<table> </table> ST. LOUIS | The Royals&#8217; clubhouse is deathly quiet. A baseball clubhouse is always quiet after a team is shut out. The clubhouse gets to be deathly quiet when the team is shut out two games in a row.</p><p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t really know what there is to say,&#8221; Royals first baseman Billy Butler says. Well, he&#8217;s right &#8212; not much to say. The Royals lost to the Cardinals 5-0 for the second straight day. They have not scored a run in 24 innings. They have lost 11 of their last 14. They fell below the .500 mark &#8212; 21-22 now &#8212; for the first time since the fifth game of the season.</p><p>The Royals (and this might depress you) now have exactly the same record they had after 43 games last season. There just isn&#8217;t much to say about that.</p><p>Now, you can sense this creeping dread building around the team. For one thing, Royals players and management talk about how &#8220;nobody&#8217;s panicking.&#8221; When people say &#8220;nobody&#8217;s panicking,&#8221; that&#8217;s usually a pretty good indication that somebody&#8217;s panicking. More to the point, the Royals held a players-only meeting before the game. Nobody wanted to discuss what it was about afterward &#8212; players only and all that &#8212; but it was undoubtedly about playing with more intensity and focus. That&#8217;s what players-only meetings are <em>always</em> about.</p><p>Anyway, I cannot hear about a players-only meeting without thinking about former Royals manager Bob Boone&#8217;s enduring quote. He said: &#8220;Winners win and losers meet.&#8221;</p><p>The main point of all of this is that the Royals are going through their first real baseball crisis of the season. They are not scoring runs. They are not playing well. And I suspect they&#8217;re not going to rally out of it with conventions and summits.</p><p>No, they&#8217;re going to have to hit themselves out of it &#8230; and how well and how soon they do that will probably determine how good a season this can be. Everyone knows this team has more talent than any Royals team in years. They have good pitching &#8212; heck, they came into Saturday&#8217;s game with the best ERA in the American League. They have the biggest payroll in team history. They have several veteran players who are supposed to change the team&#8217;s persona.</p><p>But, as boring as it sounds, they have to become more consistent. Good teams do not play brilliant one day, awful the next. Last year, the Royals were probably the streakiest team in baseball &#8212; they lost seven in a row, won five in a row, lost 12 in a row, won 11 out of 12, lost 14 out of 16, won 13 out of 15. They were very good or very bad. They finished 12 games below .500. The idea was to smooth that out a bit.</p><p>But so far, the Royals have been as streaky and inconsistent as ever. Just look at them this month. They won six games in a row &#8212; two in extra innings &#8212; and were looking like one of the surprise teams of baseball. They promptly lost six games in a row and looked a lot like the old Royals. They broke the streak when Zack Greinke pitched an awesome game, as he has all season. &#8220;That should be our longest losing streak of the season,&#8221; Greinke said.</p><p>Then, on Tuesday they had their most exciting victory of the season &#8212; one of their most exciting victories of the <em>decade</em> &#8212; when they scored four runs in the bottom of the ninth and beat the Cleveland Indians. Afterward, everyone talked about how a victory like that can inspire a team, get them rolling.</p><p>The Royals&#8217; scorecard since then: Zero wins, four losses, two shutouts, one players-only meeting and a .195 team batting average.