Royals Rumblings - News for July 11, 2025
Can the Royals keep up the momentum into the All-Star Break?
There were a couple of stories about Vinnie Pasquantino giving Jac Caglianone an il bacetto in celebration after his home run on Wednesday. Anne Rogers mentions it in her story:
Caglianone’s two-run home run off Pirates starter Bailey Falter cleared not one, not two but three separate walls in center field at Kauffman Stadium for a whopping Statcast-projected 466 feet, bouncing over the QuikTrip banner below the CrownVision scoreboard.
Caglianone was greeted in the dugout with what has turned into a very Italian home run celebration between him and Vinnie Pasquantino, in which Pasquantino greets Caglianone with an il bacetto — kisses on both cheeks.
“Just Italians being Italians,” Caglianone said.
Pete Grathoff also writes about it in The Star. He also wrote about the homer that preceded the celebration:
Caglianone saw where the ball landed.
“I try not to watch,” he said, “but I did on that one.”
It was the longest home run of the season by a Royals player and Caglianone’s fourth of the season since being called up from Triple-A Omaha. Ian Kraft, the Royals’ assistant director of media relations, said it was the 10th-longest home run hit in the majors this season, and the 10th-farthest hit at Kauffman since 2015.
Jaylon Thompson asked some current Royals about their draft memories and advice for prospective draftees:
The Pioneer League afforded Tolbert an opportunity to develop his skills. There were less glamorous aspects, too, like hotel accommodations at the local Comfort Inn and 15-hour bus rides between cities.
But Tolbert couldn’t have been happier. He was living out his dream while remaining vigilant, even if the unyielding sacrifices he made along the way weren’t always easy.
“When I got to Idaho and just while we were traveling, I thought it was the best thing in the world,” he said. “It’s a grind, and back then, we weren’t making a lot. … You’ve got to have that belief and take it one day at a time.”
No Royals will be in the Home Run Derby. I guess that’s not surprising, considering the team is 3rd from the bottom in MLB in home runs. Vinnie’s team-leading 15 home runs is good for, checks notes, 37th in the league. Salvy and Bobby’s 13 home runs tie them for 54th along with someone called Zach Neto and a couple ahead of (39 year-) old friend Carlos Santana’s 10.
Blogs? Craig and David each wrote about the Wednesday night game.
Brown won the toss so his entry goes first:
I know the early-season Statcast metrics said not to sleep on Perez. Even though he got off to a slow start, he was still hitting the ball hard. There was just some bad luck involved. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if we were seeing the beginning of Perez’s twilight years. Age, as you know, is undefeated.
Yet since the start of June, Perez is hitting .271/.314/.504 with seven home runs and nine doubles. That was prior to Wednesday’s game. Then, he did this to a baseball in the second inning:
That means Lesky ($) goes second:
I’ll get to Perez’s heroics and the other absolute tank that was hit last night, but something I was thinking about on the way home from the ballpark is how perception changes things. The Royals have now been exactly two games under .500 six different times. At 2-4 and 3-5, nobody really cared. At 8-10, things were feeling iffy because they were falling. At 12-14, they were on their way back up. At 34-36 the season was over. At 36-38, it was on the way back. At 38-40, it was on the way back down. And now at 46-48, it feels better than any of them because it feels like there’s a chance. The Royals have to take care of business against a good team this weekend to maintain that chance, but it feels like there’s a chance.
Royals Data Dugout ($, I think) talk about Cam Devanney:
After slashing .272/.366/.565 in 69 games at Triple-A Omaha with an 11.8% walk rate and 18 homers, Devanney more than earned a shot to add some life to KC’s lineup with plenty of pop and a dash of defensive versatility to boot. While his primary responsibility is manning shortstop, he’s played a handful of games at second and third in 2025.
But the appeal is the power, evidenced by an outlandish .293 ISO in 288 plate appearances with the Storm Chasers. While the bat didn’t find a spark in Spring Training, as Devanney slashed .194/.324/.226 without a dinger in Big League camp, he did show off his ability to work a walk with six free passes in 37 trips to the dish.
Blog Roundup:
- Jacob Milham at KOK: KC Royals pair of prospect hurlers take home weekly MiLB honors
- Andrew Banks at KOK: KC Royals resurgence in July has been fueled by power surge from their main core
- Caleb Moody at KOK: Jac Caglianone unveils iconic new KC Royals home run celebration after 466 foot blast
- Darin Watson at U.L.’s Toothpick: This Date In Royals History—1985 Edition: July 10- The Royals score four runs in the first, but it doesn’t hold up in a loss to the Yankees.
- Patrick Glancy at Powder Blue Nostalgia: Japan - Ichiro. Ohtani. Colonel Sanders? (he talks about the Curse of the Colonel that we mentioned here and here back in 2023 when the Hanshin Tigers broke the curse)
I don’t have one of my traditional OTs today. I’m still playing catch-up from vacation and still feel like I’m on Pacific Time. That said, I (re-)ran across a mention of the Tri-Cornered Baseball Game and I don’t think it’s been mentioned before on this site. So, yes, we’re going to have the rare “Baseball OT” today.
I’m just going to start with the Wikipedia description from the link above:
The Tri-Cornered Baseball Game was a three-way exhibition baseball game held at the Polo Grounds on June 26, 1944, among the Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants and New York Yankees. The game, a World War II fundraiser, was played with a round-robin format in which each team batted and fielded during six innings and rested for the other three. The Dodgers won by scoring five runs in their times at bat; the Yankees scored one run, while the Giants were unable to score.
Over at SABR, Trachel Hamelers and Mike Huber went into more detail:
On June 25, the day before the game, the New York Times wrote, “As major league baseball starts its tenth week of its campaign, Greater New York’s three local clubs will pause in their serious pursuit of pennants for the more serious pursuit of war bond dollars.”2 Another story told fans, “The jig-saw puzzle of working out this procedure baffled the best minds of the game until they called upon a mathematics professor at Columbia University, Paul A. Smith. Without scratching his head more than a few hundred times the professor came up with the following layout, which calls for eighteen half-innings to be played, thus”:
So you get the basic idea, right? Three teams played a 9-inning game. Since only two teams could play at a time, the other team rested for the inning. The teams rotated who played and who rested. The box score is a sight to behold.
There were some pre-game festivities and it was all to raise money for war bonds.
I think I came across this article again from MLB. This might be my favorite bit from the whole endeavor:
The Giants were the home team for the bizarre contest on June 26, 1944, leaving the Dodgers and Yankees to share the visitors’ dugout. That meant that two future Hall of Fame skippers, Joe McCarthy of the Yankees and Leo Durocher of the Dodgers, found themselves strategizing against each other from the same bench. (The Giants, too, were managed by a future Cooperstown inductee, Mel Ott, who was also their right fielder at the time.)
We’re going back to the SNES version of SimCity. So far, we’ve used the Village (2017.11.03 - introduction), Metropolis (2021.04.09 - more details), Capital (2023.07.07), and Town (2024.02.16) themes. Two to go - this one and the ultimate of Megalopolis. Today, it’s the “City” Theme: