Royals Rumblings - News for November 10, 2017

With it being the hot stove season, lots of rumors flying fast and furious. The FanSided network (KOK, KCKingdom, et al) had their thoughts on the following:

• Logan Morrison liking KC
• Atlanta not going after Moose
• Orioles linked to Vargas
• Carlos Gomez’s fit on the Royals

I’m sorry, but every time you do a slideshow, you’re getting dinged for it in this space. Alex Duvall took time “Analyzing 5 Kansas City Royals due for progression or regression in 2018”. But, again, it’s a slideshow so you’ve been warned.

KCKingdom’s Ben Almquist took a look at the potential Royals rebuild.

Another story on the Royals rumors horizon that has yet to have been seriously talked about is the potential of KC trading away some talent. While players like Whit Merrifield, Danny Duffy, and Salvador Perez are fan favorites, they also have a lot of value. If Kansas City is serious about a rebuild, they would be foolish to not explore this option.

BPKC’s David Lesky thinks projections at this time of year are dumb.

But let’s not sit here and pretend that a team projection in early November for a team that just lost a ridiculous number from their big league team is anything other than noise. There’s a good chance the 2018 Royals are bad. There’s a good chance the 2018 projections when the rosters are actually set show that they’ll be bad. But even with that, what we’re seeing now means very little. Let’s at least let the ink dry on a few of these deals before we hit the algorithm to tell us just how bad this team will be.

Eric Hosmer makes CBS Sports's "Riskiest Free Agents on the Market" list

Everyone likes to dig into advanced metrics to figure out if the surface-level numbers are maintainable. In Eric Hosmer's case, doing so just creates more headache.

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For the first time in the short-lived Best of Royals Review (TM), it’s time for something other than a playoff game thread. There’s a strong argument to be made that this is the second most famous post on this site, to the point where ESPN basically copied it a year later (it’s not quite that simple, but, well, read the link).

Today’s Best of Royals Review(TM): The Battle for Grass Creek, Wyoming Begins.

It divides families, college campuses, marriages and army units. Each side knows just what the other side hates most to hear, and vice versa. Every year ESPN jams the rivalry down our throats, knowing that we'll only beg for more. Mariners fans think the Royal cronies are bandwagonners, while Royals fans think the Mariner supporters are self-important and annoying. The Royals are sleek, corporate, professional and classy. The Mariners are swept by the tides of the sea, romantic, given over to loathing and self-doubt.

Later installments in The Battle for Grass Creek gave us this brilliant map:

And then this even brilliant-er map:

Too many missives to link have been written about this battle, which has been woven in RR meme lore.

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Fangraphs's Travis Sawchik proclaims "We've Reached Peak Shift".

ESPN had a trio of fun stories about bets in Vegas on the World Series

For today’s “story I just got around to reading”, back in August, BBC and others were reporting on a mysterious radio station.

Nutella changed the recipe of their wildly popular spread. Let’s see how that works for them.

The flu vaccine was 42% effective last year. It might be similarly low this year. Bummer.

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A while back, we were talking about Final Fantasy and we took a detour into talking about Chocobo Music. If you’re not sure what a Chocobo is, it’s a fictional bird that’s one of a couple of mascots of the Final Fantasy series (Moogles being the other).

Chocobos first made their appearance in Final Fantasy II and have been in every game since. I went back and cataloged the number of Chocobo themes for the first few games:

• FF2 has the original Chocobo Theme (the one that is most associated with them).
• FF3 has the one and then Big Chocobo!
• FF4 has those two and then adds the flying Chocobo theme (Samba de Chocobo).
• FF5 and FF6 only have one Chocobo theme each: FF5 kindof combines the original and Samba into Mambo de Chocobo FF6 has Techno de Chocobo
• FF7 explodes with 5 different themes (damn you, Golden Saucer) and it just goes on from there.

At the technology to capture video game music has changed, the song has gone through a number of iterations but is still the same at its core:

Or if you just want to see a cockatiel sing the song for 3 minutes, YouTube also provides.