Royals’ ownership, led by David Glass, ranks as 10th most popular in baseball

My, how the times have changed.

It wasn’t that long ago that owner David Glass’ name was mud among Royals fans. In 2013, Sports Illustrated rated Glass as the third-worst owner in baseball and Real Clear Sports ranked him as the fifth-worst in sports. A year earlier, Bleacher Report ranked Glass No. 29 among the 30 baseball owners.

At that time, most Royals fans would have either agreed with those assessments or thought they were too kind.

Heck, even a year ago, when the Royals were coming off a World Series appearance, some fans were griping about the Royals’ ownership holding the team back from making a bigger splash in free-agency.

Since then, the Royals traded for Johnny Cueto and Ben Zobrist and won the World Series. Just this month, they handed a four-year, $72 million contract to Alex Gordon and reportedly agreed to a five-year, $70 million deal with pitcher Ian Kennedy.

The payroll for 2016 should top $130 million. The criticism of Glass being a penny-pincher is dead.

Jeff Sullivan of FanGraphs asked readers to vote in a poll on team owners. Here is how the Royals’ ownership scored; there was a day in the not-too-distant past that the “good” and “bad” numbers would have been reversed.

Very good: 20.84 percent

Pretty good: 37.99 percent

Average: 26.65 percent

Pretty bad: 9.76 percent

Very bad: 4.75 percent

Sullivan assigned a point total to each of those responses (Very bad = 1 point; Average = 3 points; Very good = 5 points).

Royals ownership scored 3.61 points, which was good for 10th place, just behind the Yankees (3.63). The Astros were the runaway winners (4.44), followed by the Cubs (4.39) and Cardinals (4.29).

The fine blog, Royals Review, also polled readers using the same five categories. Their numbers were even better for David Glass:

Very good: 14 percent

Pretty good: 47 percent

Average: 32 percent

Pretty bad: 6 percent

Very bad: 2 percent

Fans are coming out publicly in support of Glass these days:

This story was originally published January 18, 2016 at 2:38 AM.