Royals Rumblings - News for January 24, 2025

These are hard to come up with at this point in the offseason

Orientation continues for first year players:

Dan Szymborski (Szymborski! Szymborski!) posted a preview of the ZIPS Projections for the 2025 Royals: https://bsky.app/profile/dszymborski.fangraphs.com/post/3lggqv3v3fs2l (say, Vox, you can get those Blue Sky embeds working any time now...)

Not sure who Blatmerquezco is, but he’s probably better than our starting RF. This usually means he’ll post the full team preview to Fangraphs the next day. Wait? That’s today!

Another potential target is off the table with Jurickson Profar signing with the Braves at 3/$42M. How do you adequately value a player that has been worth -0.2, 2.4, -1.6, and 4.3 fWAR the last 4 seasons?

Is it gauche to post links to other stories on RR? What about if it’s a Fanpost? I just got around to reading royalcannabis’s 2025 season preview. It’s everything you expect it to be! Also, I like the idea that there are no comments except 1 but it keeps getting rec’d.

That feels like a good segue to the blogs section.

At Farm to Fountains, Jackson Ogden makes the HOF case for Salvador Perez:

Perez is one of the more polarizing Hall of Fame cases that voters will be given the task to evaluate. While he doesn’t possess an MVP or have out-of-this-world numbers, Perez has been one of the top catchers in baseball for well over a decade now, and his accumulative stats are creeping into Cooperstown territory. If he retired today, I would say there’s no chance of him getting in, but if Perez strings together a few more strong seasons before calling it quits, his case will be one to track through the years of his name on the ballot. I’m not sure as Perez gets into his older 30s, he will be able to quite make a push into the club, but with Perez, it’s hard to ever count him out.

I haven’t seen this one linked yet this week. Kevin O’Brien, the Royals Reporter, looks at Spring Training NRI Harold Castro:

Based on that potential, it makes sense that the Royals would give him a Minor League contract for Spring Training. Not only are they familiar with him from his Tigers days (he had a career .267 average and .658 OPS against Kansas City), but he could give the Royals a power upside from the utility role that they may not get with Cavan Biggio or Braden Shewmake.

Blog Roundup:

• Jacob Milham at KOK: KC Royals make strong return to Baseball America’s Top 100 prospect rankings
• Patrick Glancy at Powder Blue Nostalgia: The Ride We’re All On

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Going back to last week’s OT, we talked about The History of Rock and Roll documentary.

The recording I have is from the 1978 edition, specifically from the Corpus Christi station. One of the underrated benefits of a recording like that is that it’s a time capsule, complete with commercials. There are 1970s ads for that era’s versions of timeless businesses like sporting goods or menswear stores. There were ads for restaurants I wish I could go back and eat in. Sadly, I Googled some of them and they’re all gone. There was an ad for custom kit cars - which I guess still exist in the form of something like a Slingshot, but sounded more like a boring DIY sedan back then.

One of the commercials was for a record store, featuring “new” albums. One was for Wings. Another was for Ronnie Montrose’s solo album (which has another VH connection but also led me down this rabbit hole if we ever want to revisit a video game I never played). And then there was one that started out with “When God invented Rock and Roll, he was thinking of a band like Van Halen” (part 22, 1:07ish).

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(Ed note: we’re also going to find out why I never write about music this week as this might generate some strong feelings, some of which sounds like “you’re an idiot” and, on this front, you might be right)

Growing up, my favorite band was Van Halen. I’m far from a historian of the band - I was born after the band debuted and was enamored with Sesame Street songs when David Lee Roth left and Sammy Hagar joined the band. In short, I came to them after their prime and someone who was contemporary with them could give a more comprehensive version of their story with much more context than I ever could.

Here’s my simple take on this complex, complicated band that has been litigated ad nauseam: they’re not two different bands, as some would suggest, but distinctly two (or three) different eras: there was DLR’s Van Halen, there was Van Hagar, and then there was some nonsense after that. It’s not as if the band broke up: Eddie, Alex, and Michael Anthony were with the band during the entire time and from the two decades from 1977-1996, there were two lead singers, each of whom was there about half the time.

To me, Diamond Dave is the Jim McMahon of rock. He’s a lot of what they needed: a flashy showman who complements the band around him, but is definitely not great in his own right. For the legions who hate Sammy and how he wasn’t “worthy” to be in Van Halen and was a huge step down, look at their solo careers. It’s no contest.

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb saying that Sammy Hagar has a much better voice. However, wikipedia has me covered on why the Van Hagar era had difficulties in this review of OU812:

A retrospective review from AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine was fairly positive. Erlewine stated that “when David Lee Roth fronted the band, almost everything that Van Halen did seemed easy – as big, boisterous, and raucous as an actual party – but Van Hagar makes good times seem like tough work here.

As an aside, I’ve always been weirdly in awe of their consistency. While the second era of Van Halen would never reach the 10M diamond certified highs of the debut album or 1984, it’s not as if they fell off the face of the earth. Does anyone remember Van Hagar’s last album Balance (ok, besides me)? It sold 3M copies! More than Fair Warning and as many as Women and Children First.

They released a dozen albums between the two main lead singers, including a live album and greatest hits album. They all sold 2M or more, across 2 decades. Other hard rock contemporaries had major lulls or duds - bands like Aerosmith, AC/DC, Ozzy, Journey, Rush? But not Van Halen. It’s really difficult to find bands that even lasted 20 years in a relevant incarnation, much less had sustained success. For instance, Zeppelin was huge, but they only lasted 12 years.

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(Little bit of a sidebar here, if you’ll indulge me)

The band had a greatest hits album called Best Of: Volume I and, in the tradition of poorly named greatest hits albums, there is, of course, no Volume II. It’s also a bit frustrating as the band could have released a Volume I for the DLR era and a Volume II for the Hagar era -both would have sold like hotcakes.

The album, as is, tells a tremendous abridged story of the band: the first fourteen songs are some of the band’s biggest hits. You could quibble about a few of the selections - I know I have - but there’s nothing egregious. However, the last couple of songs - the ones a band tack onto the end of a greatest hits album to squeeze out another hit or two - those tell a fun story of the band as a whole, if you want to look too much into them.

Humans Being - It’s an underrated song off of the Twister soundtrack, but the above quote rings so true. It feels like such effort to grind out those great riffs and the Hagar as bit of a square peg in a round hole with VH. The story around the making of that song is a mess and, after it’s over, Hagar is out of the band.

Can Get This Stuff No More - After Hagar leaves, Roth collaborates on the band with a couple of songs. It’s a turbulent process and the results are uneven at best. This one sounds old and tired. There are some of the riffs that sound like vintage VH, but it’s also sounds like when a band “wants to mature”, which, most of the time, is code for “being out of ideas”. The band proceeds to crank out something that kindof sounds like their unique voice clumsily fused with a bluesy or jazz riff.

Me Wise Magic - The final song on the CD is this frantic, energetic, egotistical mess that mostly works with some catchy hooks. Sure, by this time, the band has lost a bit off its fastball and, man, is it overlong. It’s clear the band is pretty much done, but they go out with a finale with flourishes that sound like a religious rock revival.

From there, the band is mostly cooked. After DLR is kicked out (again), the band looks for a new lead singer and decides on Gary Cherone from Extreme. The new album, Van Halen III, bombs as does the subsequent concert so the record label basically forces Eddie to kick him out of the band. During the 2000s, the band goes on hiatus, tours with Hagar, tours with Roth, and removes Anthony, replacing him with Wolfgang (Eddie’s son). In 2012, there’s one last hurrah with A Different Kind of Truth, a DLR-led new album and tour that is generally successful. Eddie, who had battled cancer and other health issues for decades, died in 2020, which officially ended the band.

*Technically, the band did release another Greatest Hits compilation but it’s a mess - it’s not chronological and the track order makes no sense so we’re just going to pretend it doesn’t exist.

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So, now that I’ve (mostly unintentionally) pissed off everyone’s music senses in some way, let’s bring us back around to why I’m writing about it today. In 2023, I went and saw a concert for my birthday and wrote about it here. So, since I went to another concert for my birthday in 2024, I thought I’d copy my old idea.

Despite them being one of my favorite bands, I’ve only seen “Van Halen” twice in concert. But both were in the same building and both were in some bastardized form.

The first time I saw the band was at the The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion (think Sandstone, but for Houston). It was 1998, as part of the aforementioned ill-fated Van Halen III tour with Gary Cherone. For the two main singers, It’s odd enough hearing Hagar on the lead vocals to “Jump” and I just assume DLR pretends the Van Hagar era didn’t exist. Could you picture DLR singing any of Hagar’s ballads? Yeah, nope (I could see him do “Poundcake”, tho). To hear a different singer entirely do /both/ singer’s songs - well, it wasn’t great. Teenage me was fine seeing any concert, but adult me looks back with some disappointment.

Last year, for my birthday, I went to The Best of All Worlds tour, which featured a number of Van Halen songs, but was officially not a “tribute tour”. It was officially billed as a Sammy Hagar tour, however, it felt anything but. Of the 23 songs in the setlist, 15 were Van Halen songs, though they leaned heavily towards the Van Hagar catalog.

76yo Sammy Hagar was the lead singer and he brought his party attitude, at one point sharing a bottle of tequila with fans in the pit. His pipes still sounded good, though there were times he spoke rather than wailed his lines. Michael Anthony also sang quite a bit, particularly for the older Van Halen standards like “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘bout Love”. Yes, the former Van Halen bassist and frequent bandmate of Hagar was part of the tour, which added an air of legitimacy to the Van Halen claims.

After the death of his brother, Alex Van Halen hasn’t played much and he auctioned all of his gear off in 2024. Anthony speculated: “maybe he feels that, since his brother’s gone, he doesn’t feel the desire to go out and play anymore”. On the tour, Jason Bonham, son of legendary Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, and frequent Hagar collaborator played drums. For keyboards, Australian Rai Thistlethwayte had the assignment for keyboard like the introduction to Jump.

But what to do for guitars? Eddie Van Halen is on the Mount Rushmore of guitar players. There’s no way to replace him. But what if you had to pick an incredibly talented guitarist who could do his own interpretation of the material? I can’t think of many better names than Joe Satriani. Hell, he even used a drill on the intro to “Poundcake”. He didn’t try to copy Eddie note-for-note, but he had an amazing tribute that was in the spirit of the music and did it justice.

In the end, the concert was fun. The crowd was energetic despite evening temperatures in the 90s backed by Houston’s trademark swampy humidity. The seated sections stood for at all but a couple of songs (I was in the minority standing for “Seventh Seal”, but I like Balance more than most). My wife and I had fun dancing and singing, enjoying date night. No, it wasn’t a true Van Halen concert but we’re running out of time to see anything that even remotely resembles one.

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I wrote this last year but was running out of time to run it, so it got bumped to 2025. There’s a decent chance this video of the entire concert is no longer with us by the time this gets poster, but who knows. Also, I know this claims to be “remastered”, but it’s still on YouTube and still sounds like it’s being recorded in a cave.

I originally had this as a poll question but I don’t think there would be enough responses. However, why don’t I just post it here as a conversation starter?

Poll Q: After David Lee Roth leaves Van Halen in 198x, what should Eddie and the gang have done?

1) Go with Sammy Hagar.

2) Go with another new lead singer (Patty Smyth and Daryl Hall were asked, you can list another name in the comments).

3) Break up, depriving the world of the decade of Van Hagar and the band of piles and piles of money.

4) Wait a decade to join back up with David Lee Roth for reunion tour only that lasts maybe a year and then break up again.