![]() The team one year brought in a professional softball player in the hopes of getting a bargain. You suspect the $1,000 came only after negotiations first the Royals offered baseball socks and McDonald’s gift certificates. The Royals would give $1,000 signing bonuses to anyone they drafted after then fifth or sixth round - yeah, a $1,000 bonus. The stories from those days are legendary. That’s how little the Royals were worth then. Walmart CEO David Glass bought the team for less than $100 million in 2000 - this one year after the Cleveland Indians had sold for more than $300 million. People could never appreciate that he had an impossible job he was trying to build a competitive baseball team with no money, no ownership support, no staff to work with. In the lost summer of 2001 - one of so many lost summers of Kansas City baseball - I was on the field watching batting practice with relatively new Royals general manager Allard Baird.
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