Kansas City

Stop Complaining About How the Royals are Dominating All-Star Voting

· June 8, 2015 · This, That, & the Other · , , , , , , , , · One Comment

Today, Major League Baseball released the latest voting totals for the July 14 MLB All-Star Game.  Of the nine positions involved in the American League fan balloting, the Kansas City Royals have the top vote-getter at seven positions.  Right fielder Alex Rios, who is just returning from an injury that kept him out for almost two months is fourth among all outfielders.  Second baseman Omar Infante (and his .221 batting average) are currently in second place, trailing the Astros’ Jose Altuve by 150,000 votes – despite this sentiment from Kansas City media:

Unless something crazy happens, the Royals will have at least five starters as 3B Mike Moustakas, SS Alcides Escobar, C Salvador Perez, CF Lorenzo Cain, and LF Alex Gordon all lead by over a million votes.

There are many national (read:  East Coast) voices who cannot fathom this Royal domination.  In between their alarmist angst, they blame fans excited with “newfound relevance“, click-happy fans voting dozens of time online, and a host of other conspiracy theories that threaten to ruin the sanctity of the All-Star Game.

So what is going on here?

  • First and foremost, the Royals are good.  For most casual baseball fans that is probably a surprising sentence to read*. Perez, Escobar, Cain, and Gordon are among the best at their positions – regardless of league.  Moustakas is having a breakout season and is worthy of the four million plus votes he’s received so far.  The other Royal vote leaders – 1B Eric Hosmer and DH Kendrys Morales – are having strong seasons too.  Even with a recent slump, the Royals are still just a game back in the competitive AL Central and should be considered strong contenders to defend their American League pennant in the postseason.

*Hell, for a lifelong fan like me – who suffered through a 29 year playoff drought filled with bad players, horrible management, and inept front office leadership – the idea of the Royals being good is still surprising…but I’m getting used to it.

  • For the first time, ASG voting is being done exclusively online.  While that eliminates the time-honored tradition of poking chads from a paper ballot with your car keys, it also reduces the inherent advantage that clubs with atop the attendance standings (i.e. Red Sox, Yankees, Angels, Rangers, Tigers) tended to have in voting results*.  The Yankees don’t automatically get four starters every year just because they draw 40,000 a game.

*Although, it is worth noting that the Royals current sit 10th in MLB (and fourth in AL) in attendance – easily their highest position in years.  When the Royals hosted the All Star Game in 2012 (and ASG ticket priority was given to season ticket holders) the Royals were 25th in attendance.  So even if they still used paper ballots, the Royals would probably be doing all right.

  • With voting online, the Royals have wisely taken advantage by promoting voting in the stadium and on social media.  The club regularly holds drawings and giveaways where the requirement of entry is proving that you voted the maximum 35 times.  Are other clubs not doing this?  Are Royals fans the only ones capable of getting online?  Do we need to send some old AOL CDs to Detroit?

*   *   *

Personally, I’m quite amused by the “anti-Royals fervor” going on as a result of these voting totals.  If you want to fill out 35 ballots without a single Royal, that’s your choice, but consider this:

  • As Manager of the AL squad, Kansas City’s Ned Yost can name any of his guys to the roster regardless of how the votes turn out.  It would be very Ned to thumb his nose at the league and pick his own guys.
  • Others have pointed this out, but it bears repeating:  If you’re concerned about a game for home field advantage in the World Series coming down to the NL All-Stars versus the Royals, well, remember who represented the AL last year.  They seemed to hold their own against the best team in the National League.
  • Should KC get four (or more) starters, it will only start to make up for a decade of All Star Games where the token Royal representative was somebody like Ken Harvey, Mark Redman, Jose Rosado, Dean Palmer, or Aaron Crow.  Seriously – as a diehard fan of both the Royals and Nebraska Cornhuskers, has any team had a worse All Star Game representative than Ken Harvey?

 

 

The Best and the Worst of America

· August 14, 2014 · What's In The News · , , , , , , , , , , , · No Comments

Tonight, my daughter woke up crying.

A dry diaper, a few ounces of formula, and some gently rocking on Daddy’s chest got her calmed down and back to sleep.  While I waited for her to get into a deep enough sleep so I could move here back to bed without waking her, I scrolled through Twitter on my phone.

My Twitter feed was dominated by two topics.  Both are taking place in the same state, and are only separated by about three or so hours on the interstate.  But, they are worlds apart.  They show us how great we can be, while demonstrating how bad we are.

*   *   *

I’ve been a fan of the Kansas City Royals for most of my life.  It just made sense – Kansas City is the closest Major League team to my eastern Nebraska home, and when I was in the formidable years when a boy picks the teams they like, the Royals were winning.  Granted, since that World Series title in 1985, being a Royals fan has been an exercise in masochism, frustration, and pity from friends and family.

Now imagine being a lifelong Royals fan born and raised in South Korea.

That brings us to the happy side of my Twitter feed.  SungWoo Lee has been a passionate, hardcore Royals fan since the 1990s – all while living in South Korea.  His dream has been to come to KC and watch his beloved Royals play.  Thanks to the efforts of some KC fans on social media, SungWoo has been living every baseball fan’s dream for the last week:  meeting players, throwing out the first pitch, hanging with Hall of Famer George Brett, and watching the Royals go on an eight game winning streak to move into first place.

One of the guys responsible for bringing SungWoo to KC is a guy I follow on Twitter, The Fake Ned (@TheFakeNed).  He has been tweeting about SungWoo’s visit pretty much non-stop.

Basically, the whole SungWoo experience has been one magical fairy ride that has made the most jaded of Royals fans believe.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, 230 miles east on I-70 sits the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson.  For everything good and wonderful going on in Kansas City, something ugly and scary is going down in Ferguson, MO.  A young black man was shot and killed by police, which has led to civil unrest, protests, police attacks, and a racially charged powder keg of a town.

 

What.

The.

Hell?

*   *   *

I’m seeing and reading about these things while my not yet one year old black daughter sleeps on my chest.  I think that is what makes it so real and so difficult for me.  Someday I’m going to have to explain this world that we live in to my children.

I’m going to have to tell my children that sometimes you can follow all the rules and still be arrested – or worse.  Explain to them that in many parts of the greatest nation on earth, the color of their skin entitles them to the right to be treated poorly.  Try to instill a respect for an authority that sometimes has no respect for them.  Attempt to raise good, honest, hard-working adults who are not jaded and disillusioned by racism and prejudice that I’ll never truly know.

And I have to balance that brutal honesty while hopefully getting them to believe that there really are good people in the world too.  People that will open their arms for a guy from the other side of the globe, treat him like royalty, and make us believe in the inherent good in people – even if he’s of a different race.  All because he’s a fan of the same historically crappy baseball team that we like?

*   *   *

Since I’m struggling to put a pretty bow on all of this, I’ll let The Fake Ned have the last word:

 

RIP Martin

· August 16, 2013 · What's In The News · , , , , , , , , · 4 Comments

Today I saw a random tweet that said “NBA Efficiency Rating Inventor Kills Self, Explains Via Website”.  I was intrigued (and bored) enough to click the URL and I got a shock.  Martin Manley committed suicide.

I realize that 99.99% of my audience has no idea who Martin Manley was, or why I would care about his passing.  At the time I became familiar with him, Martin was writing the Upon Further Review blog on the Kansas City Star website.  The blog tried to be different from most of the sports blogs out there, which is not easy to do.  Most sports blogs are typically comprised of the same types of posts:  (“Athlete/Team is the greatest or doing something nobody has done before”, “Team/Conference A is better than Team/Conference B”, “Why does Athlete/Team suck so much?”, along with miscellaneous rants about the BCS and other sporting injustices).

In that sense, UFR was a typical sports blog, because those were the types of things Martin Manley wrote about.  But there was one key difference, which his tagline (“analytical commentary and insight”) proudly proclaimed.  If Martin said Alex Gordon is doing something nobody has done before, the Big XII was better than the Big 10, the Chiefs suck, or the “BcS” was an injustice – you knew he was going to back it up with fact, raw numbers that he collected and analyzed himself, and a table that showed his work.  You may not like his opinions or how he used the data, but the numbers rarely lied.

I read UFR rather faithfully for a couple of years, and I’m proud to say that I’ve incorporated some of his traits here.  In my Husker writings, I try to incorporate statistical information to beef up a point – it’s one thing to say NU’s punt return game sucked in 2012, it’s another to show that in almost eight full games they return yardage was less than that of one return immediately prior to that slump.  Most of the numbers and stats I use are things that I collect.  It can be a laborious pain in the ass sometimes, but it is worth it to know that you’re not just another keyboard pumping hyperbole into cyberspace.

Martin Manley gave me one of my first breaks as a writer.  In 2012, he was gracious enough to use my piece on Blowing Up the College Football conferences as a guest post on UFR.  It was damn cool to be able go to the website of the Kansas City Star – known for having some great writing talent – and see a link to content I created.  I’ll always be grateful for that.

A few months later, Martin left the Star and they shut down Upon Further Review.  Martin then started his own blog, Sports in Review, where he did a lot of the same things he did on UFR.  I’m sad to say that Sports in Review slipped out of the rotation of sites I regularly read, and I hadn’t visited in months.  Upon learning of Martin’s death, I went to his blog, and found the following in a post dated August 15:

“The reason for my departure is 100% within my ability to control. You see, earlier today, I committed suicide. I created a web-site to deal with the many questions a person would rightfully have. It’s called martinmanleylifeanddeath.com. It went live today. In my opinion, there is no question which you could conceivably ask that I have left unanswered on that site. My goal with this post is closure for SIR.”

As of this writing, the new website is offline (I receive a 503 – Service Unavailable error when I click on it).  From what I have read, Martin pre-paid the site fees for five years, so I am hopeful that it returns at some point in the future.  As macabre as it may sound, I am intrigued to read his rationale for his suicide – which took place on his 60th birthday, outside of a police station in a Kansas City suburb.  From what I have read, the site is has a ton of content – some rationale, some not*, and almost all of it in past tense.

*Apparently, within his website, he referenced having buried a small fortune of gold coins in an arboretum near his home – complete with GPS coordinates.  This was proven to be a hoax, and police had to ask people to refrain from digging up the park.

I’m curious to understand the why, when, and how he came to this decision.  Depending on how one interprets this excerpt from an October 2012 post on closing the comment section, he had been planning this for a while:

“As to not having time, I’ll get into that in more detail at a later date, but for now, all I can say is I appreciate the contributions which have been made in the past and I hope the blog continues to provide a source of information and/or entertainment.”

Mainly, I want to see how Martin Manley, a man who defended every controversial opinion with numbers and fact, defends this.  I don’t expect to agree with him, but I expect his rationale to be well thought out.

And that, will be vintage Martin.

May he rest in peace.

Top Ten Ways to Help the Royals Win Again

· May 30, 2013 · Lists · , , , , , , , , , , , · 2 Comments

My poor Kansas City Royals.

They are in historically bad slump – which as any Royals fan in the last 25+ years will tell you, is really saying something.  They have lost eight in a row, and 19 of their last 23.  After spending most of April in first place, they are now in last.  In short, something needs to change.

Sure, they could fire Ned Yost, one of their two hitting coaches for a team with several starters hitting below .250 with absolutely no power, or they could replace those lousy batters with a bunch of guys from the minor leagues.  Any of those things might work.  Or they might not.  Given that we’re talking about the Royals, rational changes will probably just make things worse.

The Royals need to think outside the box.  Unconventional.  Drastic measures.

Fortunately, I know how the Royals can win again.  And no, I’m not referring to a “slumpbuster” as infamously described by Mark Grace.  Here are ten ways to help get the Royals back on a winning track:

10.  Through use of wigs, fake mustaches, costumes, and fat suits, Alex Gordon bats twice an inning.

Not really relevant, but I love this picture.

9.  Royal batters only need three balls to walk, but get four strikes.

8.  Opposing team must chug a Boulevard beer at every base.

7.  Cork.  Lots of it.  In the bats, the baseballs, the opponents gloves, in the hotdogs.  Anywhere.  Everywhere.

6.  Manager Ned Yost is replaced with a Magic 8 Ball.

Do the Royals have a hope of winning again?

Do the Royals have a hope of winning again?

5.  The fences are moved in 20 feet whenever KC bats.  No wait, make that 40 feet.

4.  Mascot Sluggerrr arranges lap dances for player who gets game winning hit.  (I shouldn’t have to mention this, but obviously that link is considered NSFW).

3.  Don Denkinger comes out of retirement to umpire Royals games (especially the interleague series with the St. Louis Cardinals).

Close enough.

2.  Longtime play-by-play man Denny Matthews broadcasts in the nude until the Royals win.

1.  Kansas City reschedules a 7:10 pm game for 7:10 am, and “accidentally” forgets to tell the other team.

Royal Review – April

· May 2, 2013 · This, That, & the Other · , , , , , , , , , , , , · 4 Comments

As a baseball fan, I always look forward to the start of the season.  You’ll hear announcers and writers talking about the “hope and potential of a new season” and bunch of other clichés about how everybody believes their team can win the World Series in April.

As a long time Royals fan, my response to that is “Yeah, right.”  The Royals may start in first place on Opening Day, but I’ve seen enough seasons to know that KC’s April will usually go one of two ways:

  1. The Royals get off to a respectable start, flirting with first place for a day or two, before a six game losing streak drops them back in the standings.  They continue to find new ways to lose, and they’re out of realistic contention by May.
  2. The Royals stink out of the gate, a lousy collection of washed up vets who don’t care and quadruple-A players who could not start for most major league teams.  They may not go on a prolonged losing streak, but they probably will – just because they can.  Any hope of contending is gone by Tax Day.  After that, the focus shifts to not finishing last in the division and guessing who the token All Star representative will be.

But the 2013 season might just be different.  General Manager Dayton Moore has built a young, but strong core of position players and spent the offseason bolstering a pitching staff that was painfully bad in 2012.  The Royals dominated the Cactus League during spring training, and are a trendy dark horse pick to win the American League Central.

One month in to the 2013 season, and the Royals have been different.  Good different.  Like, a real big league team with pitching, hitting, and defense different.

And I’m not sure what to do with it.

Let’s not kid ourselves…there is still a ton of baseball to be played.  Five full months and over 135 games, to be exact.  But as I type this on May 1, 2013, the Kansas City Royals are in first place.  They have won at home, won on the road, beat good teams, pounded bad teams, and have generally looked good doing so.  At the risk of jinxing the team, I’ll say it:

If the playoffs started today, Kansas City would be in for the first time since 1985.

But that is looking too far down the road.  I’m sticking to the same thing I said at the beginning of the year:  I will be happy – hell, I’d be thrilled – with 82 wins.  Get over .500.  Anything beyond that is gravy.

Will it happen?  I want to say yes, but history says no.  Regardless, it should be a fun ride.

*   *   *

Three Up (or “Why you might want to set aside some cash for a playoffs fund”)

  1. James Shields, Ervin Santana, and Jeremy Guthrie have brought stability to the starting rotation.  Shields and Santana were the two key offseason acquisitions, and in April they were worth the price.  Guthrie came to the Royals in 2012, and has been quietly dominant.  Combined, these three are 8-3, with a 2.68 ERA.
  2. The offense is has serious potential.  The majority of the lineup is capable of delivering an extra base hit at any point.  Ned Yost has not been afraid to run – the Royals are third in the AL with 19 stolen bases – which has helped put guys in scoring position, and put pressure on opposing defenses.  They’re not clicking on all cylinders, but if they do….look out.
  3. There is noticeable excitement and chemistry on the team.  This is my favorite.  For the first time in ages, the team is playing with passion.  They look like they care, and they are having fun.  Fans are starting to expect this team to win, instead of finding a way to lose.

Three Down (or “Why you should consider focusing on the NBA and NHL playoffs instead of baseball”)

  1. There is no consistent power threat.  The Royals are last in the league with 14 home runs (the Yankees have 35).  While several Royals can take you deep – nine guys homers in April – up and down the lineup there is not a guy who you fear going yard in every at bat.
  2. Will Moustakas and Hosmer produce?  Mike Moustakas and Eric Hosmer are two cornerstones of the Royals youth movement.  In order for the team to contend, each needs to be a key cog in the offense.  So far in 2013, the two are batting a combined .221 with one homer and 13 RBI.  Moustakas has been especially bad with a dreadful .195/.276/.299 line.  At the end of April, both showed signs of heating up, but if they cannot produce, the offense will be challenged.
  3. It’s still the Royals.  April was one of the better months in recent history to be a Royals fan.  It has been a blast to watch the team play good baseball, beat good teams, and get our hopes up for what the rest of the season will bring.  But let’s face it:  the die-hard fans who have been through the 100 loss seasons, puzzling roster moves, and bizarre moments that can only happen to Kansas City are waiting for the other shoe to drop.  As much as I want to believe in this team and their chances, an eight game losing streak would not shock me.

Extra Innings

  • I’m trying to give the guy the benefit of the doubt, but man, Rex Hudler is brutal.  Especially when paired with the ultra dry wit of Ryan Lefebvre.  I don’t necessarily miss Frank White providing a continuous Dr. Julius Hibbert laugh track every time Ryan made a joke, but surely there is somebody better out there.
  • I’ve never understood why there are so many scheduled off days in April.  You’d think a ballplayer would rather save those days off for August when the season is starting to grind and their bodies need extra rest – not five in the first 22 days of the season (not counting rain outs and the Friday the City of Boston was on lock-down).
  • Jeff Francoeur:  What the heck, dude?

Call to the Bullpen

“So, the Royals playing dominating baseball and the impending snow in May in KC don’t have anything to do with the apocalypse right?” – TJ Carpenter‏ (@TJCarpenterWHB)

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