Royals Rumblings - News for October 6, 2017

The Royals are replacing their field for the first time since 1994.

The Royals hope to start laying sod at Kauffman Stadium by Nov. 13 and have the project completed by Nov. 22.

“Instead of putting it to bed, we’re just rebuilding it,” said Vance, who is in his 33rd year with the Royals. “If it happens once every 20 years, I’m happy with it.”

Max will be thrilled to read about the final Royals SportsCrate of the year. This “highlight” might have been taken slightly out of context:

It wasn’t all bad though.

Yes Marlins Man was at the last game of the year.

It’s the time of year to start doing lists!

Christopher Till at Royals Blue is doing a “Top 25 Moments of the Last 5 Years” series. So far, the first three are up:

• #25 – The James Shields Trade
• #24 - That's What Speed Do
• #23 - Duffman K's 16

KOK revisited 2014 ALDS Game 3. Somehow Nicholas Sullivan forgot the most important moment in the game, though:

Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images

Since Royals-specific news dries up in the offseason, I’ve been kicking around the idea of this recurring feature for the next few months. I’m sure it will evolve as we go along but here’s the first installment of “The Best of Royals Review”. In this section, we will remind you of a notable thread from this site’s past.

FYI: If anyone has some mad Photoshop (or awful but amusing MSPaint skills), I’m open to adding a logo.

This week is an easy one and it barely needs an introduction. As this year’s playoffs just started, let’s look back at the best game in Royals history: the 2014 Wild Card thread.

Between it and the four(!) overflow threads, it went 4934 comments* deep, not including the 561 comment recap. Here’s the intro from Duggan and you can just read from there:

Can you feel that? An unfamiliar, simultaneous amalgam of excitement, dread, certainty of failure, blind optimism of success, pending horror, sexual arousal, crippling impotence, realizations that this may never happen again, faint hopes that this will not recur, more sexual arousal, even more crippling impotence, glow-basking, fear-masking, and premature heart palpitations all accompanied by the malodorous combination of befouled undergarments and fear-elicited sweat pouring from every gland?

*(no I did not check and no, I absolutely didn’t have 255 comments personally; also, I’m pretty sure I didn’t have the most in the thread)

There were some baseball games that didn’t involve the Royals yesterday:

• Jose Altuve hits three home runs in Astros 8-2 win versus Red Sox
• Let’s Go Tribe seems to think the Indians already have this postseason won with their 4-0 win over the Yankees. Let’s see how that goes for them. Nothing could possibly go wrong, especially not for a sports town like Cleveland.

I guess there are other sports, too. I have a couple of interesting older stories I read this week and they were all from ESPN. I know, right?. Hilariously, they all have some part of “the inside story” in their URL, title, or both.

The Inside Story of how Players took Control of the NFL National Anthem (something something - I think the rest of the title got cut off in the URL) tells a really interesting story of how the owners in the NFL actually disagreed about something until they remembered it might cost them all money.

Inside Bob Stoops' last days at Oklahoma is the portrait of a man who saw his dad die on the football sidelines and didn’t want to follow in those footsteps.

The inside story of how the FBI brought the words corruption and fraud to college basketball appears as if they tried to weave the court documents and complaints into a narrative.

Vox looks at fake news and the illusory truth effect.

Netflix is raising prices again.

I guess Fallout last week was just too mainstream and there weren’t that many comments. So, this week, we’re back to esoteric! Project X Zone for the Nintendo 3DS is like some fever dream of a Japanese game executive: you take popular characters from difference franchises from from Bandai Namco, Capcom, and Sega and throw them all together in a game. Think Kingdom Hearts, only instead of using Disney and Square, the two largest players in their respective spheres, you took some “smaller” companies. Oh, and don’t do it nearly as seamlessly so the plot basically consists of an ever increasingly large gang of heroes hopping into another world to find new heroes and saying "hey, we're going after the bad guy, want to come along?"

The game is a fun idea: in your dimension hopping, you control characters from such disparate games as Mega Man, Resident Evil, Street Fighter, Devil May Cry, Tekken, Space Channel 5, Ghosts n' Goblins, Dead Rising, and a whole slew of jRPGs. And the battle system combines a simplistic sRPG grid system with a really fun button masher fighting game. Unfortunately, the battle system gets repetitive and the plot is just a shallow mess. And we’re not even talking about some of the drawbacks of the genre: overworn tropes, fanservice, etc. In its defense, the script is quite self-aware and makes fun of a lot of those. Also, the writers mostly take loving care of the characters they are borrowing.

The soundtrack is pretty easily split into two parts. The first half of the tracks are theme songs for characters from their respective games. The second half are new creations for Project X Zone. Today's song, Wanderer's Road, is the theme of the two main protagonists of the game: Kogoro and Mii. He's a lazy detective tutor from a long family line of ninjas and carries a sword of legend while she's a wealthy heiress and shotgun-toting high school cheerleader. Because of course they are.