Royals Rumblings - News for March 1, 2024

If you didn’t see yesterday, a former Royal passed away:

We already talked a little bit in the comments about Brady Singer’s new pitches yesterday (I blame OMD), but Anne Rogers wrote about it for MLB.com:

“You look at his movement plot — how can we help that?” pitching coach Brian Sweeney said. “What’s going to get weak contact? What’s going to get the swing and miss you’re looking for? Can you open up a slider and make it run off a righty’s bat, but still use the gyro slider? How does using the top of the zone with your four-seam play off your two-seam? We had those discussions.”

Singer was sold on the idea because of the evidence and, well, another blunt reason.

“Probably sucking,” Singer said. “Probably that, yeah.”

If the season goes south, I think we have our motto: “2024 Royals: Probably Sucking”!

Speaking of odd things you might see in Arizona:

At The Star, Vahe Gregorian writes “on [the] dilemma of Kansas City Chiefs-Royals stadium initiatives being voted on together”

The twist to all this, though, is that the projects at once are independent undertakings and entirely clasped together:

From the lease they remain under until 2031 to the Chiefs’ future plans being partly contingent on the grounds of a demolished Kauffman Stadium, to the fact Jackson County voters essentially will be asked in April to vote simultaneously on distinct stadium matters with considerably different implications.

It makes for a confounding dilemma for voters pondering whether to extend the current 3/8th-cent sales tax for decades to come.

To wit,

• Royals, why should we spend so much money on your crappy team?
• Chiefs, why should we spend so much money on your crappy stadium project?

We don’t link to GQ a lot around here, do we? GQ’s Matthew Roberson sat down with Bob Kendrick or, as he called him in the article’s title, Baseball’s Greatest Storyteller:

That reminded me to ask you about someone who I know has been very involved in the museum for a long time, Ichiro.

I love him to death. He snuck in here the first time. That’s Ichiro. No one knew. He didn’t call. He just came through on his own. The only reason that we knew? He bought a bunch of jerseys and we saw the credit card slip. The very next year when the Mariners came to town, his interpreter called me and said, “Ichiro would like to meet with you.” I’m like, “Ichiro wants to meet with me? Cool!”

We pull out some of the memorabilia that we have, and there’s a magazine that is written in old Japanese. But he was actually able to interpret what was on the cover. He’s blown away by the fact that these brothers have been to his native homeland as early as 1927. He developed, I guess you could say, a kindred relationship with [former Negro Leagues player and manager, and one of the founders of the museum] Buck O’Neil. They just hit it off.

Ichiro would later go on to say that he admired Buck’s style. He was always a snappy dresser. Well, that stems from the days of the Negro Leagues! These brothers were clean, man. You would never see them outside the ballpark not immaculately dressed. As a matter of fact, if a young ballplayer came to join the Kansas City Monarchs, the first thing Buck would do was take him to see the tailor, because you had to look good!

Buck, I think he was drawn to Ichiro because he understood what Ichiro was going to go through when he came to this country. The minute he says he’s coming to the U.S, what do the skeptics say? “Oh, well, you did that in your league. You won’t do that in our league.” Then what does he do? He put up 3,000 hits. Because a great player is a great player, it doesn’t matter where he comes from.

While we don’t have an official MLB section today, I feel this story merits mentioning: “The Philadelphia Phillies are scrapping $1 hot dog nights following unruly fan behavior”. Wait, what?

Armed with projectile frankfurters, some unruly Phillies fans began chucking their favorite Hatfield meat during a game last year, and the dogs soared like cans of corn throughout the stands and onto the field. The demand for the discount dogs also led to clogged lanes — if not arteries — on the concourse, and the cramped spaces led to security and safety concerns. Who needs snowballs?

An April 11 game last season turned into a Philly food fight when fans — largely good-naturedly — tossed their ballpark franks in several sections, leading to multiple ejections. “It wasn’t just the throwing,” said John Weber, senior vice president, Phillies ticket operations and projects. “It’s the concourse, the crowds of everybody being at the same X amount of stands. But obviously, you know, the throwing was a little bit of a tipping point.”

To be frank...

Oh yeah, the AP writer went there.

---

There’s a ton of Royal blog news today!

David Lesky looks at the Royals that have options and how that keeps the 2024 Royals flexible:

Among position players, Salvador Perez can’t be sent down, which is fine. Hunter Renfroe also can’t, which is also fine. And then there’s Adam Frazier and Garrett Hampson, who were signed to be big leaguers. Everyone else can be sent down, and other than Sandy Leon, there isn’t a position player vying for the roster who is out of options either. And while Bobby Witt Jr. or Vinnie Pasquantino aren’t going anywhere, I think it’s pretty easy to see how any of Dairon Blanco, Freddy Fermin, Maikel Garcia, Tyler Gentry, Kyle Isbel, Nick Loftin, Michael Massey, MJ Melendez, Nelson Velazquez and Drew Waters could spend the year on the I-29 express.

On the pitching staff, Seth Lugo, Jordan Lyles and Michael Wacha are all unable to be demoted. But again, I feel like starting pitchers are a different animal. You’d like to have the flexibility there, but I don’t think it’s as big of a deal. Both Cole Ragans and Brady Singer have options, but if either of those are utilized, there are probably some pretty big problems with the team anyway. In the bullpen, only Chris Stratton and Will Smith can’t be optioned. All the rotation hopefuls who might be in the bullpen - Jonathan Bowlan, Daniel Lynch IV, Alec Marsh, Anthony Veneziano and Angel Zerpa - have options. They can work in the big league bullpen if needed or can fill in the rotation if someone like, oh I don’t know, Lyles needs to be moved to a relief role.

At The Royals Reporter, Kevin O’Brien hits a couple of minor notes and then makes this announcement:

That said, I have recently been encouraged by much of the work from many Royals content creators. And nobody else sticks out more than “Farm to Fountains,” which was founded by Preston Farr, one of the best Royals prospects and Minor League experts.

Preston has created something special on “Farm to Fountains” and has helped the site grow incredibly in months. The site consists of a cadre of talented writers covering everything from the big league club in Kansas City to the Fireflies in Columbia (and even the Arizona Complex and Dominican Summer League in some cases). Jared Perkins, who also has worked for Just Baseball and Prospects Live, is also part of the “Farm to Fountains” team and is someone I tremendously respect as a baseball content creator and person in general.

After talking with those two over the weekend and discussing the vision for both of our sites, I felt it made sense to join the “Farm to Fountains” team before the start of the 2024 regular season, as Preston announced on Monday.

Farm to Fountains is collecting quite a bit of talent over there. That’s awesome! The more quality content, the better it is to follow the team.

Speaking of Farm to Fountains, here’s what they have over there the last couple of days:

• Zac Miller: Why this is the Royals’ most important season in nearly a decade
• Preston Farr: Who will be the Royals’ fifth starter to open 2024?
• Jared Perkins: Who will be the most impactful newcomer for the Royals?
• Matthew Robison: New Player Spotlight: Matt Sauer

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of stories at Kings of Kauffman, too:

• Mike Gillespie: Why days like Tuesday are so important for the KC Royals
• Matthew Gerrity: How Maíkel García could blossom into a star for the KC Royals
• Jacob Milham: Matt Sauer is latest boom-or-bust Rule 5 pitcher for KC Royals

Finally, Darin Watson of U.L.’s Toothpick is back! (And he’s moved to substack)

Back in 2020, he did a “This Date in Royals History” for the 1980 season, which was really cool, especially when sports had ground to a halt in the early days of the pandemic. This time he’s taking a swing at 1984.

Currently in the preseason, he’s previewing the other teams in the division. Yesterday was Oakland:

Up next in our look at the Royals’ division competitors in 1984, it’s the Oakland A’s, who went 74-88 in 1983. Oakland went through some miserable seasons after Charlie Finley blew up the early-1970s dynasty, then had a brief resurgence in the early 1980s under Billy Martin. But, as usual in Martin’s career, it didn’t take long for him to wear out his welcome. When several pitchers got hurt in the 1982 season (even by the standards of the day, Martin tended to overwork his starters) and the team finished 68-94, Martin was fired, allowing him to go back to New York and help George Steinbrenner turn the Yankees into a soap opera.

---

Hey, I was good last month. We didn’t do a single movie review. New month so that’s out the window. Actually, never mind - these are TV reviews! Honestly, there’s nothing wrong with talking movies, but it feels like a little formulaic. Though, on the plus side, you can do them ahead of time and no one’s the wiser.

I’m one of those cheapskates people who only has one streaming service at a time instead of subscribing to them all at once. There was a special a couple of months ago for 3 months and then we kept it for an additional month or two to finish out the shows we wanted to. I watched all the MCU series over the past couple of years so you don’t have to. Well, except Echo, but it wasn’t out when I wrote these (again, that whole “you can write these ahead of time). Maybe when we get Disney+ again in another few months, we can catch up on Star Wars.

I tried to mostly avoid major spoilers, though there are some obliquely spoiler-y references to events in the show (She-Hulk, you kindof have to talk about the finale).

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law

A good show, on the whole, but, like most MCU Disney+ shows, 2 parts good/1 part meh. Tatiana Maslany was great, the guest stars were good (I love the quote about Wong being Twitter armor for a week and the Daredevil stuff was a bonus), Abomination was good, and the other law firm people were decent, if a mixed bag. My wife really liked when the show was talking directly to women’s issues like jokes about walking home safely at night, horrible dating profile stuff, or her loser cousin mansplaining law to the lawyer. That was a real strength of the show, even if it didn’t always land for me. Other diversions like the Titania social media stuff were more cringey and annoying as were some of her “law case of the week” cases that were there to put her in awkward situations. I thought if they had just left out the Hulk blood thing and had the baddies be misogynistic douchebags who target her because she’s a woman, post revenge porn, and play off a unique flavor of “hysterical woman” criticism (magnified more because she’s literally a hulk) - that would have been great and that’s where I thought they were going. However, a really good show ground to a halt in the finale. I think the writers thought the K.E.V.I.N. stuff was extremely creative, but, to me, it felt more like they didn’t know how to end the series.

.

Moon Knight

This might have been my favorite of what we watched (or Loki season 2). I get the criticisms that this has less superhero and is more of an acting vehicle for Oscar Isaac. But that’s fine with me as he’s good at it. I haven’t memory holed the Star Wars sequels and he was part of the reason why I still really like Episode 7 (even if 8 and 9 were not good). Ethan Hawke’s Arthur Harrow was an excellent villain, gliding seamlessly between the cult-leader and psychiatrist personas. May Calamawy’s Layla El-Faouly rounds out the major cast as Layla, the stand-in for Egypt. Sure, ancient Egypt is common in American science fiction, but they also made a token attempt to bridge to modern Egypt (even though they couldn’t film there). The stakes were low, as much as something concerning life, death, and the afterlife can have. There was some aborted world domination and it didn’t appear to have any other ties to MCU, leaving the creative team free have some dark fun. I hope they revisit Moon Knight again (season 2? Blade?), even though it’s nowhere else on the MCU calendar at this point.

.

Ms. Marvel

This one took a was slower getting out of the gates than the previous two series. Iman Vellani was great at Kamala Khan. The supporting cast of Bruno (Matt Litz), Nakia (Yasmeen Fletcher), Kamran (Rish Shah), and her family (Zenobia Shroff, Mohan Kapur, and Saagar Shaikh) were all fine to good. There are some cool effects, like how the texts and ideas show up artistically on screen – it’s very comic book-y. However, it just feels like you’re watching a Disney channel teen show much of the time. It’s not quite the adult-writing-kids problem, though there is a bit of metafiction try-hard that’s distracting. But the bigger problems is that the tone and characters are written inconsistently and can vary wildly from one scene to the next. When the show leaves the cliche “high school is hard for a superhero” bits and trades it for life in an post-9/11 NYC mosque or jets off to Pakistan, it’s at its best, though I don’t have the background to know what to make of their take on that or of the Partition of India. This was probably the best vehicle to introduce the character ahead of The Marvels, but I wish it was better written.

.

Secret Invasion

I don’t get the hate this miniseries got. I mean, it wasn’t the best show, but it also wasn’t “7% on Rotten Tomatoes” bad, either. The main complaint seems to be that it was overhyped and I guess I missed the hype, so I had more muted expectations. I liked that we finally get to see some more Nick Fury after he’d been back burnered. I could watch Samuel L Jackson and Ben Mendelsohn chew scenery all day in an alien/human buddy pic. Kingsley Ben-Adir’s Gravik isn’t quite Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger, but the bigger problem is that Emilia Clarke’s G’iah isn’t written nearly as well as Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther. For every bad, there was a good. I liked the Nick Fury love story with Varra (Charlayne Woodard), though I wish he had gotten his spy groove back by the end of the series. Yes, it’s slow getting out of the gate and the X-Files-ish theming was at odds with its clunky geopolitics bent. However, when our actors were allowed to interact, they were usually good, especially new arrival Olivia Coleman as MI-6 Sonya Falsworth. While flawed, like practically all MCU shows on Disney+, the good outweighs the bad. There will be a time when budgets have been cut, stars aren’t included, these shows are rare, and people will say things like “Remember when we all thought ‘The Marvels’ and ‘Secret Invasion’ were the worst Disney+ MCU shows?”

.

One Shots

These are actually a bit older, scattered throughout Phases 1-3 of the MCU, but they were something we realized we hadn’t seen when looking through the Disney+ menus. There’s a couple more chances to see Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson in “The Consultant” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Thor’s Hammer”. While those were a couple minutes each, “Item 47”, is a dozen minutes long and has Maximiliano Hernández reprising his role as Hydra sleeper agent Jasper Sitwell. Titus Welliver also gets a couple of minutes of MCU screen time as S.H.I.E.L.D. has to track down a missing alien weapon. It “partially inspired” Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. while the 15-minute long Hayley Atwell short “Agent Carter” gave rise to the TV show of the same name. It’s the best of the lot, a complete short story, where Carter defies her misogynistic boss (Bradley Whitford) to retrieve a deadly chemical weapon. “All Hail the King” was a chance to revisit Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin and expand on the Ten Rings plot. Finally, there are three “Team Thor” episodes that are a couple minutes long and directed by Taika Waititi. They’re fake documentaries in the humorous Thor: Ragnorok style, so if you wanted more of that, those might be your jam.

.

Werewolf by Night

I really enjoyed this. I saw it was directed by Michael Giacchino and was like “wait – the composer?” But he really nailed the old monster movie feel while updating it so it’s deliberately dramatically slow, but doesn’t drag too much. It’s basically a two man show with Gael Garcia Bernal as Jack Russell (and the titular werewolf by night) and Laura Donnelly as Elsa Bloodstone. In this fun and campy throwback to the bygone era of old monster movies, you’re half expecting Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, or Lon Chaney to show up. However, it is also able to muster a serious tone when needed. It’s a small, simple movie that currently sits unconnected in the monster wing of the MCU, much like Moon Knight.

.

Loki, Season 2

The first season of Loki is one of the best MCU shows out there. This one is a little less fresh and a lot less tight on the story side as it has to integrate into the bigger picture. It leans even heavier into the New Whovian feel, mostly to good effect. But Loki’s character turn towards the end of the season feels rushed and the Groundhog-Day-turned-Yggdrasil plot resolution reminded me that Doctor Who can charmingly “timey wimey” away plot holes so well because of its unfailing humanistic optimism. But none of the characters in Loki can pull that off. Still, Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson make buddy pic magic, Ke Huy Quan was a tremendous addition, and Jonathan Majors was brilliant between his two roles. The first season was so good that this one got integrated even more into the MCU big picture, to its detriment. But it’s definitely worth a watch.

.

What If, Season 2

What If’s first season was a pleasant little surprise. There were some real duds like the Party Thor episode or the Zombie episode. However, it unexpectedly became a larger, neater story in the end. The second season is back with these expectations - so a little freshness is gone - but it still boasts the same quality animation and voice acting, most of which features the live action stars reprising their roles. There are still duds, like the Grandmaster episode, but others like Nebula’s cyberpunk Guardians episode, Kahhori’s origin story (which feels an inadvertently cruel fairy tale in the way that Wakanda is), and the Die Hard parody are wonderful. While it’s somewhat tethered to the MCU, the premise allows a lot of freedom so that it’s not weighed down by it. Like Loki, this will be increasingly diminished if they insist on tying the show together and tighter to the greater MCU.

---

It’s been a while since I’ve kept up with when major video games are released. Heck, I’ve always been cheap so I would often buy games a year or more after a game came out. Protip: Black Friday is a great time to save money on older video games (or used to be - not as sure any more). But I was looking for an idea and saw that the second game in the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy was released this week. While I’m lukewarm on the original game and haven’t played the remakes, I really liked that soundtrack. So that seemed like a good cuse to feature it again.

We’ve done 5 songs before from the game:

• 2017.09.15 FF7 - One Winged Angel
• 2018.09.28 FF7 - Intro and Bombing Run
• 2019.03.29 FF7 - Fight On!
• 2020.04.10 FF7 - Forested Temple
• 2021.11.19 FF7 - J-E-N-O-V-A

This time, it’s Tifa’s Theme: