Royals Rumblings - News for November 3 , 2017

Next year, the Royals will celebrate their 50th season. Over the course of the next year, they’ll name the Royals All-Time Team. You can help by voting here. Why not just leave George Brett marked for everyone like the free space in Bingo? First name alphabetically? All-Star Aaron Crow.

BPKC’s Clint Scoles (wait- that can’t be right? I could have sworn Thursdays were Craig Brown’s day) looks back at the Royals 2013 draft. It even sounds like he might be referencing RR in the intro:

The title of this article might seem odd, but as other blogs and this site have pointed out, scouting director Lonnie Goldberg has had some drafts that have hurt the Royals balance sheet and the farm system in the process.

KOK’s Nicholas Sullivan pens a retrospective on Carlos Beltran now that the former Royal has won a title with the Astros.

With or without a World Series ring, Beltran would still go down as one of the best Kansas City Royals draft picks of all time.

Elsewhere on the Fansided network, Leigh Oleszczak looks back at the playoff bullpens for the Royals:

When looking at how hittable those bullpens were, especially LA’s who was thought to be the second coming of what Kansas City did, it has to make Royals fans appreciate what they had in 2014 and 2015. Those bullpens were elite and it’s entirely possible that we won’t see another unit like that for a very long time.

We talked about this in last week’s Best of Royals Review (TM). Since the universe didn’t shatter, we can do one more game thread even though the World Series is over: 2015 World Series Game 5 (3489 comments).

For the Royals, the game didn’t really start until the 9th inning with Matt Harvey demanding to go back out there. Then Cain’s walk, Hosmer’s double, and Hosmer’s mad dash tie the game. In the 12th, Colon drives in Dyson, Escobar gets him home, and Cain puts punctuation on the inning with a bases-loaded double. Wade finishes it off and KC wins their first World Series in 30 years.

Next week, I promise we’re onto something other than game threads. But who doesn’t want to relive the Royals World Series run?

Will Leitch tries to help out Astros fans with what they will be feeling over the next few months. It brought back some memories. For instance:

You will not want next season to start. Ordinarily, Spring Training is a renewal, a reminder that baseball is coming back to save us. But when your team has just won the World Series, all Spring Training stands for is 29 teams trying to take away your championship.

Here are a few details about the Astros parade, for those interested. This is information about streaming it online. Houston ISD schools will be closed for the Astros parade but a number of neighboring suburban districts will remain open. The city’s website has the parade route, as do local news sites.

The first of a couple of older articles that I don’t think they made the rounds here. Hyperbole alert: this didn’t actually break baseball as the title claims but it’s a fun little story of high school baseball and some oddball rules.

I’ve always wanted to be an astronaut. I will probably always want to be an astronaut. But my eyesight precludes it and I’m too risk averse to gamble everything on that type of long shot. That said, when I was visiting Cape Canaveral a few years ago, if someone from NASA had run up to me and said “We just lost an astronaut to something (anything!) and need someone to go up into space. You’ll have to quit your current job and train for 6 weeks but then you’re guaranteed to fly into space”, I’d do it without hesitation. Or for those not in fantasy land, here’s what it takes to become an astronaut.

The next time you bring your boss a list of complaints, nail them to the door of his or her office and say you’re starting a religious movement. Happy 500th, Lutherans!

New techniques allowed archaeologists to discover a giant “void” within the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Unfortunately, I’m too late for today’s iPhone X launch. But for the next one, here are some camping tips. Or you can revisit past ridiculous queues. And, unsurprisingly, people in line are doing silly, discourteous things.

Speaking of camping: I have a couple of spots in the corners of one of the bathrooms at home where spiders love to camp. They just sit there. Sometimes for days. Then eventually they leave or are displaced or- I really have no idea. I googled why this week and apparently the answer is, basically, “they conserve energy and only move when necessary” combined with the fact that it’s probably a high traffic area for prey small enough we can’t see. While we’re at it, here are “8 facts about the misunderstood house spider”.

I’ve been in a Super Nintendo mood with the SNES Classic being released in the last couple of months. However, this week’s game is not in the collection, but it was a launch window game for the system.

Let’s linger there for a moment: the SNES was released in North America in August 1991 and the launch games were Super Mario World, F-Zero, Pilotwings, SimCity, and Gradius III. Other games released before Christmas include Actraiser, Final Fantasy II, Final Fight, John Madden Football (II), Paperboy 2, Populous, Super Baseball Simulator 1.000, Super Bases Loaded, Super Castlevania IV, Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Super Off Road, Super R-Type, and Super Tennis. That’s the best launch window ever. Period. Much as I love the Dreamcast, as it’s mentioned as the only real competition for this title, it’s just not close. Their launch window included Sonic Adventure, Soulcalibur, House of the Dead 2, Marvel vs Capcom, Power Stone, Time Stalkers, and a host of Sega-branded sports games. That said, the SNES had the benefit of being out in Japan for almost a year before coming stateside.

This game was also already on the PC, Mac, and a number of other systems like the Amiga. It's also a hugely revolutionary game, cited for starting an entire genre, even though it's successor was even more amazing. In case you haven’t guessed already: today’s game is the classic SimCity.

The open-ended world builder essentially started the simulation genre. After designing the game, Will Wright would go on to design a number of Sim games including 100-million seller The Sims. Those who have played SimCity certainly remember laying down roads, zoning parts of your city, dodging disasters, and balancing the needs of your Sim citizens to try a make your city grow the way you wanted.

For the song of the day, as your city grew from “Village” to “Town” all the way to “Megalopolis”, the music would change. As your city got larger, the bucolic music got more uptempo. I couldn’t find a perfect video for the game, but here’s a decent video of someone going from open fields to a city of 100K within about an hour and the musical changes the city experiences: