(Disclaimer: this is a
very personal essay. I want to talk about why I’m ending this blog, which means
by necessity I need to talk about myself. If you are one of those people who
think that I am an arrogant and self-centered writer, well, this piece
certainly isn’t going to change your mind. There will be some navel-gazing
here. I humbly ask that you give me the benefit of the doubt that I’m not
writing this for self-aggrandizement, but because I feel obligated to explain myself
to you, the reader.)
I just don’t have the time anymore. I wish I could give
you a better reason for why I have stopped blogging about the Royals, but
that’s the honest truth, and the evidence of that is that it somehow took me more than four months after my
penultimate post to write this one. That wasn’t the plan at all; the plan was
to say goodbye before the season ended, to write one last long, poignant
article that explained why I was no longer going to write about the Royals by
way of explaining why I started writing about the Royals in the first place,
and everything that happened in the 20 years between those two points.
And that was the problem: I didn’t have the time to write
that article. I wanted to write about how much the game has changed over the
last 20 years, how much smarter baseball teams have become, how much smarter
the Royals have become, and how that’s made doing what I do – which, in a
nutshell, is waiting for the Royals to do something dumb and then pointing
fingers at them – so much more challenging than it used to be.
And if I had the time to write that article, I think it
would have been a good one. But it turns out that I don’t. If I did, I probably
wouldn’t need to stop writing about the Royals in the first place.
I started this blog in 2008, when I had two daughters, a
five-year-old and a two-year-old. I now have four daughters, ages 12, 10, six,
and three. When I started this blog, I had one main dermatology office in St.
Charles, Illinois, and had just opened a satellite location that I worked out
of one morning a week. In the seven years since, I’ve hired a physician
assistant, opened another office way out west in Sycamore – it’s an hour from
my house each way – and added three more employees.
But I continued to write about baseball at every
opportunity. I couldn’t keep up the frenetic pace of blogging I established in
2008, but I managed to put up a column here at least once a week. The
increasing demands on my time caused me to stop writing at Baseball Prospectus,
my original home, almost entirely – but then in 2011 Bill Simmons dropped me an
email asking if I could write an article on the Royals for his new Grantland
site that had just launched, and what started as a one-off piece turned into a
second article,
and pretty soon I was being encouraged to write as often as I wanted for what
was becoming one of the coolest websites in journalism, in front of the largest
audience I ever had. (You will notice that I continue to write
for Grantland when I can. I would be a fool not to. It’s a fantastic place to
work.)
And then in 2013 I got the call that, in retrospect, I
had spent the previous two decades working to get. The Chicago Cubs contacted
me and asked if I would be interested in interviewing for an analytics position
in their front office.
Let me rephrase that: The
Chicago Cubs wanted me to work for them.
Let me reframe that one more time: The Chicago Cubs, run by Jed Hoyer and Theo Epstein, who had already
won two world championships and ended an 86-year championship drought in Boston
together, thought that I could help them in their attempt to accomplish the
same in Chicago. More than that, the Cubs contacted me even though they
knew I was a dermatologist and wouldn’t be able to work for them full time.
Forgive me if I never get tired of bringing that up, because it was the moment
that most vindicates the 20-year passion project that has been my baseball
writing career. It probably always will be.
In the end, I didn’t get the job, in large part because
the Cubs felt they needed someone who would be able to commit to the
organization full-time. I completely understood their reasoning, and frankly
remain astonished that they would even consider the alternative. Maybe they
really didn’t consider the alternative, but simply figured that once an
opportunity to work in baseball presented itself to me, I would be willing to
walk away from my dermatology career to pursue it.
And if ever there was such an opportunity that I’d drop
anything for, it was this one. I mean, it’s
the Chicago Cubs. It’s a team that 1) is one of the most iconic franchises
in American sports even though 2) it has a longer track record of continuous
failure than any team, in any sport, possibly in human history. A Cubs world
championship is the Mount Everest of the sports world – quite literally the
most momentous achievement possible. And their front office sees the game
pretty much the same way I do – I mean, even my not-so-bright
ideas coincided with theirs. Oh, and I live 45 minutes from Wrigley Field.
I have many regrets about the fact that I couldn’t have
made a different decision, but I have no regrets over the decision I made. As
much job security as there is in medicine, that’s how little job security there
is in sports. To throw away a practice I had spent a decade building to take a
job that I could get fired from at any moment, possibly for outcomes that I had
nothing to do with – that’s not a risk I could take, not with a wife and four
kids to support. And that’s without even mentioning the pay cut up front.
I mean, you have to understand: I never set out to be a
sportswriter. I’ve said this before, but if Herk Robinson had protected Jeff
Conine in the 1992 Expansion Draft, or if he hadn’t traded Gregg Jefferies for
Felix Jose, I may never have started writing in the first place. I started
writing about baseball on rec.sport.baseball – the online bulletin board for
analytic baseball nerds in the pre-web era – because I felt compelled to share
my frustrations with someone, anyone,
who would listen. The last 20 years have all been one happy accident for me.
But once the Cubs opportunity came and went after the
2013 season, I realized something. I realized that I had gone as far as I could
go in baseball with just one foot in the game. Short of working for a major
league team, I had accomplished pretty much everything I could have imagined
accomplishing when I told Gary Huckabay in 1995 that yes, I would be happy to
join him in writing a baseball book with no name, no publisher, and no market.
I also realized that as long as I kept one foot in
baseball, it was limiting how far I could go with my medical practice. I had
been slowly growing for 10 years, but very slowly, in large part because I was
thinking about baseball when I could have been thinking about how to grow my
practice.
So I decided it was time to fish or cut bait. On February
9th of this year, I formally closed on the acquisition of another dermatology
practice in Oak Park, Illinois, a stone’s throw away from Frank Lloyd Wright’s
studio and the setting for such classic movies as “Adventures in Babysitting” and “Rookie
of the Year”. (Well, they’re classics for me…) So I’m now working out of
three different offices while trying to
grow my practice enough to one day hire more dermatologists to work with me.
If and when that day comes, I’m hopeful I can hand off
enough of the workload to allow me to start writing more again. But at least
for the time being, I’ve had to put my writing career on the backburner. I hope
you understand.
When I first started this blog, I made the conscious
decision to keep the web design simple and to eschew any advertising. This was,
in retrospect, probably a mistake. I decided to keep from monetizing this site
because I didn’t want to feel obligated to write about the Royals all the time –
but it turns out I couldn’t control that compulsion even though I was writing
for free. I don’t think this blog would have made me rich, but even a couple
hundred dollars a month would have grown into like $20,000 by now. That’s on
me.
But before I go, I would like to make an appeal to my
readers for money. Not for me, but for the victims of the worst humanitarian
crisis the world has seen since World War II. As many of you know, my parents
immigrated to America from Syria, settling in America in large part because the
Assad family had set up a totalitarian dictatorship in their home country. Four
decades later, the Assad family still had an iron grip on the country, and
peaceful democratic protests in Syria as part of the Arab Spring in early 2011
were met with the most brutal and murderous response imaginable. The revolution
was initially led almost entirely by moderate, non-sectarian protestors, who
begged for help from the outside world when their non-violent protests were met
with bullets, bombs, and eventually weapons
of mass destruction outlawed by the Geneva Convention. While no help was
given to moderate protestors, the initially-tiny extremist contingent was plied
with weapons and cash from rich benefactors from the Gulf…and now it’s 2015,
and ISIS is a global menace, while the Assad regime whose bloody, barbaric
reign created ISIS in the first place is still in power, and the moderate
rebels are either dead, in exile, or are barely holding on. It’s enough to make
a man sick.
But I’m not here to argue politics: I’m here to ask for
help for the victims of the disintegration of Syria. Of the country’s 23
million people before the war, nine
million have been displaced from their homes, and four of those nine
million are refugees in other countries like Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. These
people are left wanting for the most basic of life’s necessities: food,
shelter, schooling for their children, medical care, freedom from fear. I feel
a moral imperative to help these people.
