Good seats remain to watch the stupidest thing the Royals have done in years, and we include here Sluggerrr shooting a fan in the eye with a hot dog and even $36 million for Jos&#xE9; Guillen.</p><p>This one will happen Saturday when the Royals hold a shamefully weak Negro Leagues tribute that borders on insulting and paints the franchise as out of touch and embarrassingly cheap.</p><p>Here comes another for the stack of anecdotes about an organization that, every so often, can&#x92;t get out of its own way: The team with baseball&#x92;s lowest payroll chooses to save the $15,000 to $20,000 cost of outfitting players with replica Negro Leagues uniforms.</p><p>That&#x92;s roughly 0.2 percent of the money saved on Gil Meche&#x92;s retirement, by the way, and privately even some loyal team employees shake their heads with sadness about this.</p><p>The Royals are stuck in another last-place season, and even as real signs point to a brighter future, any criticism about a sorry major-league product is fair game. This one, though, goes beyond baseball and to a franchise that should be begging to make stronger ties with a scarred fan base instead of showing itself to be some wicked combination of oblivious and penny-pinching.</p><p>This is the franchise that tried out a professional softball pitcher and batted the first player of the game out of order, but one of the enduring indictments of the bush-league way the Royals operated for most of the 1990s and first part of the 2000s is that they once canceled a Negro Leagues tribute because the uniforms cost too much.</p><p>David Glass has since changed his ways. The Royals have handed out big free-agent contracts. They&#x92;ve set records for spending on amateur talent and are the buzz of the industry for a stacked farm system, earning praise from those who used to ridicule, but somehow, amazingly, here we are again.</p><p>The Buck O&#x92;Neil Legacy Seat is brilliant, a fitting tribute, the coolest honor for good deeds in this town, and the Royals deserve credit for coming up with it. Nothing happens in a vacuum, so it&#x92;s worth pointing out that the plans for this weekend were made in a time the museum had a void of leadership before current president Bob Kendrick took over.</p><p>But the museum is the little guy here, the one in need of help and unable to make demands. The Royals are the major local institution, the ones with the means and responsibility to help the community and should&#x92;ve been better about keeping that in mind.</p><p>Instead, this is one more opportunity for fans &#x97; especially black fans, whom the Royals particularly need to court &#x97; to draw ugly conclusions about a franchise&#x92;s priorities and values.</p><p>The Royals aren&#x92;t canceling the tribute, but neutering it past the point of significance. This is the birthplace of the Negro Leagues, home of the museum, and what the Royals are doing this weekend is less than what several other clubs do every year &#x97; including the Padres, and San Diego never even had a Negro Leagues team.</p><p>Those replica uniforms advertised a worthy cause that holds special meaning in this town and generated up to $20,000 that became an important part of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum&#x92;s budget. Fans also used to get replica Monarchs hats, the ones you see around town all the time.</p><p>Instead, this weekend the Royals will be giving out souvenir pennants.</p><p>They used to invite former players, who enjoyed the reunion and a few dollars for autographs. Those players will be home this weekend, left to hear Royals marketing director Mike Bucek say &#x93;we just wanted to try something different and put the focus more on Buck.&#x94;</p><p>That simply doesn&#x92;t match with reality. People notice uniforms, so if the Royals wanted to put the focus more on Buck, they could&#x92;ve at least put a patch on the players&#x92; sleeves. They could&#x92;ve been wearing those patches all season &#x97; Buck would&#x92;ve turned 100 this year.</p><p>By saying they want to highlight Buck and then ditching the uniforms, the Royals expose themselves as ignorant about the man they&#x92;re honoring. If you knew Buck, you know he would want the players in uniform, for the focus of the day to be on the group. If anything, the Royals using this excuse only drives a pre-existing and petty jealousy that some other former Negro Leaguers carry toward Buck.</p><p>The museum is going through some well-documented financial struggles and needs all the funding it can get. Now it needs even more. The Royals still have time to do the right thing and cut the museum a check to make up for the difference, but a misguided tribute this weekend shows an unfortunate lack of awareness.</p><p>Especially in this anniversary year, the Royals had the opportunity to do something special to honor a beloved man and help a struggling local nonprofit.</p><p>Instead, they&#x92;re showing themselves to be cheap, out of touch and at least in one way, not all that far removed from the darkest days in franchise history.