The Royals have not been a good baseball team in a long, long time. Since 1995, they have one winning season, their 83-79 campaign led by Tony Pena in 2003. This year they once again have been the bottom feeder, sitting at 65-86 with just 11 games to play.

Recently I was going through my 2007 Topps base card set. A team photo of every Major League team is featured in the set, along with a manager card. Every team, that is, except the Kansas City Royals. And it isn't that the team portrait is missing. No, the card is there, but nobody is pictured.

Is this an underhanded way of Topps poking fun at the Royals, letting card collectors everywhere know that "the Royals have nobody"? Probably not, but if it is, it's hilarious.

I found this on ESPN's page 2, when Jim Caple asked the Topps people about the missing portrait:

"Every year Topps prints a team photo card for every club. Been doing it for decades. But this year, the Royals' team card is just a photo of the stadium in Kansas City. It seems that for some reason, a Topps photographer didn't shoot the team on photo day during spring training. So a Topps rep called the Royals to see if they could use their team photo instead. The only problem was, he says, Kansas City told him it didn't bother to take a team photo, either."

So it appears that not even the Royals themselves want to document the poor team they field everyday.