Royals Rumblings - News for January 17, 2025

We have reached the winter lull of the baseball season

Oh, boy. We’ve really hit the winter doldrums. The last story from The Star was last week when Lorenzen signed.

There hasn’t been a new story on the Royals site since Tuesday. Their last Tweet was Monday about the Royals Rally.

MLB Pipeline reminded us that the Royals Spring Breakout game is March 14th. I say “reminded” because I remember writing about it when it was initially announced back in August. But, hey, now there’s a capsule about the game and we need bulk:

Royals at D-backs, 8:10 p.m. ETWe know Jac Caglianone (No. 17/KC No. 1) will be focused on hitting only in 2025 in order to get to Kansas City as quickly as possible, and this exhibition will be a perfect spot for him to combine with Blake Mitchell (No. 51/KC No. 2) and Carter Jensen (KC No. 5) on a potential laser show in the desert. On the other side, Jordan Lawlar (No. 9/AZ No. 1) was a Spring Breakout standout a year ago and will get a chance to demonstrate his health after missing much of 2024 due to thumb and hamstring injuries.

Blogs will save us!

David Lesky ($) writes about Michael Massey:

I think we can all agree that if Massey is on the team come Opening Day, he’s hitting in the middle of the lineup, likely fifth as it stands now but in a more perfect world, sixth or seventh. That’s not without merits. While his OBP hasn’t been good enough to hit at the top as he did toward the end of the season and in the playoffs, he’s a productive hitter with pop. I questioned if he could continue hitting for as much power the other day, but that doesn’t mean the power isn’t real. One thing I didn’t mention when I said that his ISO seemed destined to drop is that I think there’s a chance we see the average come up. We already saw a jump in 2024, going from .229 to .259. That wasn’t due to batted ball luck with a .271 BABIP. It’s not from hitting the ball exceptionally hard either. It’s just from hitting the ball more.

Kevin O’Brien continues his Royals top prospect countdown with 20-11:

18. Frank Mozzicato, LHP

Mozzicato was a big tumbler in my rankings, as he was ranked No. 2 in my 2024 list. His season wasn’t bad at the surface level, as he posted a respectable 3.45 ERA and 1.32 WHIP in 101.2 innings with the River Bandits in 2024. Unfortunately, his fastball velocity continued to stay under 90 MPH last season, and he struggled with walks, as evidenced by his sub-2.00 K/BB ratio.

Mozzicato has the frame and arsenal to be at least a middle-of-the-rotation starter at the MLB level. Furthermore, his curve is one of the better-breaking offerings in the Royals system. Until that velocity increases, however, it’s hard to see Mozzicato be much more than a reliever as a big leaguer. A velocity increase in 2025 could get him back on a Daniel Lynch IV track.

At KOK, Mike Gillespie flashes back to when Ian Kennedy signed with the Royals nearly 10 years ago:

On paper, signing Kennedy made some sense. Only four starters — Edinson Vólquez, Yordano Ventura, Danny Duffy, and Chris Young — were guaranteed to return to the rotation in 2016, and only they among the club’s regular 2015 starters were reasonably expected to be Royals for all, or even part, of 2016. Jason Vargas was slated to spend most of the 2016 campaign rehabbing from Tommy John Surgery, and Jeremy Guthrie and Johnny Cueto became never-to-return free agents when the 2015 World Series ended.

Also at KOK, Rachael Millanta predicts where the rest of the Royals free agents end up (slideshow warning):

Will Smith, LHP

When Smith joined the Royals on a one-year, $5 million deal at the start of 2024, he was coming off three consecutive World Series wins with the Atlanta Braves (2021), Houston Astros (2022), and Texas Rangers (2023). Hopes were high that he’d bring that winning performance to Kansas City, but after giving up four runs in his first appearance as the team’s closer, it didn’t take long for him to be transitioned into only being called on in low-leverage situations. A back injury in August meant that Smith didn’t pitch at all during the Royals’ playoff campaign.

With his streak of winning World Series titles behind him and having struggled to a disappointing 6.53 ERA with just 29 strikeouts in 41.1 innings last year, Smith is a risky acquisition. Still, the 35-year-old might get lucky with a one-year deal this winter — perhaps with a team that knows him well. The Atlanta Braves have limited relief options going into 2025, and with a good track record of extending careers, they may be interested in reuniting with Smith, who pitched three years for them from 2020-22.

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RIP Bob Uecker. He’s such a big personality in the sport that he gets his own section today.

How about 19 minutes of highlights from MLB? (Bonus Royals note: Want some LoCain awesome? Check out 14:20. Man, I love him! Moose also in that highlight.)

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Rock_and_Roll

Ed note: I have had this writing prompt half done for a year now and never been able to make it where I want it . But it’s a slow day today, we need something to talk about, and I need to get it out the door, lack of polish and all.

Today’s medium of choice today is radio. Specifically, we’re going to talk about a documentary that’s mostly been lost to time called The History of Rock and Roll. Well, not completely forgotten, as it has its own wikipedia page.

The History of Rock & Roll is an American radio documentary on rock and roll music, first syndicated in 1969. Originally one of the lengthiest documentaries of any medium (48 hours in the 1969 version, 52 hours each for the 1978 and 1981 versions), The History of Rock & Roll is a definitive history of the Rock and Roll genre, stretching from the early 1950s to the present day. The “rockumentary,” as producers Bill Drake and Gene Chenault called it, features hundreds of interviews and comments from numerous rock artists and people involved with rock and roll.

It’s an absolutely amazing time capsule. It’s 50ish hours, painstakingly put together by hand in the pre-digital days. Each hour has a theme like “The Birth of Rock and Roll” or “British Invasion” or “Soul in the 60s”. Narration would set up a track, then a song would play - in part or in whole, then more narration, maybe an interview clip, another song, etc. Worth a read is the second wiki page, listing of all the songs that were a part of the 1978 show, organized by hourly theme. The stories were woven together to weave one great musical tapestry. It was what it said it was: an attempt to tell the story of the history of rock and roll.

But, while the internet giveth, with a pair of wikipedia pages, it also taketh away. There are no recordings of the show anywhere that I can find. YouTube only has very minor clips. There are a number of old internet forums that have threads asking about the show but they almost always end in the same disappointment. It’s one of those things lost to time because it was created before the internet and not monetized in a modern way.

On eBay, I’ve seen individual records of the show go for more than $100. Rarely do complete sets show up there, but we’re in luck today. Asking price? $1700. There’s even someone offering a thumb drive with an MP3 copy of both the 1969 and 1978 shows. That’s “only” $450.

Fortunately, I have my own personal copy. And I do mean personal. I come by my digital packrattery honestly. Back in 1978, my Dad recorded about 40 of the 50 hours on a reel-to-reel tape recorder off the local radio station. It’s incomplete and imperfect. Dad did not stay up all night so we missed a few of the overnight hours. There were also times when the end of a reel cut off in the middle of a song and the recording picked up at the start of the next song or segment.

At one point, Dad copied that reel-to-reel recording to cassette tape. We took a number of long road trips when I was younger where we got into the van and drove hours and hours from destination to destination. Heck, I grew up in Texas and it takes a whole day just to exit the state to the west. I remember listening to these cassettes on that road trip. I was young and didn’t fully appreciate them then, but they stuck with me.

Years went by and I asked my dad a few years ago whatever happened to those tapes. After he retired, one of the things he would spend his day doing was digitizing old analog media. You know how they made fun of parents who used to make kids watch their old vacation pictures? That was my dad. To some, it might have seemed like a chore to digitize thousands of slides and photographs? Dad was enjoying reliving many of the best moments of his life and taking his time doing it, much to the chagrin of my Mom (who wanted a de-cluttered house).

Apparently, he had also digitized a bunch of his old audio tapes. He offered me the MP3 but was a little embarrassed that it wasn’t a perfect recording. He had been among those trying to find copies online to supplement his recording. I know where my compeltism and sentimentality come from. I didn’t care that it was a few hours short - I was thrilled!

Summer of 2021 was during the height of the COVID pandemic. My wife and I had managed to get our vaccines but not my son as they were not yet authorized for children under 12. For all of our mental health, we wanted to take a long vacation but also minimize risk. I thought back to those old vacations with Dad and Mom and planned a trip to New Mexico.

Over 2 weeks, we drove over 2000 miles, visited six National Park sites*, did a number of other outdoor activities, met safely with friends like my wife’s college roommate, and, generally, it was the first real “break” from the pandemic. All the while, particularly that 13 hour first day, our soundtrack was that recording of The History of Rock and Roll that now lives on in my computer.

*I say “sites” because they weren’t all National Parks. Some were National Monuments like Bandelier or Petroglyph

It’s one of my fond memories of Dad - not one the important ones - but one of those silly ones that makes you smile. I’m starting to digitize some of my old cassettes from when I was younger. I listened to a Z-Rock affiliate in Houston and diligently recorded the Z-Rock 50 on Sunday nights (maybe we’ll talk about that another day). I even found some mix tapes that my Grandpa showed me how to make when I was really young. Maybe this goes back even more generations in my family.

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Someone on YouTube put out all 3 Timesweeps from the 1978 edition. Want a few seconds of every #1 hit from 1956 to 1978? Because that’s what we’ve got here in three videos: