Royals Rumblings - News for August 2, 2024

Anyone miss their 4000-word Fridays?

At The Star, Jaylon Thompson sets the table for the playoff push over the next two months:

The Royals have a chance to catch the Cleveland Guardians for first place in the AL Central but currently trail by six games. Later this month, the two teams will play a four-game series at Progressive Field.

Other divisional games in the Royals’ near-term future include three-game road series against the Detroit Tigers and Minnesota Twins. Also ahead are pivotal home matchups with the Boston Red Sox and Philadelphia Phillies.

A strong month would put the Royals in position for a postseason berth. But they will be tested by first-place teams and clubs in the playoff mix. This season, the Royals are 28-33 against teams with a winning percentage above .500.

He also profiles trade deadline acquisition Michael Lorenzen:

“I’m excited for the opportunity,” Lorenzen said. “I think it’s a great team to join and kind of plug right in. It seems like a lot of good guys. You know, being with Detroit last year, I made a few starts against Kansas City. And I’m happy to be a part of it.”

The Royals are set to utilize Lorenzen in the starting rotation. He is scheduled to start on Saturday night against the Tigers. He will occupy the fifth starter spot after the Royals sent second-year pitcher Alec Marsh to Triple-A Omaha.

“I’m planning on giving this team a start every five days and giving them everything that I have,” Lorenzen said.

Also at The Star, Pete Grathoff writes about a resolution in the tiff between Bally’s and Comcast:

There’s a bit of good news for fans who want to watch the Royals make a run for a postseason spot. Diamond Sports Group, which owns Bally Sports Kansas City and other Regional Sports Networks (RSNs), reached a carriage agreement with Comcast earlier this week.

Starting Thursday, Royals games will return to Xfinity. which is owned by Comcast, for the first time in three months. However, the games won’t be on the basic Xfinity plan. Royals games will be on Xfinity’s Ultimate TV package, which will be a more expensive option for some viewers. CableTV.com said the Ultimate TV package costs between $68.50 and $80 a month.

MLB and MLBPA are giving a $2M grant to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum as part of their $30M fundraising campaign:

The same could be said about Thursday’s announcement by the MLB-MLBPA Youth Development Foundation of a $2 million grant to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. The grant will help support a $30 million campaign to build a new 30,000-square-foot home for the museum. The new facility will incorporate the latest technology to build upon the legacy and tell the stories of the Negro Leagues and its players.

“You have to remember this museum started in a one-room office in 1990,” said NLBM president Bob Kendrick. “You had a handful of folks led by the late, great Buck O’Neil, who dreamed about the possibility of building a facility that would not only pay rightful tribute to one of the greatest chapters in baseball history, but now as thousands upon thousands discover every year, one of the greatest chapters in American history.”

The new museum will sit adjacent to the Buck O’Neil Education and Research Center (BOERC), which is housed in the former Paseo YMCA. The historic building is where Rube Foster first gathered other team owners to start the discussion that led to the Negro National League forming in 1920.

How about a random Tweet about the stuff in the Royals bullpen?

How about a couple about Witt?

At CBS Sports, Matt Snyder talks about his MVP case:

On the season, Witt is hitting .349/.396/.596 (171 OPS+) with 30 doubles, 10 triples, 19 homers, 76 RBI, 91 runs and 7.0 WAR. He leads the majors in hits, runs, average and WAR (Fangraphs’ version; he’s second to Aaron Judge in Baseball Reference’s version).

Where the conversation gets really interesting is the MVP race. The only Royals MVP ever was George Brett in 1980. It looks like Witt’s chief competition for the award will be Judge, who won MVP in 2022. The Yankees have the most MVPs in MLB history with 21. Their markets couldn’t be more different.

Finally, two national stories about the trade deadline.

First, at Fangraphs, Dan Szymborski (Szymborski! Szymborski!) asks ZIPS which teams improved their postseason probability the most at the trade deadline. As ZIPS hates the Royals and they didn’t make any major trades, I wonder what teams went up:

In terms of playoff probability, the Kansas City Royals head the list, though they remain long-shots to catch Cleveland and their World Series winning percentage didn’t budge that much. They didn’t make any huge additions, but Michael Lorenzen, Paul DeJong, Lucas Erceg, and Hunter Harvey are all generally replacing below-replacement talent. What benefitted Kansas City the most, however, is what happened elsewhere. Two teams in their division got noticeably weaker, and while that benefits the Guardians as well, ZiPS already saw Cleveland’s fate as being less up in the air. ZiPS also doesn’t expect Cleveland to need to make the playoffs via the Wild Card, but the Royals, like the other AL Wild Card teams, got the extra benefit of the Rays killing off their playoff shot.

At The Athletic ($), Jim Bowden graded teams on their trade deadline deals:

Kansas City Royals

Grade: B

Trades:

• Acquired RHP Hunter Harvey from Nationals for 3B Cayden Wallace and 39th pick in MLB Draft

• Acquired RHP Lucas Erceg from A’s for RHP Will Klein, RHP Mason Barnett and OF Jared Dickey

• Acquired RHP Michael Lorenzen from Rangers for LHP Walter Pennington

• Acquired SS Paul DeJong from White Sox for RHP Jarold Rosado

• Traded RHP Colin Selby to Orioles for cash

Key takeaways: The Royals did an excellent job of improving their roster, especially considering they were trying to make trades with one of the weakest farm systems among the contending teams. J.J. Picollo upgraded the bullpen significantly with the trades for Lucas Erceg and Hunter Harvey and added important starting pitching depth with Michael Lorenzen, who can start and relieve. They also added some power with Paul DeJong, whom they can move all around the field.

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Blog time!

At Inside the Crown ($), David Lesky gushes over Witt’s July:

He played 23 games in July and had a hit in 22 of them. He had multiple hits in 13 of them, including three in seven of them in four in another. He came into the month with 377 plate appearances and 343 at bats. Do you know how difficult it is to move your numbers by the time you get to that many PAs and ABs? It’s pretty tough.

Anyway, Witt raised his average by 37 points, his OBP by 33 points and his SLG by 62 points. Steven Kwan got to the .400 mark during his game on June 20. Witt now leads him in batting average by 17 points. Aaron Judge is third in baseball in batting average and is 33 points behind him. I’m going to come off as harsh here and I don’t care. If you are a baseball fan, and I assume you are if you’re here, and you’re not properly appreciating what we’re seeing from Witt, you’re simply wrong. The calendar month split is kind of funny because it is actually arbitrary, but Witt’s .489 (.4888 really) average in July is the 24th highest average ever in any calendar month with at least 75 plate appearances. That’s in the history of Major League Baseball.

Craig Brown does the same at Into the Fountains:

Witt recorded exactly 100 plate appearances in July. He hit .489/.520/.833.

In one month, Witt added almost 100 points of OPS to his total. An absolutely absurd jump for this time of the season.

He recorded at least one hit in 22 of 23 games.

He tallied 16 extra-base hits.

He scored 26 runs and drove in 22.

He recorded 13 multi-hit games, including a stretch of four consecutive games where he collected three hits.

Amazing.

Here’s a pair of older articles that may or may not have been linked last month. I wasn’t here so I missed them.

At Royals Farm Report, Alex Duvall posts his Midseason prospect rankings:

1) Jac Caglianone, 1B/LHP

I can’t say I’ve ever seen raw power like this just standing idly by and available with the 6th overall pick in an MLB Draft before. I mentioned live on the Royals Weekly podcast that I think Adam Dunn is totally in Caglianone’s reasonable range of outcomes. I am a little nervous about how much he swings (Dunn walked a ton in his MLB career) and how the pitching development side of things could impact the bat, but there is easy 40 home run power here if it all works out. Roll the dice and close your eyes.

At Powder Blue Nostalgia, Patrick Glancy gave his State of the Game Address around the All-Star Game:

Is baseball dying? No, and it’s a dumb question. (Hang on, there’s more.) I don’t need to point to the billions of dollars flowing through the sport or record overall attendance numbers to prove it either. Although, speaking of attendance numbers, nobody look at Oakland. But that brings me to a better question.

Is baseball thriving? That one’s a little trickier to answer. Diehards will point to the previous paragraph as proof that it is, but I don’t think it’s that simple. Sure, combined attendance is great, but the distribution is unequal. Even taking Oakland out of the equation, something’s off. Don’t get me wrong, I love watching the Phillies play in front of a packed house, especially in October, but anybody who watched the 2023 Royals (I know why I watched, but why did you?) knows that wasn’t the story everywhere.

Blog roundup:

• Darin Watson at U.L.’s Toothpick: This Date In Royals History—1984 Edition: August 1 - Missed opportunities cost the Royals in a loss to Toronto. (Spoiler: The Royals fell to 50-56 but it would get better)
• Preston Farr at Farm to Fountains: How does the Royals bullpen shake out post-Deadline?
• Mike Gillespie at Kings of Kauffman: Grading the first two KC Royals 2024 MLB Trade Deadline deals
• Jacob Milham at Kings of Kauffman: Grading KC Royals aggressive moves on trade deadline day
• Joe Summers at KC Kingdom: Bobby Witt Jr. On Pace for Something No MLB Player Has Ever Accomplished

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(Ed note: We’ll try this OT for a week and if it gets a good response, maybe we’ll do another one next week. If not, we’ll be off to another topic)

I’m a huge Olympics junkie. Always have been and probably always will be. It’s a fun uniting force and I like a lot of the sports that only get a spotlight every 4 years.

In the past I’ve abused my DVR - getting the main stuff on NBC, watch it a couple of hours late, and miss most of the commercials. A normal day would be “Wake up -> watch the overnight broadcast from the previous day while eating breakfast, fast forwarding through commercials -> go to work (and catch some at lunch) -> DVR the daytime stuff -> get home from work -> watch the Daytime broadcast off my DVR, fast forwarding through more commercials, human interest stories, stuff I already watched, and other stuff I don’t want to watch -> roll straight into the evening stuff -> by the end of the night, I’d have watched most of the coverage for the day” .

Earlier this year, I cut the cord and have had to use Peacock. It has some quirks. For instance, with the live network broadcasts, you can’t time shift. If you want to see a prestige event that will be on Primetime like, say, gymnastics - you have to watch the live feed (with no time shifting), watch the international feed (where you can move around in time), or wait until they release the event on replay (with time shifting). Even for the non-prestige events - you can move around. But if you start like 2 hours into a 2:30 event, they might kick it off the stack and it will abruptly end before you can finish and see what’s going on.

They also have the Gold Zone channel, which is like the Red Zone, where they switch between events - but you’re at their mercy as to which event they’ll focus on and it’s never for very long. The studio guys, well, they leave a lot to be desired. It’s not exactly Mike Tirico doing the coverage. It only runs from 8-5 and once it’s off for the day, you can’t replay it. You can rewind and fast forward during it, but only for a part of it. You can’t sit down at 3 and hope to watch all day - it will only let you rewind a couple of hours. In short, Peacock is worth it for the Olympics but it’s far from perfect.

Today, I’m just going to hit up some of the stories that have caught my eye in the first few days of the 2024 Olympics.

I was hesitant to bring one up as I don’t have the ability to moderate comments and I’m trying to not make more work for Max, et al. Can we just all pretend to be adults for a day? Let’s just assume that if there’s something you didn’t like in the world or on the internet that doesn’t personally affect you, it was probably just the French being French (i.e. if you don’t like something on the internet, just skip the next paragraph and move along rather than threadcrapping and making a mess for everyone else)? Don’t make me turn this car around!

As always, the Olympics started with an Opening Ceremony that reflected the host country. It was indeed, very French. However, the torch bearers were not exclusively French. Zinedine Zidane had a big role but so did Serena Williams, Carl Lewis and Nadia Comăneci. The final torchbearers were French Olympic legends, Teddy Rinner and Marie-José Pérec, and they lit a hot-air balloon torch (there’s a historical reason for this, along with it just being unique and cool). Similarly, the performers also had an international flair with Lady Gaga and Celine Dion bookending the night. In the middle, French metal band Gojira jammed with an Opera signer in a headless Marie Antionette costume to a French revolutionary song. France, ladies and gentlemen! The acrobatic torch guy was fun as was the horse “running on water”; my kid liked the Minions scene; and I liked the idea of the parade of nations on boats in the Seine even if the rainy weather wasn’t ideal. The ceremony was not without controversy as a bunch of people mistakenly though a section of the show with drag queens was portraying da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” (an Italian painting in Italy). But, no, it was the Feast of Dionysus, most notably portrayed in “The Feast of the Gods” at a museum in Dijon, France. Again, France, ladies and gentlemen!

