After the Kansas City Royals opened the season 2-12, I examined the tough schedule they’d be playing through the end of May, their unimpressive talent, and the poor management that had made the club much less than the sum of its parts. I realized, after rigorous analysis that consisted alternately of laughing and crying, that this team was not only the worst in the majors, but potentially the worst in major league history. This was not, admittedly, the most far-seeing bit of punditry I’ve ever engaged in, but when an open sewer is running in your neighborhood, sometimes you need to point at it.

In the interest of encouraging readers to pay more attention to the history being made in their own time, I offered naff prizes – a Royals cap and an autographed copy of famed Royals fan Rob Neyer’s new “Big Book of Baseball Blunders” – to the reader who came closest to predicting the hapless team’s record through the end of May. The contest seemed to strike a nerve, and I received an avalanche of responses – some from people who wanted a Royals hat and others from beleaguered Royals fans who mistook me for a Yankees publicist.

Only one correspondent, though, had the vision and acuity to accurately predict that the Royals would end May 13-38, on pace for a record-shattering 41-121 season. Congratulations to reader James Jewell.

With the Royals having passed through New York recently, many of you have seen them. They are bad – not routinely bad, not bad in one aspect of the game, but hopelessly inept at everything, and they seem to be getting worse.

The most galling (or amusing) thing is that this is a really old team. Of the nine Royals with the most at-bats, only three – shortstop Angel Berroa, center fielder Shane Costa, and catcher John Buck – are under 30, and they all stink. Their best hitter by far, Mark Grudzielanek, is 35 and has hit two home runs this year. And the hitting is the strength of the team! Among pitchers with at least 20 innings, the Royals have more with ERAs above 6.00 than below 5.00. It goes without saying that the team plays with utter lifelessness and apathy. It’s not an exaggeration to say that they’re worse than you’d expect a good Triple-A team to be if it found itself in the majors.

This is an awful lot of bad baseball for any team’s fans to take, so Royals boosters should take their good news where they can find it. The squad recently won

its first game in Yankee Stadium in five years – that’s a good thing. They’re so bad that mathematically they’re nearly certain to improve going forward, perhaps to the level of a mere 110-loss team. That’s also a good thing.

The Royals just fired their general manager, Allard Baird, and hired Dayton Moore, who’s widely regarded as the most promising young executive in baseball, but took the job on condition that he be given full authority over baseball operations. That’s not bad news, either.

Moore, who’s served for years as Atlanta Braves GM John Scheurholz’s lieutenant, is actually the ideal candidate to turn around a team as bad as the Royals. His background is in scouting and development: building a network of trustworthy talent evaluators, submitting the young players they identify to a system carefully designed to teach them winning baseball, and figuring out which ones are going to develop into stars and which should be traded off for major league talent.

None of this requires a budget beyond the reach of even such a broke team as the Royals. It just requires that ownership not idiotically seek to save pitifully meager sums by scrimping on salaries for the front office, scouts, and amateur talent.

The downside to this enormously encouraging development is that Moore has no incentive to improve the Royals this year. Bad as they are, it wouldn’t take much to make them better – but then he has no reason to trade off any young talent, and if he deals off the few veterans in whom other teams might have some small interest, he’s not going to be looking for players who will improve the team this year.

The only way the Royals are going to get significantly better over the next few months is if they get a new manager. Incumbent Buddy Bell is bad at everything from motivation to identifying who among his players are good. But an in-season change has already been ruled out.

So, as improved as the Royals’ longterm prospects are, their chances of avoiding the humiliation of losing more games than the 1962 Mets aren’t good at all, and in fact may have gone down since last we spoke of them. The main thing they have going for them is that it’s almost impossible for a team to be this bad – every little fluke hit, every random inning in which some pitcher displays the talent that got him to the majors, every uncharacteristically shrewd move by Bell increases the chance of this becoming just another ordinary awful team, rather than a historically wretched one.

They’ll still be well worth watching, though – it’s never a good idea to underestimate the Royals.

tmarchman@nysun.com