Why the Royals and Cardinals envy each other: a series preview

Life and sports run in cycles. The weekend series between the St. Louis Cardinals and Kansas City Royals will showcase two teams at very different points in their respective cycles.

The Royals would certainly like to be where the Cardinals are now. Championship flags flying, a superstar player and currently spitting distance from 1^st place. The quest to get to that point in the cycle has been fruitless since the mid 1980's. Clearly not every cycle is on the same time-line.

Meanwhile, the Cardinals are trying to figure out how to get where the Royals currently sit. Obviously, they don't want to be under .500 and trying to over-com decades of irrelevance. However, they are faced with an aging and increasingly expensive roster. Time will continue to march on and those older and declining players will have to be replaced by young talent - exactly what the Royals have by the truck load. Thus placing realistic fans in an odd position of coveting what their opponent has.

The Royals will be taunting the Busch faithful this weekend with Eric Hosmer at first base and Mike Moustakas at third. Combined, they  will make roughly $800k this season. Those three guys, along with the under-appreciated Billy Butler and the resurgent Alex Gordon, make up a decent middle of the lineup. Manager Ned Yost is going to have to make a decision between playing Hosmer and Butler due to the National League's penchant for putting bats in the hands of the truly unskilled 1/9^th of the time.

The starting rotation isn't quite as young and talented as the lineup, but the Royals will put Danny Duffy on the hill on Sunday. He'll be making his 7^th career start and is coming off of a pretty decent one in Oakland. He'll be the encore to Felipe Paulino - a recent acquisition from the Rockies,  and Vin Mazzarro - who is semi-famous for allowing 14 runs in less than three innings.  Suffice to say, neither of them will likely set the world on fire and highlights a major issue for the Royals.

The bullpen however is a completely different story. It's one of the finest in the game today with every pitcher pulling their weight. Closer Joakim Soria has been the least effective guy in the bullpen, but has seemed to come around lately. Former University of Missouri pitcher Aaron Crow is the primary setup man and he is typically preceded by any number of talented young relief pitchers.

The Royals aren't likely a contender in 2011. Picking and choosing players to keep an eye on is a much better way, I believe, to preview this upcoming series than laying out a team vs team comparison. I'm going to assume that if you read this blog, you're already familiar with the team that will be wearing red.

These games mean a lot to the Cardinals in the context of this season's division race. For the Royals, it's more about developing young talent and showcasing a few players for the trade deadline. That's not to say the team itself doesn't care about winning, they'll be doing their damnedest to do that. It's just that priorities shift depending on where a franchise is in it's cycle. The Cardinals are standing at third with two outs trying to figure out a way to score one more run. The Royals are on first, with no outs hoping to score a bunch of runs. The result isn't pre-determined, which is exactly the reason we'll be watching.

Nick Scott is a contributor to Royals Authority, writes a Royals blog for the Lawrence Journal-World and is host of the Broken Bat Single podcast. You can follow him on Twitter or on Facebook.