It will take a great deal more than cheap ownership, ill-conceived trades and free-agent acquisitions, and a roster stocked with bad players to have what it takes to challenge the 1962 New York Mets as the worst team it major-league history.

It will take a lot of luck, too. Bad luck. The way things have gone on that front, it seems as if the 2006 Kansas City Royals just might be able to contend for the dubious distinction of being the worst baseball team in major-league history.

Already, the bad luck mounts for the hapless Royals:

¢ Zack Greinke showed up for spring training mentally unfit and went home. He has returned to extended spring training.

¢ Eight other Royals, including closer Mike MacDougal,have appeared on the disabled list, which currently has seven names on it.

¢ The Royals actually were winning a game recently. So what

happened? It got rained out before it became an official game, getting washed off the books.

The 2003 Detroit Tigers were the most recent team to contend for the ’62 Mets’ all-time loss record of 120. In the end, the Tigers proved to be the most clutch 119-loss team in history, defeating the Twins on the final two days of the season to preserve the Mets’ claim to infamy.

Can the Royals do what the Tigers could not?

The only way to get an honest answer from a baseball insider was to consult a National League general manager, since his team won’t have to face the Royals.

“The only reason I would say I think it’s doable is that from everything I can gather about the American League, it’s a really good league this year,” San Diego Padres GM Kevin Towers said. “Theo Epstein and Brian Cashman, two guys whose opinions I really respect, both told me the same thing. They both said the American League is as good as they’ve ever seen it. The American League spent all the money in free agency this year and I think that’s a big reason why the National League’s down.”

Towers spoke highly of Royals GM Allard Baird, having known him since they were both scouts.

“I don’t think their club on paper is the worst in the history of baseball, by no means do I think that,” Towers said. “But if their veterans start to go down with injuries, being a small-market club, they don’t have the wherewithal to replace them. That hurts, and the league being as good as it is, that makes it tough. But it’s hard for me to sit here and talk about any other club’s struggles when we’re sitting here with (10) wins.”

Kansas City Royals reliever Mike Wood (46) leaves the game while manager Buddy Bell and catcher John Buck confer on the mound during the sixth inning of a baseball game against the Minnesota Twins Thursday, April 27, 2006, in Kansas City, Mo. The Twins won 7-3.

Which is twice as many as the Royals and still good for last place in the NL West.

The Royals dropped to 5-18 after losing at Detroit, 3-2, Monday night. At the current pace, the Royals would finish 35-127, shattering the record of the ’62 Mets.

Jay Hook was the first winning pitcher for that expansion team. The Mets went into that game with an 0-9 record and the Pittsburgh Pirates were 10-0. The Mets won, 9-1.

Hook, who worked in the automobile industry and then was a professor in Northwestern University’s MBA program, is retired, living with wife Joan on a farm in Maple City, Mich. At the end of the 2003 season, Hook said he and his wife returned from a trip to Aspen to find, “20 messages” from baseball writers across the country seeking comment on the Tigers closing in on the Mets’ loss record.

“Are the Royals playing that poorly?” Hook asked. “I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.”

Why not?

“Because that was 44 years ago and I’m still getting called about it,” he said.

And still enjoys taking those calls because it means talking baseball.

Hook said his motto when he pitched in ’62 was, “Don’t give up a run because if you do, you give up your chance to tie.”

Hook, 69, sounded excited that a new Pioneer League baseball team, the nearby Traverse City Beach Bums, would be debuting this summer, but he doesn’t follow the major leagues closely enough to name the Royals’ manager, when asked.

When told it was Buddy Bell, Hook repeated it to wife Joan because Buddy’s father, the late Gus Bell, teamed with Hook on the Cincinnati Reds and then the expansion Mets.

How’s this for bad karma: Joan Hook said that she and Buddy’s mother, Joyce Bell, taught Buddy how to keep score on a scorecard in the stands during a Reds game.

“He was a very cute, blond, little boy,” Joan reported. “And very well behaved.”

Little did Bell know then how torturous keeping score could become. The Royals keep ending up on the wrong end. Even when the sun shines on them, bad things happen. Esteban German, an infielder by trade, was playing center field Sunday when a baseball bruised and cut his face. He lost the ball in the sun and found it the hard way, on his face. In that same 13-6 loss, a pitcher was late breaking for first base, so Doug Mientkiewicz’s glitzy glove work was wasted.

Royals fans weaned on George Brett and Frank White see no comedy in these errors.

It was different with Hook’s expansion Mets.

“The thing about when we went into New York, the fans were so happy to have National League baseball back they were terrific, even though we were dismal losers,” Hook said. “You hate to say it was a fun summer because if you wanted to win you were a basket case, but it was a great place to play with Casey Stengel managing.”

Hook said he enjoyed interacting with the huge platoon of newspaper men in New York.

“I was studying gas dynamics at that time in graduate school during the offseason,” Hook remembered. “Bob Lipsyte, who was writing for the New York Times, came up to me and said he had 13 column inches to fill and asked me if I would explain to him why a curveball curved. I told him it was Bernoulli’s Law, the same physical law that governs why an airplane wing lifts it off the ground. Who’s going to believe a baseball player on something like that? I made a sketch for him. He took it to a professor at Columbia University and he wrote an article and put my sketch at the top of the article. It won $100 as the best article in the New York Times that month.”

Two weeks later, Hook said, he was knocked out of a start at the Polo Grounds in the fourth inning.

“Casey walked up to the two of us, looked at Lipsyte, looked at me, looked back at Lipsyte, and said: ‘If Hook could only do what he knows.’ Casey was great to be around.”

More bad karma for the Royals: In this, the year of the return of the mumps, it’s a little spooky to note that it was the mumps that led to Hook getting drafted by the Mets.

“We were in Philadelphia, and here I was out running before the game, feeling fine,” Hook remembered. “I got on a charter flight to go home. They had piston planes then, so it took a little longer to fly from Philadelphia to Cincinnati. My jaw and neck just swelled all up.”

He was quarantined in his home and per doctors orders put on a strict diet of nothing but Karo syrup and crushed ice. It sapped his strength, and the Reds left him unprotected in the expansion draft after his 1-3 record and 7.76 ERA.

In one year, Hook went from the National League champions to the losingest team in history. All things considered, that’s preferable to the fate of Royals fans, who haven’t had a team finish first since the 1985 World Championship and are in the midst of the 12th losing season in 13 years.

Small payrolls, suspect scouting, and bad trades, such as the return of John Buck, Mark Teahen, and Mike Wood for Carlos Beltran, have contributed to the Royals’ current mess.

Bad enough to lose 120 games?

If he had to guess, Towers would guess not.

“It’s hard to lose 100 games today,” Towers said. “We were terrible in 2003 and we didn’t even lose 100 games.”

Still, as the Padres’ GM said, if any year is the year to do it, this would be it, given the strength of the teams in the American League.

If any team can do it …