It remains to be seen if this is good news or bad news. Eric Hosmer and the Kansas City Royals are featured on the cover of this week’s Sports Illustrated magazine. Some people insist that appearing on the cover of the sports weekly falls under the category of “curse.”

But the Royals are getting a lot of mileage out of it anyway.

According to SI, the Royals have found success with a balanced team, leading the majors in batting average and ranking second in slugging and OPS and third in on-base percentage.

Kansas City is getting multiple contributions from several players, including first baseman Eric Hosmer. Hosmer, who graces the national cover of this week’s Sports Illustrated, leads the team in home runs, hits, slugging, OPS and on-base percentage.

“These aren’t the soft Royals of years past,” the magazine continues.

“In a 12-day span last month, the Royals were involved in five bench-clearing incidents, resulting in nine ejections, multiple suspensions, fines and a warning to the rest of the league that they don’t care what you think about them.

“They don’t back down,” Royals manager Ned Yost said. “If other teams were trying to get us so mad we couldn’t be successful, the opposite happened. We actually got better after one of those incidents. I think teams started to see, ‘You want to stir up the beehive? Go ahead. But you’re going to get stung.'”