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Royals Rumblings - News for November 11, 2015

You get a gold glove, and you get a gold glove, and you get a gold glove!

By Matthew LaMar
Jamie Squire/Getty Images

Royals Rumblings - News for November 11, 2015

It's still early in the offseason, but two things are clear, according to Andy McCullough: the Royals are interested in retaining Alex Gordon and Ben Zobrist, and athleticism remains a priority for the outfield.

The blueprint will not change. As the Royals attempt to fill holes in both their outfield corners, the team intends to fortify its defense and not commit to any plodding sluggers.

"I think that the preference would be to maintain athleticism," assistant general manager J.J. Picollo said. "Because we’ve seen how it can impact games and how much it’s helped us to be athletic. So I would think that it’s going to be a goal of ours."

These comments are far from surprising, though it does present a window into the outfielders the Royals may pursue this winter. While the team will maintain contact with Alex Gordon and Ben Zobrist, rival executives have speculated that outfielders such as Gerardo Parra or Denard Span could fit the Royals’ profile.


Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/sports/mlb/kansas-city-royals/article44188128.html#storylink=cpy

The blueprint will not change. As the Royals attempt to fill holes in both their outfield corners, the team intends to fortify its defense and not commit to any plodding sluggers.

"I think that the preference would be to maintain athleticism," assistant general manager J.J. Picollo said. "Because we’ve seen how it can impact games and how much it’s helped us to be athletic. So I would think that it’s going to be a goal of ours."

These comments are far from surprising, though it does present a window into the outfielders the Royals may pursue this winter. While the team will maintain contact with Alex Gordon and Ben Zobrist, rival executives have speculated that outfielders such as Gerardo Parra or Denard Span could fit the Royals’ profile.


Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/sports/mlb/kansas-city-royals/article44188128.html#storylink=cpy

Rany Jazayerli is doing his best Brett Favre impression, coming back from blogging retirement to begin a series about the legacy of this 2015 team.

Somehow, I was there for both the beginning and the end. When the Royals clinched in Chicago I said at the time that Royals fans celebrated like we had won the World Series. And now…we had actually won the World Series. I’m still in disbelief that it happened at all, let alone that it happened like this. I am so immensely grateful.

That’s the sentiment that I want to hold onto most of all: gratitude. I never really thought this would happen. When the Royals were losing 100 games four times in five years, when they were making inexplicable and embarrassing moves as a matter of course, I wasn’t dreaming of a world championship, or back-to-back pennants. I just wanted to experience a clinching moment or two, that moment when you qualify for the playoffs. Maybe experience what it’s like to win a playoff game or two. Maybe even winning a playoff series.

But to win five of them in two seasons – six if you count the Wild Card game? (Which you should.) To win 22 playoff games – more in the last 14 months than the Royals had won (18) in their entire 45-year history? Nah. I didn’t expect this. No one should expect this.

Eric Hosmer, Salvador Perez, and Alcides Escobar were rewarded with Gold Gloves last night. Though Gordon was snubbed, the core story is recognition of Escobar's defensive wizadry.

The ascension of Escobar lifted Yost’s spirits, though. He professed his admiration for his shortstop and postseason spark plug, who had already made his first All-Star team in 2015 and won the MVP in the American League Championship Series. Hosmer offered similar regards.

"You just see how many good plays he makes," Hosmer said, adding, "Just being his first baseman and getting to see him each and every day, and him finally winning one, being an All-Star this year, being an MVP in the postseason, I think he’s really broke out to be a superstar."


Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/sports/mlb/kansas-city-royals/article44202882.html#storylink=cpy

Joe Posnanski has a word for Dayton Moore's process: Bucksense.

Maybe the Royals should have come up with a catchy name for what they did. Daytonball. Royalball. Bucksense. I particularly like Bucksense because it incorporates two Kansas City legends — Harry Truman and his "Buck Stops Here" philosophy alongside of Buck O’Neil, who represented the soul of Kansas City baseball.

But the Royals — particularly general manager Dayton Moore and assistant general manager J.J. Picollo — do not know how to self-congratulate. It just isn’t in their nature. There are some big talkers in baseball like in every other business, some self-promoters, some blowhards … and like in every other business, baseball blowhards often move up or get too much credit because arrogance can come off as conviction and bluster came come off as innovation. It’s like the saying goes: Sometimes to be a star all you have to do is tell people you are one.

Moore and Picollo, the rest, they just can’t do it. Throughout the Royals’ incredible run from baseball’s depths to an 800,000 person parade in downtown Kansas City, the Royals’ public persona built around Moore’s basic philosophy: "We’re not smarter than anyone else. We don’t work harder than anyone else. We just have to care more than anyone else."

Everyone wants to be the Kansas City Royals at the GM Meetings because of how they won with a modest payroll.

Everyone wants to be the Kansas City Royals, who won the World Series with a young, athletic team that had a payroll of $128 million at the end of the regular season, 13th among the 30 big-league teams.

Kansas City won its first title since 1985 with a five-game victory over the New York Mets, who were 19th at just under $110 million.

"My favorite fun fact about the World Series is we had a small market against a big market, and the small market had a higher payroll than the big market. That's all good from my perspective," new baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said. "The correlation between payroll and winning going down I think is a great analytical indicator of competitive balance in the game."

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Wednesday classic

Thirty-six years after Mozart's 40th Symphony, Beethoven premiered his final symphony, his ninth. Beethoven was a transitional figure in art music, serving to almost single-handedly bridge the gap between the classical and romantic styles. His final symphony was so epic that it basically broke the entire concept of the symphony for decades, and so monolithic and looming that its performance length is said to have heavily influenced the eventual length of the first compact discs.

Though the symphony's finale would incorporate trombones and a full choir, the second movement is a fantastic representation of Beethoven's style at its best (and is *extraordinarily* hard to play if you miss just a few measures).

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