So I have teamed up with the Syrian American Medical
Society, or SAMS, a nonprofit, non-sectarian, humanitarian organization largely
comprised of Syrian-American physicians who would like to give back to their
native homeland. (The outgoing President of SAMS, Dr. Zaher Sahloul, is a
friend of mine, and is one of the more remarkable people I know, traveling
regularly to refugee camps and sometimes even into war-torn Syria at great
personal risk to provide medical care and deliver supplies, and working
to highlight
the calamitous situation there to the American public, while also working as a
full-time pulmonologist and critical care specialist here in the Chicago area.)
If you are so inclined to help, a donation of any amount to
SAMS can make an incalculable difference in the lives of so many people, and I
would be forever grateful for the gesture. Not to turn this into a Kickstarter
campaign, but if you do make a (tax-deductible!) donation to SAMS, I’ll do
something for you in return.
Here’s how this works: click on this link to make a donation.
Select the amount you wish to donate, and designate where you would like your
donation to go to. (Pick any program you wish, or just stick with the default
of “most needed.”) After you enter your donation amount some more options will
pop up. Then, under “Additional Information” you will see the question “What
brought you to the site to give today?” – select “Dr. Rany Jazayerli”.
Fill out your payment information and click “donate now”.
After your donation goes through, you should receive a receipt by email. Finally,
forward a copy of your receipt to ranyontheroyals (at) gmail (dot) com. In
return:
- For any donation of at least $25 – barely 5 cents for
each of the 479 articles I have written on this site – I will personally email
you a thank you note, to the email address you sent me the receipt from.
- For any donation of at least $50 – just over 10 cents
an article – I will instead send you a handwritten thank you note by regular
mail, to the address listed on your receipt.
- For any donation of at least $100 – less than 21 cents
an article – I will instead call you by phone to thank you personally. (When
you send in your receipt, please include the phone number you wish to call, as
well as the days and times that work best for you.)
And for those of you who are willing to be especially
generous with your charitable dollars, I have two more deals for you:
- For any donation of at least $300 – less than 63 cents
an article – I will instead meet you at a restaurant for a lovely meal and
conversation; we’ll talk baseball the whole time, or anything else you want to
discuss. (We’ll go dutch, not because I’m trying to be cheap, but because I don’t
want to subject you to my personal dietary restrictions.)
- For any donation of at least $600 – that’s $1.25 an
article – I will instead treat you to a Royals game. I’ll buy the tickets. (If
anyone affiliated with the Royals can set me up with discounted and/or free
tickets for a charitable cause, that would be much appreciated.) We’ll talk
baseball the whole time, or anything else you want to discuss.
A couple of notes:
1) These offers are NOT cumulative. A $100 donation gets
you a phone call, but not a phone call, handwritten note, and email. A $600
donation means I’ll see you at the ballpark, but I won’t see you at lunch
first.
2) For these last two offers, please note: the offer is
for one person only.
3) Both at the restaurant and at the ballpark, I will entertain
people in groups of up to five or six, so it will be you, me, and maybe three
or four other people.
4) I’m thinking barbecue for lunch, or maybe a place like
First Watch for a weekend brunch. I’m happy to take suggestions; I’m not the
local.
5) As I only make it to Kansas City a few times a season,
I can make no promises on when exactly we will meet – depending on demand, it
may be 2016 or 2017 before we can arrange the logistics to accommodate everyone.
I honestly have no idea how much interest you all will have at the higher
levels; I wouldn’t be surprised if no one makes a $600 donation, but I’m hopeful
– and more than a little terrified – that a few dozen of you take the plunge. If
so, I beg your patience as I try to accommodate everyone into my schedule.
Priority will be given based on when I receive your emailed receipt, so the
sooner you donate, the better for you.
Phone calls and handwritten notes will probably be made
in August and September.
6) I plan to see my lunch guests in the Kansas City area,
and my ballpark guests at Kauffman Stadium. But if you are able to meet me in
the Chicago area for a meal, or meet me at a Royals game here in Chicago instead,
I would obviously be fine with that as well, and we would have a lot more
scheduling options that way.
7) I reserve the right to get creative in order to make
this work. I’m sort of operating on blind faith here that this will all work
out, and I ask you to be patient with me. Thank you.
I’m saying goodbye, but this isn’t a permanent and final
goodbye. I still care about the Royals, and as those of you who follow me on
Twitter know only too well, I still care about sharing my opinions of them with
anyone who will listen. After the magic of 2014, I can only say that I’m glad I
didn’t close down the blog a year earlier. And I’ll tell you what: if they make
the postseason again this year, I’m sure I’m going to have a lot of thoughts
about them in the playoffs, thoughts that can’t be contained on Twitter and
have too much of a niche audience for Grantland. Maybe I’ll make Rany on the
Royals a seasonal thing that opens every October, like a pumpkin farm. Maybe I’ll
even throw in a column if they make a big move at the trading deadline or a big
transaction in the off-season.
Because October, 2014 made the seven seasons of mostly
futile writing that came before it all worth it. I don’t want to wait 29 years
for that rush again. I don’t want to wait 29 months for that rush again, even if that rush could end with the
Royals being on the other side of some long-hapless underdog’s Cinderella
story. The Royals have exceeded expectations this season – my own included – as
much as they exceeded the nation’s expectations last fall, and it’s becoming
increasingly difficult not to acknowledge that the front office may actually
know what it’s doing. Last year may not have been a fluke.
The fan base has certainly acknowledged it, and as
gratifying as it has been to see the Royals actually becoming one of the most
feared and respected teams in the game, it’s just as gratifying to see Royals
Nation rise up the way I always claimed it would if we just got a team worthy
of our fandom. The record crowds don’t surprise me. The best local TV ratings
in baseball don’t surprise me. The Royals’ complete and total domination of the
All-Star voting…okay, that surprised
even me. If Omar Infante is the starting second baseman in Cincinnati on July
14th, I will be as horrified as I am titillated.
Because for all the hand-wringing over how Royals fans
are making a mockery of the vote, of how they’re forcing long-needed changes in
the voting process to be made in the future, I’ve seen not nearly enough credit
given to the Royals that it’s their
fans – one of the smallest fan bases by population, though clearly not by
passion – that have succeeded where no other fan base has. You can complain
that the voting process needs to be tweaked, and I’ll agree with you – but
first you have to tip your cap to the Royals for doing something that fans of
the Yankees, Cardinals, Red Sox, and 26 other teams were never able to do.
It’s a new chapter in the history of the Royals, and even
if I’m not chronicling it on a daily basis anymore, I couldn’t be more excited
to see where this leads. I’m not at all surprised by the passion of the fans,
or by the emergence of a new generation of fans who finally have a reason to
root for the Royals, but I was caught off guard by the emergence of one
particular fan – my eldest daughter, who is now 12 years old.
I had already reconciled myself to the fact that none of
my kids would be baseball fans; they hadn’t shown any interest, and let’s be
frank: being a baseball fan can be exhausting,
because they play every single day.
There are a lot of other things you can do with the time you spend following a
baseball team 162 times a year. This was just going to be something that Dad
did in his free time, and they could find their own hobbies and interests.
My daughter watched the Wild Card game last September
30th, but went to bed in the sixth or seventh inning – it was a school night,
remember. My wife told me afterwards that before our daughter went to sleep, she
said she felt terrible for Dad who flew all the way to Kansas City to watch his
team lose. (My wife, bless her heart, stayed up until the end, something she’s
never done before.) The next morning my daughter woke up to the insane news
that the rest of us digested over the course of two heart-stopping hours, and…I
don’t know, but maybe something clicked that day. She watched every playoff
game from then on. She celebrated with me when they clinched the ALDS, and then
when they won the pennant. She was mad – she’s still mad – that I didn’t take her to the World Series. (I was
rooting for the Cardinals in the NLCS in part because I was planning to drive
down to St. Louis with her for one of the weekend World Series games.)
