<table> </table> A wise baseball man once posed this riddle to me: &#8220;Have you ever noticed that the only time anybody complains about managers&#8217; moves or lousy defense or bad relief pitching or players not doing the little things is when you&#8217;re not scoring any (bleeping) runs?&#8221;</p><p>Well, there&#8217;s a lot of truth in that. The Royals, as you probably have noticed, are flopping like it&#8217;s 1999. After Sunday&#8217;s sad late-inning breakdown, the Royals have now lost 16 of 21. They dropped four games under .500 &#8212; suddenly, only three teams in the American League have worse records. And, of course, there is all sorts of talk about manager Trey Hillman&#8217;s failed strategies and the collapse of the bullpen and the Royals&#8217; crummy defense and so on. Sure, those are all factors in the Royals&#8217; lousy play. But they are all supporting actors in this drama.</p><p>The star is the Royals&#8217; utter inability to score runs. Everything else is smoke. Sunday, even with Zack Greinke starting, the Royals lost to Chicago 7-4. Afterward, people talked about how Zack looked positively human out there, and people griped how the bullpen was brutal and, along the way, they were virtually <em>congratulating</em> the Royals for scoring those four runs. Hey, four runs should be enough to win! That&#8217;s how bad it has been &#8212; four runs is like a party.</p><p>I&#8217;m going to show you a statistic in a minute that will show you exactly what four runs gets you in baseball. But first, your Zack Greinke update: Greinke pitched seven innings and allowed three earned runs, which boosted his ERA to 1.10 for the season (first time all year his ERA has been above 1.00). He did not allow a home run, which means he has now thrown 110 consecutive innings without giving up a homer. That&#8217;s the longest streak in baseball since 1997. He did not walk anybody &#8212; so his strikeout-to-walk ratio is now a preposterous 88-12.</p><p>But he did give up more than two runs in a game for the first time this year. He gave up those three earned runs and a fourth unearned run. He gave up eight hits. He just wasn&#8217;t sharp. &#8220;I couldn&#8217;t finish them off,&#8221; Greinke said, and it&#8217;s true, the White Sox&#8217;s biggest hits came with two outs and two strikes on the batter, the time when Greinke usually closes things out. He was just a little bit off.</p><p>Still, Greinke pitched well enough to win. See, there&#8217;s a rigid law in baseball (and it rhymes too: Score more than four.) That rule has been in place for quite some time now. Every single year in baseball this decade, every year, teams lose more than they win when they score four runs. Every year. Obviously, they lose a lot more than they win when they score three runs or two runs or one run.</p><p>All in all, it breaks down like this: Teams that score <em>more </em>than four runs win more than three-quarters of the time. Teams that score four runs or fewer win about a quarter of the time.</p><p>It&#8217;s really that simple. Four runs are not enough to make you a winning team in baseball. The Royals came into the year hoping to beat those odds. They talked about pitching and defense. Royals general manager Dayton Moore has done a good job of getting starting pitchers. He loaded up on power arms in the bullpen.</p><p>And for a while, the Royals were doing well in those low-scoring games &#8212; the first month or so, the Royals won two 2-0 games, a 2-1 game, a 3-0 game and a 3-1 game. After that month, the Royals were 18-11, in first place, looking like one of the surprise teams in baseball.