Royals Rumblings - News for September 6, 2024

Six games left in The Gauntlet (TM)

Manager Matt Quatraro missed some games earlier this week due his mother’s death. At the Star, Vahe Gregorian talked to the skipper about how her lessons influenced his managerial style:

The last few days away from the team, he said, were “maddening. … You want to be here every second of every day with these guys. I mean, that’s what baseball is.

“It’s not a part-time sport. You do this every single day, day in, day out, for six, seven, eight months, hopefully. And when you’re not here, it really hurts. And to see the guys struggling makes it even worse.”

So he was in touch with Picollo and bench coach Paul Hoover and pitching coach Brian Sweeney.

“But by no means … micromanaging from a distance or anything like that,” said Quatraro, who noted his appreciation for his staff’s support. “I mean, these guys are in the fight. They’re here, and I’m not. So you’ve got to let (them) have a feel for what’s going on.”

Jaylon Thompson profiled new Royal Tommy Pham:

The Royals hope to lean into Pham’s leadership over the next several weeks, and perhaps longer. He admittedly hates to lose and that mentality is necessary when games matter most.

“If I could get 27 more guys on the team to hate losing like me and bring more of a winning culture,” he said, “that can be very beneficial for us in this race.”

In some notes about Wednesday’s game, Pete Grathoff talked about some broken streaks:

In addition to stopping their seven-game skid, the Royals ended a streak of six straight games with three or fewer runs scored — their longest such stretch since Aug. 15-21, 2022.

The Royals also had scored two or fewer runs in their previous five games, the longest such stretch in that regard since 2018.

Anne Rogers talked to Brian Sweeney about his stadium stair climb to remember 9/11 first responders:

As Brian Sweeney embarked on the final lap of his annual stair climb to honor first responders who lost their lives in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, he glanced behind him to see a line of cadets from the Kansas City Fire Academy falling in line to follow him.

The 38 cadets were volunteers at the Royals’ 9/11 Memorial Stair Climb on Tuesday morning at Kauffman Stadium, stationed at each section through the lower deck of the ballpark. They cheered on the participants who climbed over 2,000 steps that symbolized the height of the World Trade Center towers and the firefighters’ heroic efforts to save others that day nearly 23 years ago.

ICYMI, Max covered the roster moves from yesterday.

Speaking of Hunter Renfroe, want a quick listicle? MLB has one for “Each team’s player with the most to prove down the stretch”:

Royals: OF Hunter Renfroe

It’s no secret the Royals’ offense is struggling right now, and it’s not hard to point to the exact turning point, back to a week ago when the Royals lost first baseman Vinnie Pasquantino to a right broken thumb. Pasquantino’s going to do everything he can to return if the Royals can make a run in October, but until then? They need some other hitters to step up. That includes Renfroe, who’s due back from the injured list (right hamstring strain) soon. Renfroe has had an up-and-down season in terms of performance, but Royals signed him this past offseason to be a right-handed power threat in the middle of their lineup. Now is the time to be exactly that and more to help the Royals score some runs and push into the playoffs. — Anne Rogers

Some good news for Royals minor league teams:

There were a couple of announcements during the off day yesterday.

The team touted some of their sustainability initiatives:

The Royals Foundation is accepting applications for their Royalty Fields program:

A local business will be handing Bob Kendrick a check:

JE Dunn Construction and the Royals are set to present a check worth $40,000 to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum (NLBM) before the Royals’ game against the Minnesota Twins on September 6.

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Blog time! Of course, both David Lesky and Craig Brown were happy to talk about Wednesday’s game, most notably Pham and Lugo but also all the little things that made that win happen.

Craig at Into the Fountains:

After the game Pham talked like he hadn’t been doing much to help his new team. I will point out that the guy has been scorching the baseball since coming over in that waiver claim. In the four games he’s played with the Royals, Pham’s average exit velocity is 98.6 MPH. That’s his average. It’s 14 balls in play, so small sample size that all you want, but I’ll point out that you don’t average 98.6 MPH unless you’re consistently hammering the baseball.