The big hero so far in the games is Léon Marchand, the French swimmer who has, thus far, won golds in the 200m breaststroke, 200m butterfly, and 400m IM. The 200m fly was an incredible comeback and I would have loved to hear the noise in the crowd for that one. Annoyingly, I can’t embed that video, but I can link to it here. The pair of 200m medals were won on the same day, within an hour of each other! Meanwhile, no one had ever medaled in both the butterfly and breaststroke in the same Olympics because they’re just such different strokes, never mind gold. He has one more race as he’s qualified for the 200 IM finals.

The shared gold between Qatar’s Mutaz Essa Barshim and Italy’s Gianmarco Tamberi was one of the best stories of the 2020 (2021) Olympics in Tokyo. Heck, it was one of the best Olympic stories ever (again, link since I can’t embed from NBC). Tamberi made headlines again. Not from the long jump: swimming is this week, track and field next week. No, he accidentally lost his wedding ring into the Seine during the Opening Ceremony. Oops.

The athlete blamed “losing too many kilos” and “irrepressible enthusiasm” for the mishap. “If it had to happen, if I had to lose this ring, I couldn’t imagine a better place,” he wrote, claiming the ring will now “remain forever in the riverbed of the city of love”.

He called the bad luck “poetic” and suggested they throw Chiara’s ring in the river too. “[Then] they will be together forever and we will have one more excuse to renew our vows and marry again,” he said.

“Only you could turn this into something romantic,” Chiara wrote under her husband’s apology.

More swimming? Sure! Let’s stay in the pool a while longer. Quick personal story: My wife and I were in Omaha for a wedding in 2012 and had a spare morning so we went to the US Olympic trials, which was apparently one of the most star-studded ever. The biggest story, of course, was Michael Phelps, coming off his record 8 golds in Beijing - we got to see him do a heat. Ryan Lochte, too. I saw super excited that I got to see the last competitive race for Janet Evans, who was doing a comeback at age 40(!). However, there was a new swimmer with a ton of buzz and we got to see her, too.

I didn’t know what the trials were like until I went and I might have a little of this wrong, but go with me. Basically, everyone who swims an official “qualified” time for an event is invited. No, you can’t just say you swam a 50s 100m freestyle (note: numbers not exact) in your pool at home, but if you did it at a sanctioned Big XII swim meet, you can try out for the Olympics. All the qualifiers are placed in heats and the winners move on until you have it whittled down to the 2 swimmers who will represent the United States. Some events have literally hundreds of high school, college, and “semi-pro” swimmers. And, yes, most of them have no hope of moving on. There’s always that trope around Olympics time that they should let one non-Olympian compete against the best in the world to remind us just how great these people are at their sport. Even the best high school swimmers, on their best day, are going to get smoked by Michael Phelps at 70%, but at least they’d get to say they swam against Phelps. Every once in a while, there’s a swimmer who is so advanced for their age that you can tell they’re about to become a star. In 2012, that was Katie Ledecky and she absolutely annihilated her heat in the 800m free.

I’m not sure which stat about Ledecky is my favorite. Is it that by the time you get to the back half of any 1500m free, the only way you can get the top swimmers in one picture is to show the other swimmers one way and her going the other, already a partial lap ahead? I think my favorite it’s that she hasn’t lost a 1500m race in 14 years(!!) - that sort of longevity is insane. Or maybe it’s that she has the 20 fastest times in history for the 1500m free?

So far, Ledecky has already picked up a gold (1500m free), a silver (4x200m free), and a bronze (400m free). She swims one more time on Saturday in the 800m. Remember that whole “20 fastest times for 1500m free” thing? Yeah, back in 2022, she had the 25 fastest times in the 800m free. Currently, she has the most medals (13) of any American woman in history and is tied for 5th most of any Olympian with only Michael Phelps (28), Soviet gymnast Larisa Latynina (18), Norwegian cross-country skier Marit Bjørgen (15), and Soviety gymnast Nikolai Andrianov (15) ahead of her. Her 8 golds are currently tied for most by an American woman with swimmer Jenny Thompson. A win moves her into a tie for 2nd all time, tied with Latynina, Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi, and fellow Americans Mark Spitz (swimming) and Carl Lewis (athletics). They all trail Michael Phelps’s incomparable 23(!!). Lastly, with a win, “she would become the first woman to win the same individual event at four different Olympics and just the second swimmer to do so after Michael Phelps, who was dominant in the 200m IM”.

