Royals Preview...

Not by me, mind you. That will come later in spring training.

Baseball Think Factory has issued the first (that I've seen, anyway) of what will undoubtedly be a long line of depressing, hopeless previews of the Royals 2005. Since this is exactly the opposite of what many baseball pundits were predicting for the past two seasons, perhaps the "buck the expectations" trend will continue and the Royals will surprise the hell out of us all.

The Royals will improve by default, simply because its very difficult for a major league baseball team to lose 104 games two season in a row. No matter how bad a team is, it takes lots of unfortunate happenstance to lose that many games, and I can't imagine for the life of me that it could happen again. That doesn't mean that the Royals still won't lose 95 games, and for all intents and purposes 95 and 104 losses are the same thing - they both mean the team never contended. But I think its a fairly safe bet that we won't the same historic levels of suckiness reached in 2004.