. That may not be a word, but you know what I mean. He blew another save and subsequently, another late-inning lead.

He was the Mexecutioner. Now, he’s more like the Let Them Hit Home Runs-tioner.

The Royals, with the loss, are now on pace to lose 90 games, but that pace is quickening, considering they are 3-7 over their last ten.

We’d cry out SOS, but you probably saw Sean O’Sullivan’s 10-earned run outing on Saturday, so maybe that’s not such a good idea after all.

What’s remarkable, is how often the Royals are getting picked off. They lost six men on the basepaths in two games between baserunning gaffs, and Billy Butler simply looked lost in getting tagged out yesterday.

Unfortunately, the Royals didn’t have to face something like in the video below. They only had to face normal pickoff moves, and they still couldn’t hack it.

Sure, other things, like, say, walking two men with the bases loaded, hurt the team yesterday in a 9-8 loss to the Cards. But I’m blaming baserunning errors, mostly because I found this video.

- The Critic

Everyone is off the bandwagon now, right?

I’m not one for too much nostalgia, but I like to remember back to the good ol’ times every so often.

Some of you young’uns won’t believe me, but the Royals use to be good. They hit for a little bit of power, they ran well and they scrapped out close games. Their pitching staff looked good, too.

But the first week of the season has passed us by, and now were are firmly back where we’ve been so many times before. We’re back to the land of pitchers setting records for bad efforts, only to get immediately demoted. We’re back to the timid offense (with the exception of Eric “My Name Almost Spells Homers, And That’s About Right, Bitches” Hosmer) and defensive gaffs.

And, if we talk specifically about the 5-4 loss the Royals posted on Wednesday night, we’re back to when the Royals get consecutive baserunners picked off in high leverage situations and when, in the 10th inning with the bases loaded and one out, we get no runs. We may also be back to the time when our closer decides its okay to give up runs, like Soria did last night.

Ah. Just like the good ol’ days.

- The Critic

For some reason, the bloggers at the Race to 100 did not receive an invite.

We’re a bit crushed we didn’t get to blog our way to The K, as last night’s game versus Cleveland gave us ample material to work with. However, since there were about 27 bloggers at Kauffman that weren’t us who can provide you the details, we’ll spare you the play-by-play and just remind you that our Royals have now dipped below .500 and that we’re at the point in the season where fans consider a 3-7 loss “not that bad.”

In the meantime, we’re still trying to figure out why our “Blog Your Way to the K” application was denied. I mean, let’s just say, hypothetically, that I had one Royal’Rita too many on opening weekend, started weeping during “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” screamed at a kid for singing the wrong words, and then hurled into the fountains. Assuming that happened, there is no way you can connect me to this blog.

We would appreciate an invite next year.

- The Law

Vin Mazzaro History:

• 22.74 ERA (hopefully this is his Royal career number)
• 14 earned most in Royals History
• 14 earned in two and a third  most in that short of an outing in MLB history

Maybe these would have helped the Royals last night.

My cousin and I use to play wiffle ball a lot. And by a lot, I mean EVERY day. He lived in Louisiana, and he’d visit during the summers, and we were young and the Royals were kinda good then, and we loved baseball. He was three years younger than I was, so we never played on the same Little League teams. Instead, we played wiffle ball all day. We had home run fences, we developed secret pitch names and we had a roster full of fake players. It was a pretty imaginative sort of thing, but it had real value, too: It’s during those playful summers that I learned to bat left handed (I’m a righty by nature), because we always use to bat from both sides, and if you can hit a spinning pitch with an inch-thick bat, you can pretty much hit anything. We got good, good enough that we stopped using the standard-sized wiffle balls and instead used plastic practice golf balls, or otherwise we would have never stopped hitting the ball.

Sometimes, my sister would play. Not always, but sometimes. And she was no match for us. We were wiffle ball studs, Kenny and I. So, we tried to even the field a little bit. We used the standard-issue, skinny, yellow bat. We gave her the big, broad-barreled red bat. That way, when our slider dug down and away, or our knuckleball dropped a foot (Hey! Don’t doubt it. Wiffle ball mechanics are straight weird) she could often still make contact.

Which brings me to the Royals 3-1 loss on Friday night.

It looked like the Royals could have used those bigger bats, because they weren’t even close to Justin Verlander’s pitches, and at one point, including the game before he beat the Royals (again) he had a streak of 14 consecutive hitless innings.

There has been no word from the Royals’ clubhouse on using a Bam Bam bat in tonight’s contest.

- The Critic

We can now watch Johnny Damon get booed in Florida, Carlos Beltran stay hurt most of the time in New York and Jose Bautista hit 54 home runs for Toronto.

And, there is, of course, former fan favorite David DeJesus. He seemed to be the most likable guy on the Royals squad. I actually saw him once (true story) playing Golden Tee golf with John Buck on the Country Club Plaza. I might have said hello to him, had he not been surrounded by nearly 100,000 (or so) attractive women, so many that it made it difficult to wade through the crowd that followed him. He is a pretty man.

He’s also an Oakland Athletic now, as he left us via the trade that brought us Vin “Still Toiling In the Minors” Mazzaro and Justin “Still Toiling Somewhere, We Hope, Has Anyone Seen Him Recently?” Marks.

It’s hard watching our former favorites succeed… but we really can’t say that about DeJesus, who is batting just .222 this season. His on base percentage is under .300 right now, too, far below his lifetime OPB of .358.

Even so, the Royals lost twice to his As, meaning that was the series they’d lost at home all season. I’m pretty sure it’s all about DeJesus, even if he did go just 2-13 during the three-game tilt. And even if it wasn’t about him, it gives me an excuse to publish this very NSFW video. Because, as you’ll recall, no one fu messes with DeJesus.

“You know, I tried to keep it held in, but when Eric got to the plate, I just couldn’t help it,” said one fan who definitely did not write this article. “I mean, can you blame me? He really fills a void in the lineup where the team has needed power. Plus, he’s kind of dreamy.”

Hosmer earned two walks and a stolen base for the home team. Unfortunately, this did not amount to a victory for the Royals, who are still sitting 4.5 games behind Cleveland in the race for the AL central.

The word from the Royals front office is that fans will continue wetting their pants through the next series, which is versus the Yankees. Given that the series will be played in New York, experts anticipate that no one will notice the stench.

- The Law

Had the Royals lost on Friday, we would’ve made some cutesy pun about the Royal wedding. And then we would’ve posted a picture of Princess Beatrice’s toilet-seat shaped wedding hat.

Had the Royals lost on Sunday, we would’ve made some reference to Osama bin Laden and how no one really cared that the Royals lost because America was kicking ass. Not that most people really care about a Royals loss on any other day, anyway.

Had the Royals lost on Tuesday, we  probably still would’ve gone with the Princess Beatrice toilet-seat hat, because let’s face it, that’s comedic GOLD.

But all of that is old news now, as is the Royals winning streak. The world is getting back to normal, and so is our team.

Keep up the good work, boys. Fourteen down, 86 to go…