Holiday Rumblings - News for November 23, 2017 (Thanksgiving and Black Friday)

With the holiday, we have a bit of a scaled back Rumblings. Consider this your Rumblings thread for today and tomorrow.

The Royals made some front office moves that may have gone under the radar a couple of days ago:

The Royals announced a pair of moves Tuesday in their baseball operations department, promoting former pro scout Alec Zumwalt to director of baseball operations while bringing back Albert Gonzalez as assistant general manager of international operations.

I’m fairly clueless about both so take this commentary with a boulder of salt. Gonzalez sounds like a good move as he ran the Marlins academy in the Dominican Republic. Meanwhile, the Zumwalt move is a bit more of a head scratcher to me. Usually “Director of Baseball Operations” can mean anything from “the guy in charge of personnel moves” (clearly Dayton Moore in KC so that’s not it here) to “guy who controls the business side of things while leaving the GM to do baseball things”. He’s been the team’s advance scout and this position usually has something business-y to it. But maybe it’s just that the position means something different in Kansas City. Rustin Dodd’s story about this in the Star is here.

David Leksy at BPKC takes a look at which Royals pitchers have increased workload the last couple of years in an attempt to see who might have injury red flags for 2018. And, yes, I included this blockquote just for the last part.

So if you’re looking for red flags, there are a couple. Alexander’s usage in 2017 was significantly higher than in 2016. A lot of that was from him learning to deal with his diabetes in 2016, but even so, he had a pretty heavy workload comparatively and got in to a bunch more games than he has in the past few seasons. Andres Machado made a huge leap, and I imagine he’ll be monitored pretty closely, but if he’s used on the big league roster, it’ll likely be as a reliever. And finally, you see that name at the bottom? That Zimmer fella? Yeah, he’s an injury risk too, but let’s be real. It’s not the innings.

Over the last two days, Dave Cameron over at Fangraphs has listed five free-agent bargains and five free-agent landmines. YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHO IS LANDMINE NUMBER 1! Oh wait, of course you will: It’s Eric Hosmer, the most polarizing player in this free agent class and an easy target upon which to sharpen your baseball condescension axe:

It isn’t that hard to see why scouts like Eric Hosmer. He makes contact, hits the ball hard, and runs much better than most guys who play the position. And his small-market team reached the World Series two years in a row, so it’s easy to draw up a narrative about how he has magic winning beans or something.

On the happier side of the ledger (aka the bargains list), former Royal Jarrod Dyson checks in at #4 and Lorenzo Cain is #2 .

Rather than a new one, here’s a look at the Best of RoyalsReview(TM) so far. We started with game threads during the playoffs and then made our way to the Battle of Grass Creek. We have some quality entries coming up over the next couple of months.

2017.10.06 2014 Wild Card thread

2017.10.13 2015 ALDS Game 4

2017.10.20 2014 World Series Game 7

2017.10.27 2015 World Series Game 1

2017.11.03 2015 World Series Game 5

2017.11.10 The Battle for Grass Creek, Wyoming Begins

Here are some oddball holiday Thanksgiving links today.

Why are canned blobs of cranberry a thing?

The History Channel tackles “the Real History of Black Friday” (because any time something is said to be “real”, I’m sure it’s 100% official and accurate).

And they also take a look back at the first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Spending some of your holiday making your house look like Clark Griswold’s? Gizmodo has The Very American History of Christmas Lights.

It’s not exactly a song of the day, but it is definitely something to be thankful for.