Kansas City Losers

You know, sometimes I tend to fall for the vaguely commie idea of economic determinism just like Mayor-elect Mark Funkhouser and his cold Vulcan logic which mistakenly believes that attempting to turn Kansas City into Des Moines is going to solve all of this town's problems. Thing is, there are so many other factors that come into play in determining the character of a city but most of that reasoning is lost on people who just wanted to vote for a white guy and feel good about it for a change.

But I digress . . .

What I want to point out in this post is that after the billions of dollars that this city has spent on professional sports franchises over the years Kansas City was recently ranked as one of the all time Losingest Sports Cities in North America. And I was thinking that just doesn't bode well for the future of KC considering that so much of this town's economic development has been built around sports teams which historically have been mediocre at best.

ESPN tallied the results early this month and they show that every franchise (other than the Chiefs) in Kansas City has a losing record over time. In fact, our beloved town filled out the top ten in the long list of losers:

10. KANSAS CITY | Record: 4,774-5,445-33 (.533)

Teams:
• NHL: Scouts (1974-1976): 27-110-23-0-0
• NFL: Chiefs (1966-2007): 330-285-9, Blues/Cowboys (defunct; 1924-1926): 12-15-1
• NBA: Kings (1976-1985): 381-439, KC/Omaha Kings (1973-1975): 113-133
• MLB: Royals (1969-2007): 2934-3083: Athletics (1955-1967): 829-1224, Packers (Fed League; 1914-1915): 148-156

Now you could blame this on the small media market but I'm guessing that it's something deeper than that . . . Maybe a Stephen-King-type-thing and it's some kind of horrid chud lurking in the sewers and contaminating the drinking water with mediocrity (which is why I drink so much Dr. Pepper to remain awesome). I don't know. But what I do know is that any new sports franchise that comes to Kansas City is almost guaranteed to be a failure over the long haul if history is to be believed over the hype of real estate developers who are madly trying to unburden themselves of non-liquid assets before the inevitable recession which always accompanies losing a war eventually takes hold.

And in the end, I don't know if there's anything that Mayor-elect Funkhouser can do about it seeing as though his slight frame and mild manner couldn't really help out a sports franchise despite the fact that he's so tall. Additionally, the Mayor-elect's answer to the dilemma (read: debacle) regarding the empty Sprint Center has been to claim that "tractor pulls" and other low grade attractions will make up the difference which is kind of disheartening given that there's no way those kind of low rent attractions will even service the 300 million bucks worth of debt that Kansas City has taken on . . . Additionally, it's also to scary that the former City Auditor is so clueless about the way the real world works that he'd even utter that statement . . . Even worse, a slim margin of misinformed voters believed it.