Royals Rumblings - News for June 13, 2014

Royals Rumblings - News for June 13, 2014

As assembled by Royals Review staff:

Sam Mellinger revisits the controversial James Shields-for-Wil Myers deal and says so far it has been everything the club had hope it would be. He also hints that the Royals dealt Myers in part, because they valued him less than other club did:

The Royals would never say this publicly, and they’d deny it if asked directly, but a driving motivation behind the trade was that the rest of the baseball world thought higher of Myers. It is a credo in baseball front offices that you have to know your own players better than anyone knows them....

But as much as Myers fueled a boatload of angst in Kansas City while winning the American League Rookie of the Year award in 2013 — he only played 88 games, but his .831 on-base-plus-slugging would’ve led Royals’ regulars by a fair margin — the holes that some scouts saw have been exposed this year.

Remind me to "revisit" this next year when James Shields is pitching somewhere else, Wade Davis is an expensive reliever, and Wil Myers and Jake Odorizzi are contributing on the Rays roster.

Ned says getting over .500 is a "big deal."

"I'd be lying to you if I said it wasn't a big deal to be over .500," Yost said. "It's a big deal to beat a division rival like Cleveland. It's a long season and you take it day by day, but this is big."

Year Eight everyone!

Royals broadcaster Denny Matthews is not a fan of the Wild Card:

"Baseball, up until the wild card, has never rewarded mediocrity. My fear is that you’re going to have some pretty mediocre teams scuffling (through the season) and finally getting the wild-card position. I don’t know, maybe that’s good for baseball, maybe it isn’t. I don’t like it. I don’t think baseball should reward mediocrity after that long of a season."

Jerry Crasnick of ESPN writes a bit about how Dayton Moore was never really worried when Yordano Ventura overloaded his valgus.

"We have a good trusting relationship with Yordano," Moore said by phone Wednesday. "He wasn’t hiding anything from us. He’s grown up in the system, so we can read his body language pretty good, and he wanted to stay in that game.

"I knew within 10 minutes after seeing him in the clubhouse and talking to him and our medical team that it wasn’t an issue. We’ve seen enough of these in the past that you get a feeling almost immediately when someone is hurt. You can’t paralyze yourself with those types of thoughts."

Dayton knew Yordano was healthy before it was cool. He is our hipster GM.

Crasnick also drops some stat-nerd knowledge on us:

Some numbers courtesy of ESPN Stats & Information:

• Opponents are hitting .177 against Ventura’s changeup in his 11 starts this season. Among qualifying AL starters, only Felix Hernandez and John Danks have been stingier with the change.
• He’s spending enough time in the strike zone that he ranks sixth in the American League with a swing percentage of 48.6.
• After throwing the ball down in the zone 38 percent of the time in April and May, Ventura has done it 44 percent of the time in two June starts. In Wednesday’s outing, he tied his season high with 12 ground-ball outs.

Pine Tar Press has a podcast interview with Royals Director of Scouting Lonnie Goldberg about the recent draft.

The World Cup Opening Ceremonies were both insane and terrifying. Speaking of the World Cup, there are now rumors that FIFA has asked the United States if it would consider hosting the 2022 tournament after reports of corruption and deaths of migrant workers in Qatar, the named host city. Kansas City was one of the candidate venues when the United States made a bid for the World Cup, so we could be in play again.

Is the Turing test - a test to see if a computer can convince people it is human - a big deal? Or are the judges just gullibe? I guess what I want to know is, are we any close to replacing Ned Yost with a Commodore 64?

Should competitive eaters be considered athletes? Billy Butler needs a post-playing career endeavor.

I clicked on this new site "Clickhole" and what happened next changed my life. As the new editor of Royals Review, I agree with their philosophy:

ClickHole has one and only one core belief: All web content deserves to go viral.

Your song of the day is "Lazaretto", the new song by Jack White.