There have been other fun stories around the pool. Canada’s Summer McIntosh looks to be the next big thing as the 17yo has won 2 golds (200m fly, 400m IM) and a silver (400m free). Australia keeps racking up medals with 4x100m and 4x200m relay golds as well as individual golds by Mollie O’Callaghan, Ariarne Titmus, and Kaylee McKeown.

My personal favorite story was Sarah Sjöström winning the 100m free (link). She’s a better sprinter with more medals in 50m than any other distance, though she won the 100m butterfly gold back in Rio in 2016. However, at 30, she qualified for the 100 free, and has had success in that race with European Championships in 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018. Despite a fast start expected, she wasn’t in medal contention at the turn. She was still in 4th when she passed the red marker (only 15m to go) but sprinted past three others to win gold. Her expression and interview were wonderful: “I never thought a 30yo woman could win this event”. “Older” Olympians are great - there’s more life experience and more maturity while also being able to be more candid. She knew something like this wasn’t supposed to be possible, she was genuinely surprised she did it, and was so excited to have that gold medal feeling again.

Speaking of comebacks, and “older” Olympians, it’s hard to miss the Simone Biles redemption tour. That’s hardly an accurate way to describe it, but I couldn’t come up with better. I think we all remember her 2020 Olympics where the non-gymnastics world learned what “the twisties” were with her pulling out of the competition for safety reasons and putting a spotlight on mental health. Fast forward to this week where she won 2 golds, leading Team USA to a massive victory in the team all-around and adding another individual all-around. She will have a shot at 3 more medals in the coming days. Teammate Suni Lee, the individual all-around gold medal winner in 2020, took bronze.

Brazilian Rebeca Andrade finished second to Lee in Tokyo and second to Biles in Paris. As a team, they overcame one of their best gymnasts getting injured in warmups to score bronze, their first ever team medal. Meanwhile, Italy’s women earned a surprise silver, the team’s first since 1928.

On the men’s side, Japan, led by Shinnosuke Oka and Daiki Hashimoto won team gold, edging out a Chinese team led by Zhang Boheng and Xiao Ruoteng. The USA won bronze, the first men’s team medal since 2008. For individuals, Oka, Zhang, and Xiao won gold, silver, and bronze, respectively.

In other random US news, Sarah Bacon and Kassidy Cook won the first American medal of the games, a silver in the Women’s Synchronized 3m Springboard. Apparently, we have quite the women’s fencing team with Lee Kiefer defeating Lauren Scruggs for individual foil gold and then both women leading USA to the team foil gold. And in rugby 7s, the Team USA women came back to beat Australia on the last play of the game and win bronze (link).

There’s some fun viral moments, as always. Which pistol shooter do you like more? South Korean Ye-ji Kim, whose kit includes an elephant doll from her daughter, or Turkiye’s Yusuf Dikeç, who just wears glasses and foam earplugs, exuding casual dad energy? Or are you more into Italian gymnast Giorgia Villa posing with wheels of cheese (I know, posted yesterday - but it merits inclusion)? How about Flavor Flav sponsoring the US women’s water polo team (though this also highlights the financial difficulties of being an Olympian)?

I’m sure I’m going to miss some other good stories, but here are a handful of others that come to mind.

• Egyptian Fencer Nada Hafez advanced to the Round of 16 and then told the world she was seven months pregnant
• In what could be the last tennis match between two greats, Novak Djokovic defeated Rafael Nadal
• After a number of delays due to polluted water, it was “clean” enough to swim in the Seine; Cassandre Beaugrand of France won another gold for the home team (and she threw up from nerves, not from the water)
• Adriana Ruano wanted to be a gymnast but had a career ending injury more than a decade ago while only 16; she took up shooting and won Guatemala’s first ever gold medal
• Daniel Wiffen, who was an extra in the Game of Thrones “red wedding” scene, won Ireland’s first ever gold for a male swimmer

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We’ll go with what most people know as the Olympics theme song. While it often gets mistakenly attributed to John Williams, that’s only half right, at least from what I can gather. The first bit is a piece called “Bugler’s Dream” composed by Leo Arnaud and that’s followed by “Olympic Fanfare and Theme” from Williams: