“What If” is a series where I explore alternate universes of Royals baseball to find out what could have happened differently. You can read the previous entry here.
The Royals were pretty bad in the late 90s and early 2000s, but it wasn’t until 2005 that they were the very worst that baseball had to offer. The 2005 Royals saw manager Tony Pena resign in a mysterious scandal, didn’t have anyone hit more than 21 home runs in an era in which everyone in baseball was muscled up and hitting ridiculous home run totals, and allowed Jose Lima to make 32 starts despite an ERA of 6.