Royals Rumblings - News for October 23, 2020

Trevor Hughes/USA TODAY

The Fridays Rumblings Generation

As mentioned here, the Gold Glove Finalists were announced yesterday.

If you’re wondering why it only mentioned Alex Gordon, there was a little silliness as Nicky Lopez was originally forgotten by Rawlings.

But they later went back and corrected it:

Alex Gordon is up for his 8th:

Here’s Lynn Worthy’s story at The Star about it.

While Max was looking at the Royals payroll yesterday, so was Alec Lewis at The Athletic:

Also, at The Athletic, a Nate Taylor story about George Toma:

The Detroit Free Press has a story about Royals bench coach Pedro Grifol, who is in the running for Tigers manager:

General manager Al Avila has conducted interviews with Dodgers first base coach George Lombard and New York Yankees hitting coach Marcus Thames. Avila recently added Kansas City Royals bench coach Pedro Grifol to that group, according to MLB Network’s Jon Morosi, as well as Pittsburgh Pirates bench coach Don Kelly, according to The Athletic.

As for blogs,

Kevin O’Brien at Royals Reporter is doing a series entitled “Random Royals Reflections from Game {X} of the World Series”.

Darin Watson’s 1980 follow along at U.L.’s Toothpick is coming to a close. Today he talked about the parade the AL Champions received after coming up just short:

Back in Kansas City a day before they wanted to be, the Royals got one nice consolation prize after losing the World Series. A crowd estimated at 100,000 turned out for a parade to honor the team, which ended at Liberty Memorial and also gave us this excellent picture of George Brett riding a horse:

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Surprising amount of MLB stories popped up on the World Series off day.

THE NATS BROKE THE WORLD SERIES NEW BLACKOUT BY (re-) SIGNING... Josh Harrison. Ok, so maybe that’s not going to knock the Fall Classic off the front pages.

No Royals won hardware at the MLBPA Players Choice Awards:

Minnesota Twins designated hitter Nelson Cruz was voted Marvin Miller Man of the Year and Atlanta Braves first baseman Freddie Freeman was picked as Player of the Year in annual Players Choice award voting by the Major League Baseball Players Association.

Hall of Famer Jeff Bagwell talked publicly about his battles with alcoholism for the first time.

In fact, he wants to share his story if it means helping the teenage alcoholics and substance abusers who are trying to turn their lives around at Archway Academy, the only sober high school in Houston. “Well, I am Jeff,” Bagwell says. “And I am an alcoholic...

Bagwell’s troubles were not unknown to anyone who spent a significant amount of time around the Astros over the last decade or so. He’s also taken the time to talk to and try to help other addicts in more private settings. But this is the first time Bagwell has addressed his alcoholism in any kind of real public way.

At The Ringer, Ben Lindberg asks: “The Shift May Have Cost the Braves a Pennant. Will It Cost Someone a World Series?”

But the blasts by Hernández and Bellinger accounted for only two of the Dodgers’ four runs. By win probability, the second-biggest hit in the game was the one that produced the other two: the two-out, two-run single Will Smith smacked in the third.

A few years ago, Smith’s grounder might have been an easy out for the second baseman, and the Braves would have been out of the inning. In 2020, though, there was nobody on the right side of second base to stop the ball. The Braves were shifting against Smith, a right-handed hitter, and Braves second baseman Ozzie Albies was stationed on the left side of second. That alignment may have cost Atlanta a pennant.

A similar decision nearly cost the Rays a pennant, too. In the fifth inning of ALCS Game 6, the Astros’ George Springer—also a right-handed hitter—bounced a grounder past a drawn-in, shifted infield with runners on second and third.

World Series Game 1 had the least eyeballs ever for a World Series game. And then set a record again in Game 2 with even lower numbers. During a pandemic. With not much other new programming on. Even when accounting for the increased fragmentation of viewership: NotGreatBob.gif. Not only that, but, in Game 2, Joe Buck kept talking football. Crappy NFC East football, even. Seriously, it’s the World Series?!? Then again, he and Troy Aikman got in hot water over hot mic comments about military flyovers this past weekend, too. If we’re in the worst timeline, Buck will be calling a combined 17 World Series and NFL games in the next 18 days. Boo.

But, hey, Rob Manfred wants to keep the expanded postseason and new extra innings rules (and, yes, Matt is wrong). Double boo.

Deadspin’s (this is Zombie Deadspin now, right?) Rich O’Malley looks at just how bad it is to be a minor leaguer:

It’s more like “forced to buy-your-own-equipment, sleep-in-bed-bug-infested-motels, pick-up-odd-jobs-to-supplement-less-than-minimum-wage-incomes” wrong — and doing all of that while locked into a seven-season contract that limits any ability for players to leverage a better situation for themselves.

Let’s end on a nice(-ish)* story. Yahoo’s Mike Oz talks about a fan who extended his 15-year World Series streak on Wednesday night

*I don’t think there should be fans in Arlington.

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If I had to make a guess about which generational cohort was most vocal at this site, it might be the micro-generation between Gen X and Gen Y/Millennial. I think the most popular name for it is the lame portmanteau Xennial. An author for Slate has tried to dub it Generation Catalano after, apparently, Jared Leto’s character in the short-lived My So-Called Life. Uh, no. I can think of dozens, if not hundreds, of things that had more of a cultural impact, but we’re not going with “Generation Slap Bracelet” or “Generation Rhythm-Challenged Adolescents Awkwardly Rapping the Full Lyrics of ‘Can’t Touch This’ and ‘Ice, Ice, Baby’ ”. The one I like, though, is “The Oregon Trail Generation”.

But, while many kids of this generation may not have played the game, it captures the essence of a years of kids who grew up in the pre-internet days only to watch it take over every facet of our lives. We will be the only generation that crosses that divide. Or, as this popular article puts it:

A big part of what makes us the square peg in the round hole of named generations is our strange relationship with technology and the internet. We came of age just as the very essence of communication was experiencing a seismic shift, and it’s given us a unique perspective that’s half analog old school and half digital new school.

The game has been mentioned a couple of times on this site before. Sadly, this 2007 reference has been lost to the internet (not even available in working condition on archive.org)

What is the AL Central Trail? Its a reflection on the White Sox 2007 season, through the lens of the Oregon Trail computer game. Check it out now, its incredible.

For those who aren’t familiar or don’t remember, you picked a profession and hometown (which your resources were tied to), bought supplies, and headed west. Along the way, you had to hunt for food, ford rivers, and avoid dying of dysentery. In the end, you either got a crazy trip down the rapids to Willamette Valley or a headstone with whatever was funny enough to make your classmates laugh but not enough to get more than a stern look from the teacher. It was definitely 100% historically accurate (probably a bit of unfair criticism for a game designed for 3rd graders in the 1980s).

What’s more interesting (to me, anyways) is how it became ubiquitous. There was a great article in Smithsonian Magazine about its history (which was linked to in one of the aforementioned rumblings):

Minnesota was a Midwestern Silicon Valley by the early 1970s. The State of Minnesota threw huge funds to entice computer programmers to Minneapolis and Saint Paul when it created MECC in 1973. From 1978 to 1999, MECC, together with Apple, competed against private software companies to turn American children into a nation of computer-savvy early adopters and make computer class as much a part of American schooling as math and English.

We might talk about this a bit more on a future Friday.

Want to watch an entire playthrough? It only took about an hour: