These days, the sport I watch (and certainly play) more than any other is soccer. My wife Barbara and I have attended almost all of the Carolina Courage's home games in their two-year existence, and in the fall we often get over to Duke to watch women's and men's games--two hours or so of free entertainment is hard to beat.

Next on the list is probably football. Most weekends I'll take in a college or pro game on TV, though I'm not devoted enough to set aside every Saturday and Sunday afternoon (not to mention Monday nights) in the fall for viewing. Still, the sport I'm most likely to watch on ESPN Classic is football. Old football games are somehow more watchable than any other recycled sporting event.

But my first love was baseball, and every so often I come back for a fling. Last year's World Series was great--I watched parts of every game, the first time I'd done that for as long as I can remember. Call me sappy, but the match-up between the scrappy Anaheim Angels and Barry Bonds and the "last chance at greatness" San Francisco Giants was utterly compelling.

My team is the Kansas City Royals, which last year lost 100 games in a single season for the first time in team history. I quit paying attention to the outcomes of Royals games sometime in early August, but I did take note of the box scores. And what I saw was encouraging. We had a number of young pitchers who seemed to do well for five innings and then blow up, giving up three or four runs in the sixth. This seemed to happen just about every time one of these young starters appeared in a game.

I had a couple of theories about this. My first thought was that new manager Tony Pena just didn't know how to handle a pitching staff. But Pena was a great catcher when he was a player, so that didn't really make sense. Which brought me to my favored theory: That Pena wanted to see how far these guys could go, sacrificing last year (which was already a season of futility) for a better go-round in 2003.

I must admit a rising feeling of optimism as the Royals compiled the best spring training record in the majors last month. Back in 2000, the Royals did the same thing and had a pretty decent year (for K.C., anyway--they threatened to break .500 for the first time since 1994). But our young guys weren't pitching much in March, and since we'd either traded or allowed all of our veteran starters to leave, youth would be on the spot come April. As any baseball fan will tell you, March means nothing, and April and May don't mean much. "Talk to me in September" is the conventional wisdom.

Which means I shouldn't be so damned excited that the Royals won their first two series of the year and opened up 5-0 (their game on Sunday against Cleveland was postponed due to rain). Except for this: Our top four starters all went six innings or more and gave up two runs or fewer. Our opening day starter, Runelvys Hernandez, has given up five hits and one run in 13 innings while winning his first two starts. The young guys, apparently, can pitch. For now, we're winning.

All this could change in less than a week. The adrenaline and excitement brought on by a successful spring and hot start can dissipate just as soon as you can say "road trip." The problem with the Royals since 1994 (the last time they were in contention for the playoffs--the year there were no playoffs due to the strike) is not that they can't string together a few wins. It's that they tend to fall into double-digit losing streaks a couple times a year. Even the best teams will lose three or four in a row. But not 10. Or 15. If you go 5-23 in the month of September, chances are you're going to be playing golf in October.

I know all of this. My brain keeps telling me that .500 is still the goal for this team and that I should consider a winning season to be a fine accomplishment for a team which features two rookies in the regular line-up and a starting rotation with an average age of around 24. There is no rational reason to expect this fine beginning to the season to translate into a playoff run. Look at the Twins two years ago. They started off white-hot, and then faded enough to allow Cleveland to sneak into the post-season.

Then again, look at the Twins last year. They led the AL Central division wire-to-wire, beat Oakland in the Divisional Series before losing to the eventual World Series champion Angels in the AL Championship. Now that's what I'm talking about.

Which means I'm really talking about the Royals being seriously competitive in another year or two. Like I said, my brain is very comfortable with that. But my heart is racing after the great start to this year. Every night last week I turned on the TV to check the scores and then stared in amazement as the news of a glorious victory flashed across the screen, a nice little pick-me-up before getting back to my late-night writing.

And hey, when we do go into one of those 15-game slides and trash any hopes of the playoffs this year, I can always fall back on the last refuge of the tortured fan: Wait 'til next year. Which will lead to another stream of derision from Barbara, who considers my rabid devotion to perennial losers rather comical. But that's another story altogether.

Jon Worley's favorite Royal of all time is Willie Wilson, though Frank White and Paul Splittorff are right up there.