Maybe the problem is that the ball was in the air for too long. True, the ball hovered for only a couple of seconds, but a couple of seconds is enough to get a man thinking about things. These days, the last thing the Kansas City Royals want to be doing is thinking.</p><p>Things are bad at Kauffman Stadium. Yes, that sentence is a repeat from 2004 and 1998 and 2007 and 2002 and pretty much every other year since O.J. fled in a white Bronco. But something about these days feels even worse. The Royals should not be this bad. They have a dominant closer. They have a couple of very solid starting pitchers. They have a young shortstop hitting .324 and several other young players with talent. They have an enthusiastic first-year manager who was supposed to bring energy and discipline to Kansas City.</p><p>And still, the Royals play remarkably bad baseball. That&#8217;s a mouthful around these parts. They have lost 17 of their last 20 games. They allowed an astonishing 18 unearned runs in those 20 games. They lost one game after shortstop Tony Pe&#241;a Jr. lost a pop-up in the sun, a point emphasized by the fact that he wasn&#8217;t wearing sunglasses. When asked why not, he said: &#8220;I ordered some, but we never got them in.&#8221;</p><p>In those 20 games, the Royals hit a grand total of four home runs and averaged a no-chance 2.8 runs per game. On Tuesday, Texas&#8217; Kevin Millwood pitched a complete game against the Royals in only 94 pitches. I mean, these days if you allow a pitcher to blow you away in 94 pitches, you are clearly not trying hard enough. Worse, it was the seventh time this year &#8212; <em>the </em><em>seventh time</em> &#8212; that a pitcher had thrown a complete game against the Royals using fewer than 105 pitches. That&#8217;s by far the most in baseball. Most teams have allowed that to happen zero times.</p><p>Bad times. Outfielder Jos&#233; Guillen is now hitting .249 and yelling at fans. The disabled list is now crowded enough that if the Royals&#8217; wounded all went to dinner together, you would have to push two tables together. And skipper Trey Hillman seems to be getting testier and testier as it becomes clear that he really doesn&#8217;t have any answers.</p><p>So all of this was in the air in the seventh inning on Wednesday. The Royals and Rangers were tied 2-2, there was a Texas runner on second and it was about time for something bad to happen. Rangers second baseman Joaquin Arias hit a soft little pop-up back to Royals pitcher Brian Bannister &#8212; though even the word &#8220;pop-up&#8221; oversells it. The ball probably never got higher than 18 or 20 feet.</p><p>&#8220;It was like something out of a nightmare,&#8221; Bannister said. He had pitched well. This has been a rough year for him. In the old days, they called this kind of year a &#8220;sophomore jinx,&#8221; but Bannister is too smart to believe in jinxes. He believes in adjustments. The league adjusted to him after his excellent 2007 rookie season. And he has had trouble adjusting back.</p><p>He has tried just about everything. He tried different pitches. He tried different arm angles. He tried to strike out batters. He tried to get more ground balls. He tried to transform himself. Then he went to Yankee Stadium, gave up 10 runs in one inning, and realized he needed to go back to being himself again.</p><p>That return to 2007 was working pretty well. On Wednesday, he struck out a career-high eight batters. He gave up just one run in the first six innings, and that was a solo home run. (&#8220;You&#8217;re willing to put up with those as long as they are solo homers,&#8221; he said.) Then he struggled a bit in the seventh, giving up back-to-back doubles, which tied the score. He was mad at himself. He threw a hard cutter to Arias, who hit the soft pop-up, the nightmare pop-up, the one that can make a man think.