Chicago ? Dang those Kansas City Royals.

Wow. Now there’s a sentence not uttered by anyone other than a Royals’ season-ticket holder or one of David Glass’ players since some point in the late 1980s.

But it works around here this weekend.

With the Minnesota Twins in town for the first time this season, it should have been a great 48 hours of baseball. The action on the field Friday night was compelling enough — especially when Magglio Ordonez took offense at being the fourth batter hit with a pitch — but there was a noticeable lack of buzz U.S. Cellular Field, where the Twins snapped a six-game losing streak with a 6-1 victory.

You could blame the embarrassingly small crowd of 14,285 on another uncomfortably cold night. Or the White Sox having lost four of their last five against Cleveland and Baltimore. Or even some lingering trepidation about a repeat of the idiotic acts by fans who confuse themselves with participants.

But I’m blaming the Royals, who are having enough fun for three teams. The Sox haven’t been having much lately.

“Fun seems to come with winning,” Sox general manager Ken Williams said.

After a joyful 2002, the Twins have opened 2003 with a miserable April.

“It hasn’t been the norm around here,” Minnesota manager Ron Gardenhire said. “Guys have been pressing. Maybe getting your socks knocked off will loosen us up. Maybe we’ll have to get back to playing.”

Depending on whom you asked in spring training, either the Sox or Twins were going to win the American League Central. The Royals, who have had eight consecutive losing seasons, weren’t on the radar screen.

Yet they’ve been in first place since Opening Day, when Runelvys Hernandez — picked to start the opener on the basis of a coin flip — shut out a White Sox team that barely had checked into its Kansas City hotel after spending the previous two days in Houston and Birmingham, Ala.

The Royals are 17-4 after defeating Toronto Saturday.

“That’s a good run, at any time of the year,” Sox manager Jerry Manuel said of the Royals’ start.