Chiefs lose 89-10; Royals lose 958 games in 10 years... why? Because you get what you deserve

Kansas City Chiefs: Forty-eight - 3. Forty-one– 7. Cumulative score for 2011: 89 – 10.

Kansas City Royals: From 2001 to 2010, 958 loses. Average 95 loses per dreadful season. 2011? Eighty-six losses and counting with nine games left in the season. Eighty-seven just an inning and six runs away.

Why are Kansas City football and baseball teams so relentlessly dismal?

Two reasons:

1. 1) Kansas City fans allow them to be.
2. 2) Absentee landlords.

Kansas City fans allow them to be terrible: The reason here is simple. They don’t vote with their feet. They continue to go to the games. They watch the games on television, despite having in the modern age a plethora of choices to watch other, much more interesting, games. They buy the jerseys. They call into talk radio and they continue to dream.

As long as they continue to do these things, management will have no reason to put winning teams on the field. As long as people buy your cheeseburgers, the restaurant brass has no reason to improve the meat underneath the special sauce.

And, in the case of baseball, they continue to believe in next year, to substitute hope for reality. They continue to prefer the possibilities in Omaha to the realities at Kauffman stadium. How do you think Mike Aviles (three-run home run just now for the Boston Red Sox, who say they have had their eye on him for years), Wilson Betemet, Willie Bloomquist, Raul Ibanez, and Zack Greinke (seven innings, two hits today), feel about the Royals'various rebuilding plans?

Pretty damned good, is my guess, since all five are playing for teams leading their divisions and will no doubt be playing ball in October when the Royals’ brass are busy planning for 2012 and the ballplayers are thinking about fishing, hunting and reseeding the lawn.

You can add Johnny Damon, Carlos Beltran and Alberto Callaspo to the happy list since they all toil right now for three other teams still in the hunt.

I've always believed you get what you deserve in life. Better said: You get what you take. You get from relationships exactly what you are willing to tolerate. Jobs always expand to fill whatever space you give them in your life . People treat you exactly how you allow them to treat you.

Absentee landlords: The hard fact is, the Royals and Cheifs live in rental houses. If you’ve ever lived in a rent house, you know the drill. The landlord collects the rent every month and hopes you don’t call in between. Need the toilet fixed? If you don’t want to use the can at Quik Trip for the next two weeks, better do it yourself. Roof leaks? Get out the buckets.

What incentive does a landlord have to make the rent house top tier? None, if the city is full of renters willing to fork over whatever the landlord wants to charge for the house he offers. That’s the drill. Ask anyone who lives in a rent house.

No one in Kansas City has been willing or able to step up and buy these franchises since Ewing Kauffman died. The big money here – what there is of it – is far more interested in the arts. That’s their choice. The social payoff in a cowtown for supporting the arts is much greater than the payoff for owning a baseball team. That sounds backward but it isn't.

Can’t buy a house? Rent houses are how you live.

Wish it wasn’t so, but it is.

--Lofflin