And then after a quiet winter – well, she wore her new
Royals ski hat everywhere, and wanted to know why Billy Butler wasn’t coming
back, and who are these new guys – the season started, and they started 7-0,
and…well, I’m still having trouble processing it. I come home from work and
she’s watching the Royals game on TV. She’s texting me at work asking for my
MLB.tv password. She made a sign – “Salvy 4 Perezident” – when the Royals came
to town to play the Cubs, and she was over the moon when Salvy saw her sign at
the game and flashed her a thumbs-up. She told me before the season that
Moustakas was her favorite player, and she never turns down an opportunity to
say “I told you so” after Moose flicks another pitch to left field for a
single. She’s already begging me to take her to one of the Royals games when
they come back to Chicago to play the White Sox in three weeks.
She’s also playing softball for the first time, and it’s
clear that watching Royals games on a regular basis has given her an awareness
of the game that the other girls don’t have. She came home after a game once
excited to tell me that she had been catching, and when the batter hit a foul
pop-up, “I tore off my catcher’s mask just like Salvy does” and made the catch.
Last week I attended one of her games – she had moved up to the leadoff spot –
and before she went up to the plate she turned to me behind the fence and said,
“I’m going to ambush the first pitch like Esky” before doing just that. (She
grounded out to third.)
She watches the game from a different perspective than
me; while I’m focused on statistics and strategy, she’ll say things like “why
doesn’t Alex Gordon ever wash his batting helmet?” But baseball has grandeur;
there are so many ways to enjoy it. The fact that she picked any of them is still something I have to
get my head around. I mean, there’s no way to get around this fact: she’s a
12-year-old girl, and the Royals are her first crush. (Thank God it’s the
Royals as a team, and not, say, Eric Hosmer.) And like any father of a
12-year-old girl on her first crush, I’m terrified that the Royals are going to
break her heart.
She has no history with the Royals that doesn’t involve
them being the best team in the American League. She has no memory of
suffering, of sacrifice, of humiliation, and I want her innocence to be
maintained. And at the same time, I need her to understand that it’s not this easy. I’m already steeling
her for the fact that we could be the Angels this year, the team with the best
record in the league over 162 games that watches its season end in the span of
less than 72 hours because of a few unlucky breaks.
But for now, I’m content to enjoy the experience of
rooting for a winning team, and sharing that experience with my firstborn. (My
10-year-old daughter doesn’t watch obsessively, but she asks how they do each
day and wears her pink Hosmer shirsey all the time. Even my wife has started to
pay attention, or at least she follows the Royals on Instagram.)
Before the season began, I intended to say goodbye for
good when I wrote this article. Instead, I’m just going to say goodbye for now.
I’m not going anywhere. And I just wanted to take this opportunity to say that,
after writing about baseball for 20 years, and after blogging about the Royals
for 15 years, I’ve learned that Jerry Seinfeld was wrong: we’re not rooting for
clothes. We’re not rooting for laundry. We’re not even rooting for the players,
and certainly not their manager, or general manager, or the analysts in their
front office.
We’re rooting for each other.
And rooting for all of you has been one of the great joys
of my adult life. And I intended to write that when I first announced that I
was going to stop blogging about the Royals, before Sung Woo came to America,
before the second-half surge, before Jarrod Dyson and Terrence Gore ran the
White Sox dizzy, before Salvy got doubled up against Detroit, before that
wonderful night here in Chicago when the Royals clinched a playoff berth, before
the greatest game I’ve ever seen in person, before Aoki’s catch and Moose’s
homer and Dyson’s throw and Hosmer’s homer and Butler’s steal and Wade Davis
struck out the side and Gordon’s homer and Escobar’s double past first base and
Butler’s sacrifice fly and Escobar knocked the ball out of Joseph’s glove.
Before the World Series. Before Gordon held at third.
It’s been magical, all of it, and thank you, all of you,
for sharing the experience of being a Royals fan with me. I’m still rooting for
all of you. I hope that you’ll all still be rooting for me.