Lesky at Inside the Crown ($):

You could almost feel an entire city relax a little bit. That at bat was everything the Royals wanted in Pham and why they wanted him before they finally got him over the weekend. He was patient and then picked out a pitch to drive and then he actually drove it.

Yes, normally this is in the blog roundup but I felt this entry belonged here. Darin Watson has been going day by day through the Royals 1984 season. So, for instance, on September 5th (yesterday), he wrote about what the Royals did on September 5th, 1984. This one feels notable because it’s when the Royals finally crest above .500 for good on the season:

With the win, the Royals improved to 70-69, the first time they’d had a winning record since they were 7-6 on April 20. By moving into a first-place tie with the Twins, they were in the top spot in the AL West for the first time since Opening Day. In those 11 games where they had scored just 18 runs, the Twins had gone 2-9, losing a five-game lead in the division in the process. Meanwhile, California won in Cleveland, putting the Angels just a half-game behind the Royals and Twins.

Blog Roundup:

• Matt Chabot at Farm to Fountains: What does Royals’ new addition Tommy Pham bring to the team?
• Jacob Milham at Kings of Kauffman: KC Royals reliever ‘awesome’ since return, says acting skipper
• Mike Gillespie at Kings of Kauffman: Bad bullpen now means 3 things for the KC Royals
• Patrick McAvoy at Kansas City Royals on SI: Royals Are Prime Landing Spot For Former MVP Predicted To Be Available
• Jackson Roberts at Kansas City Royals on SI: Royals Are Ideal Fit For 2024 All-Star Reliever Expected To Change Teams

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I wrote a decently long OT earlier this week because the Royals were going to have an off-day. But then I remembered the Chiefs played their season opener on Thursday so no one is going to look to the OT section for a topic to talk about. Fortunately, the Royals have Thursdays off the next couple of weeks so it’s just getting bumped.

Ed note: Heck, I’m almost done with the next 3 OTs! I’m actually ahead for once.

That said, I did want to leave a small OT/SotD that is actually baseball related (I’m allowed to do that, I think).

I have a bookmark folder in Firefox listed as “Watch” that’s a collection of videos and audio to listen to or watch when I have a little bit of time in the future. Some of those have been there a while, including this link from the Cubs SBNation blog, Bleed Cubbie Blue:

Now, thanks to SABRmedia.org, the media committee of the Society for American Baseball Research, and author Stuart Shea, I present to you audio clips from the WGN radio broadcast of the very first game the Cubs ever played against the Dodgers after their move to Los Angeles in 1958. The Cubs lost the game 4-2; it was, in fact, just the fourth baseball game ever played in the Los Angeles Coliseum, a football stadium wildly inappropriate for baseball. The Dodgers played there from 1958 through 1961, and quite a bit of the broadcast clips I’ve got for you here are involved in discussion of how this stadium was set up — not well, it should be noted — for baseball.

There’s a clip of the pregame show and one of the first inning of play. What really struck me as I listened was how it sounds very similar to a modern baseball broadcast. There really is just something timeless about baseball.

I went looking for a contemporary video - something that could show what playing baseball in the Coliseum in 1958 looked like - and ran across this gem on YouTube. There’s no sound, but it’s a fun time capsule with the following description:

On April 18, 1958 my great uncle Isadore “Izzy” Perruccio attended the LA Dodger’s first game , at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, against the San Francisco Giants. The story goes: Izzy gradually snuck onto the field with his camera. Since not too many people, other than reporters, had video cameras back then, he went unsuspected long enough to get this amazing video, until, eventually, he was kindly asked to go back to his seat.

EDIT: Apparently, the previous video got taken down recently. That’s a shame as it was an interesting time capsule. Unfortunately, all of these videos look like they were taken from “days of yore” so you don’t quite get the timeless quality I was trying for.

Instead, here’s a newsreel of Game 2 of the Braves and Dodgers tiebreaker series. They both ended the regular season at 86-68 and played a best-of-3 to see who would make it to the World Series. The one that really jumps out to me is how the announcer mentions something about Milwaukee having “misfortune” in the 7th inning. The Dodger runner completely football tackled the Brave SS, who had to be carried off the field in a stretcher.