In BREAKING OOTP, I push Out Of The Park Baseball to it’s limits in various scenarios. Some will answer questions, some will settle scores, and some will push Out Of The Park Baseball to it’s very limits, to see if I can literally cause the game engine to beg for mercy.

In 30 Teams, 30 Posts, I write a post (of varying amounts of seriousness) about every MLB team in some way in the lead-up to the beginning of the 2016 season. Earlier installments can be found here. This also fulfills the Royals part of that.

This will be a controversial entry in Breaking Ootp. It’s going to be a bit political. You see, not too long ago, a woman named Phyllis Schlafly had an opinion on Baseball. There’s nothing wrong with that. People have opinions about baseball all of the time. Some of them are even insightful.

Her opinion, however, was hateful, ignorant and wrong. She believes that MLB should KICK OUT ALL OF THE FOREIGNERS. In fact, she openly says “It is time to cut off visas for foreign baseball players, and return our National Pastime to Americans.”

This, needless to say, is a bigoted and xenophobic view of baseball, and anyone who honestly believes it should be rightly sent to the dustpan of history. However, it’s also objectively wrong and ignorant. Even if she was right that Americans have a god-given privilege to have every baseball job in America (AND SHE IS MOST DEFINITELY NOT RIGHT), her arguments for the superiority of American MLB players are so paper-thin you could poke holes in them with a baby’s finger. For example, she uses the claim that the vast majority of Hall of Famers are American to “prove” that foreign players are inferior, utterly ignoring the fact that the vast majority of Hall of Famers came from an era before baseball became the diverse multi-national pool of players it is now. She also uses as “evidence” the fact that only Americans won the big awards in 2015, ignoring the fact that that was an aberration and that plenty of people from outside the United States have won those awards in the past.

So, to prove this bigoted old lady just how wrong she is, I’m going to show just how out-of-their-League a team made up entirely of American white guys would be in modern-day baseball. But who?

Now, she seems to think (according to her actual article, which I’m not linking to because I don’t want to give her the pleasure of the hits) the 1944 Cardinals were the pinnacle of baseball. Never mind that 1944’s Cardinals weren’t even the pinnacle of white American baseball, given most of the stars were off fighting WWII. Still, the 1944 Cardinals did win the World Series, so to produce her vision, I figure it would be a good idea to do it to the most recent MLB champions, the Kansas City Royals. It’s obviously not a one-to-one correlation, but it’ll do. Go below the jump for more:

So, to show how they would look like if they followed her twisted, backwards, bigoted politics, I’ve had the Royals release every player on the MLB or Minor League roster who isn’t a “white” American, thus replicating her “exciting memories” and going only slightly further than her desire to kick out all of the foreigners.

So, that means the following players (among others) are now free agents:

• Salvador Perez
• Lorenzo Cain
• Edinson Volquez
• Yordano Ventura
• Kendrys Morales
• Omar Infante
• Tony Cruz
• Christian Colon
• Reymond Fuentes
• Paulo Orlando
• Kelvin Herrera
• Joakim Soria
• Jarrod Dyson
• Jason Vargas
• Raul A. Mondesi
• …and many others.

And I did this throughout their minor league system as well. And, to make up for the fact that getting rid of all non-white American literally leaves the Royals unable to fill four of their farm system teams, I added a bunch of white guys from Independent Ball to make sure the game will actually run.

So, let’s look at how the Royals’ lineup looks now (click to make bigger):

And here’s the rotation (click to make bigger):

Now, to be sure, this is still a fairly legitimate MLB roster with some legitimate MLB players on it. However, it most certainly is not the roster of a defending World Series champion. It’s more like the roster of a team that’s dreaming of a .500 record at best but actually almost certainly headed straight to the cellar. And, also, it has Drew Butera as it’s everyday catcher, a strategy which has not worked for a baseball team since at least the 2009 Rochester Red Wings.

Say, what is the preseason prediction for Phyllis Schlafly’s dream team?

Yes, Phyllis, your 2016 Kansas City Royals (playing with something close to 1944 ethnic makeup) are predicted to go 52-110! Wooo!

But, hey, games aren’t played on paper! Let’s see how the Royals do on the field!

Still, that’s just one game, and since the Royals have more red-blooded Americans than the Mets, surely they’d triumph over those vile foreign Mets in the second game, at least, that’s what Phyllis seems to think…

Oh, and guess what else happened in this game? Alex Gordon got hurt and is out 3-4 months!

So now the Royals’ lineup looks like THIS:

Gee whiz, Phyllis! Just look at those lineups! Those guys will really put butts in the seats and runs on the scoreboard! After all, foreign players are what is holding the game down, right Phyllis? That’s what you said, and you are somebody who has the great wisdom to endorse Donald Trump for president so how could I ever judge your wisdom/sanity?

So, maybe it’ll just take awhile for these Royals to warm up. Let’s speed to the end of April, shall we?

Oh… oh my. Look at that. 4-19. And this is with both Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas being among the leaders in Slugging Percentage.

By mid-may, things in the Kansas City clubhouse have begun to deteriorate:

And soon, others are becoming increasingly angry:

On June 1st, the Royals are 10-42, 27.5 games out in the central behind Cleveland. Their longest winning streak of the season has been two, as they beat the White Sox in two straight in late May. Eric Hosmer sends this scary message:

By the All-Star Break, the Royals are 21-68, 36 games out of first in the Central and 30 games out of a wild card. They do, however, have an unexpected All-Star in Ryan O’Hearn:

The season goes on. And on. The Royals win, but not many. Certainly not as many as Phyllis Schlafly no doubt thought they would. It’s almost, Phyllis, as if there is no true difference where a player comes from, and that a great player can come from anywhere.

This is how it ended, with the Royals having one of the worst records in history:

And, that’s not all, look at how the hyper-depleted farm system did:

As you can see, the minor leagues are also super out-of-their-league as well, with the exception of the Dominican Rookie League, as apparently your average low-independent ball player is better than the absolute lowest rungs of the minor leagues.

…

So what did we learn today? Well, we learned that Phyllis Schlafly is not only a bigot, but also a horrible baseball mind. We also learned to appreciate just how diverse the 2015 Royals were: they won because of their diversity, with many of their best players being either minorities or from other countries.

And, as far as the OOTP itself is concerned, we learned that, yes, they do have rosters for every league- I mean, when was the last time you went through Pecos League or Frontier League rosters? Exactly.

Previously on BREAKING OOTP:

1. Pitchers vs. Hitters
2. Arena Baseball
3. The Seattle MARIOners
4. Seattle MARIOners vs. Pablo Sanchez
5. The No-Homers Club
6. The Greenland Diamond Wall Baseball League (on the OOTP website)