Nearly three weeks into the MLB season and Kansas City Royals fans haven’t been given much reason to believe 2010 is going to be any different to previous years.  Rational people might suggest that Royals fans should just go and support someone else, but anyone who follows a sports team knows that’s just not an option. You don’t tend to choose your team, your team chooses you and you’re tied together from them on, through good times and bad.

There are many coping mechanisms that can be employed to get through the lean years and gallows humour is one of the most attractive.  With this in mind, appreciate the Royals Review blog’s brilliant depiction of how their team bears an uncanny similarity to the heroically useless Peanuts baseball team.

I’m sure there are people in the UK whose only exposure to baseball is via the Peanuts strips and Snoopy cartoons.  The tales of Charlie Brown’s baseball team have been a long-running theme in the classic Charles Schultz strips since their inception in 1950 and they never fail to fill me with joy whenever I look back at some of them.  One of my favourites is from a week in July 1961 (starting from here) when Schroeder decides to quit the team in favour of devoting more time to practicing at his piano, leading poor old Charlie Brown to bemoan that he had been “beaned by Beethoven”.

The strips are all available via an online archive at Snoopy.com, but the best resource from a baseball fan’s point of view is at wezen-ball where you can bury yourself in the fruits of Lar’s labour.