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The Royals are bad. Everybody knows that. But why has Kansas City's major-league baseball franchise deteriorated so precipitously in the 20 years since it won the World Series?

For an expert opinion, the Journal-World asked Bill James, the long-time Lawrence resident and noted baseball guru, to provide an analysis.

James, who serves as a senior advisor for the world champion Boston Red Sox, filed this report.

You can't get to be as bad as the Royals are by doing one thing badly. It takes a lot of mistakes by a lot of people over a long period of time to get into this kind of a mess.

The Red Sox, of course, have the advantage of money, and a lot of the difference between the Red Sox and the Royals is a result of money. A lot of it isn't.

In the early to mid-'90s, the Royals had two good young third basemen, Joe Randa and Sean Berry -- both very competent major-league players. They basically gave them both away and handed the third-base job to a series of veterans like Gary Gaetti, Dean Palmer and Gregg Jefferies, with comic interruptions from guys like Phil Hiatt and Craig Paquette. Eventually, they went and got Randa back.

Rick Reed, already a minor-league veteran, pitched half a season for the Royals in 1992. He was fine -- 18 starts, 100 innings pitched, 20 walks, 3.68 earned-run average. They sent him back to the minors, turned him loose. He went on to go 13-9, 16-11, 11-5, 11-5, 12-12, 15-7. Nobody even remembered that he was an ex-Royal.

In the '90s, the Royals had enough young players to build around, but they didn't know it. If they had traded Jermaine Dye, Johnny Damon, Carlos Beltran for solid young players and made solid decisions on a few others, they'd be fine today.

So ... my opinion, there are five reasons the Royals are where they are:

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1) The economics of the game are stacked against smaller cities.

2) They have drafted relatively poorly in the last 10 years.

3) In the early- to mid-'90s, the Royals didn't know a ballplayer from a skeet shooter and committed themselves to staving off ruin by bringing in a long series of fading stars. This caused the base of the organization to crumble, which increased the financial pressures on the team, putting them in a position from which they never have recovered.

4) When the Royals have had young players that they could not afford to keep, they have uniformly failed to acquire value in exchange. The worst example of this was last year with the Carlos Beltran trade.

5) The Royals have been unable to identify and acquire the kind of affordable, decent journeymen players who could serve as a tourniquet on the organization. They have done this SOMETIMES, but just not consistently enough. Jose Lima was 8-3 for them in a stop-gap role two years ago. They wouldn't make a decent offer to retain him, let him go, and he was 13-5 for the Dodgers.