Royals Rumblings - News for October 13, 2017

Sam Mellinger talks about how Scott Boras is selling Eric Hosmer.

The three-ring binder will have graphs and numbers and quotes and comparisons that will make Eric Hosmer look like some cross between Ted Williams and the Pope. If it’s not done already, it will be soon, distributed by agent Scott Boras to the Royals and any other team interested in giving Homser many, many, many millions of dollars to play baseball.

Former Royal Johnny Gomes is raising money for California wildfire victims.

“Now I need you to help me give back to the thousands affected by this horrific catastrophe. Kids are without homes and schools. People have nothing but the clothes on their back. My hometown is a wasteland of ash and rubble. You and I are going to change that!”

Colby Wilson over at BPKC asks if Ned is the right man going forward while reminding us of Ned’s results versus the Pythagorean expectations:

The glass half-empty part of me wants to believe that Ned Yost is simply the luckiest SOB in the world and caught lightning in a bottle for an extended period of time. That is an easy belief.

The other part of me thinks that eventually, luck is no longer luck.

Leigh Oleszczak posited the ugly question “Could Eric Hosmer sign with the Cardinals?”

But the hate is strong with this one:

And yesterday’s post compared the 2014-15 Royals to the 2016-17 Indians.

Speaking of which, hope they’re enjoying the comeuppance that gets heaped on your plate of hubris. Playoff baseball is notoriously fickle. Remember when Let’s Go Tribe was patronizingly and cattily cheering for the Royals to do lukewarmly well so they couldn’t rebuild?* I suppose that as Royals fans face the upcoming rebuilding winter, they can keep warm by burning World Series Champion shirts that didn’t come from antique stores or third world countries.

*Or the seemingly constant drumbeat there that everything the Royals have ever done is luck? Again, this gets back to the blind spot of "they don’t do it our way thus they’re wrong". Never mind that the best Royals teams were built on bullpen, great defense, and high contact in a low contact era, things that are cheaper than power starting arms, power bats (well, less so now), and OBP. I mean, I can be genuinely sympathetic to the entire Cleveland sports scene about their views on “luck”. They have had a bad lot there and it’s not personal or a moral judgement from God about Chief Wahoo or the river catching on fire or whatever; there is just some randomness they’ve been disproportionately on the wrong end of. The Royals lived a really charmed playoff life in 2014 and 2015, but so do most teams who win. Really, I was just ready to just move on from this nonsense with them but their threads the last couple of daysy reference the Royals practically as much as RR has.

As this year’s LDS series just finished up and a lot of those same Astros are in the 2017 ALCS, let’s look back at another iconic game thread for the second installment of “The Best of Royals Review”: 2015 ALDS Game 4.

Facing elimination, Ned Yost and the Royals turn to Yordano Ventura to keep their season alive.

-Josh Duggan

Facing elimination, Royals Review turns to Old Man Duggan to keep its season alive

-Gopherballs

Since it was a day game, there were only about 3000 comments, but a number of them were notable. Possibly the most lasting one was Wil(l) (Freneau) starting the meme of Rios the firestarter. Go, enjoy! It’s another happy thread! In another week or two, we’ll move onto something other than gamethreads and it gets a bit more depressing.

Reiterating: If anyone has some mad Photoshop (or awful but amusing MSPaint skills), I’m open to adding a logo for this series. Then again, if no one notices these, I may just kill them off.

Jeff Sullivan points out that strike zones get bigger in the playoffs.

Another week, another older ESPN article. This one is talks about the Miami businessman who is biggest name in customizing cars for professional athletes and tries to explain the car lifestyle of the rich and famous.

I’m working on some documentation at work and ran across this article, which talks about using colors to evoke the correct emotion in web design.

Some dust observations came back about the “Alien Megastructure star”. Boring.

Death tolls for natural disasters are often inaccurately and woefully low.

The US pulled out of UNESCO. Apparently this had been in the works for a while as we owed about $600M in back dues and weren’t real keen on Palestine being accepted as a member. Speaking of Israel...

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported that Israel spies saw Russian spies using Russian company Kapersky’s antivirus software to spy on American spies. There was even a Stuxnet reference in one article about it.

For some lighter and more hilarious virus news, I’ll let the headline speak for itself: Virus on world's most popular porn site may have infected millions. A computer STD?

And since my stories usually come in trios, Equifax was hacked again. No, not all of our personal information. Someone already has that. This time their website was hacked and replaced with a link to a fake software updater, which probably installs a virus on your computer.

But, hey, in another story: good news might come out of the Equifax hack. HIPAA has some pretty strong rules about not using SSNs for patient numbers in health care. Maybe we’ll get something similar for credit reporting.

Kirby, Nintendo’s lovable squishy mascot (or “walking natural disaster” in the hilarious article entitled “I’m Starting to Worry Kirby Isn’t a Hero, You Guys”), goes back more than 20 years. Looking back, Kirby may be the first major character born from a handheld system. Kirby's Dream Land came out on the Game Boy in 1992 so he predates Pikachu and the Pokemon crew by almost 5 years. And most other popular games on the Gameboy were shrunken versions of NES or SNES (similar for Game Gear and Genesis).

I was going to type “Somewhere along the way, Kirby became a tech demo franchise for Nintendo” but, actually, he always has been pushing the genre envelope. Chronologically, after Dream Land and NES’s Kirby’s Adventure is Kirby’s Pinball Land (GB). This was before every character out there* had a pinball version. It was way head of its time with a rumble pack built into the game. Next was Kirby’s Dream Course, which was basically miniature golf crossed with Marble Madness.

*Wait? There’s a Pinball of the Dead? As in House of the Dead (or the even more awesome Typing of the Dead)? We are definitely doing a Rumblings about that game in the future. Sega, keep being awesome!

If you look around for lists of Kirby games, beyond the standard fan wiki fare, they get broken into different pieces or have titles like “The 10 most obscure Kirby games”. To further illustrate, Game Boy Color’s Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble (2001) had a motion sensor built into the cartridge and was a platformer where you had to tilt or shake the Game Boy to make Kirby move. Besides being bleeping hard, to fit the motion sensor, it was in a special cartridge that didn’t fit in some iterations of the Game Boy. The Wii’s Kirby’s Epic Yarn (2010) is terribly cute creates a “yarn”-themed platformer where kirby is made of string and you can literally sew together parts of the level background as a gameplay element.

This may be my favorite video yet: over 20 years of Green Greens!