Royals Rumblings - News for July 21, 2017

(Ed note: I’m still jealous OMD got to link to the Richard Lovelady name story yesterday. But, really, it is more his tone than mine.)

As always, with my Fridays, it’s take out the trash day. Some is new news and some is news from earlier in the week that slipped through the cracks. I’ll probably even drop some flavor of this disclaimer eventually. There’s also some danger I repeat stuff but, well, that can happen.

Tonight’s game against the White Sox will stream live on Facebook. FYI: For those of us out of market who keep forgetting when it will end, the MLB.tv free trial from the Final Vote is over next Wednesday, the 26th. Old friend James Shields is on the mound and the White Sox will be using a lot of young players and a new bullpen with a number of players already having been traded.

Last night’s laugher was a lot of fun. If you didn’t see the first inning, those familiar with the aughts Royals should see some familiar things. Or you could cue up the Yakety Sax and watch the condensed game for a couple of minutes. They probably sync up as well as the Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon. Case in point: Salvy got a stolen base.

Jeff Passan writes about the political crisis and activism from MLB players (nothing about Perez or Escobar in the story, though) in Venezuela

“I’m tired of paying protection money so they don’t kidnap my mother, not knowing whether they are police or criminals,” said Detroit Tigers first baseman Miguel Cabrera, the two-time American League Most Valuable Player, in an Instagram video protesting Maduro last week. “All I ask is: Please, don’t hurt my family.”

Nate Karns had his thoracic outlet surgery and hopes to return in the spring.

After Ian Kennedy’s hamstring injury in May, he started using his curve more.

Jorge Bonifacio has been a (mostly) consistent hitter this season.

Bonifacio, 24, just had a nine-game hitting streak end in Wednesday night's 4-3 win over the Tigers. He also had his 22-game streak of successfully reaching base end -- the latter is the second most for a Royals rookie in club history behind Kevin Seitzer's 29-game streak in 1987.

JD Martinez had his #hugwatch in Kansas City, finding out about his trade to Arizona during the Tigers-Royals series.

In more trade news, Buster Olney is reporting MLB told teams that the qualifying offer this year should be around $18M. MLBTR adds the following:

Yu Darvish is the easiest call among impending free agents (assuming he isn’t traded), while others such as Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Lorenzo Cain and Greg Holland all stand out as logical candidates (once Holland turns down his $15MM player option).

The White Sox targeted high-upside players in their recent rebuild so there’s a lot of boom-or-bust potential there.

Certainly, these guys can improve from what they currently are, but part of the reason the White Sox were able to acquire all these guys is that their development is anything but guaranteed. Rick Hahn prioritized upside in his acquisitions, and while he’s done a great job picking up guys that have obviously high ceilings, we also shouldn’t be surprised when most of these guys don’t make it. Obviously, there are risks with every prospect, and saying that a bunch of them are going to fail isn’t breaking news. But it’s notable that the White Sox have landed risky prospects even by prospect standards

The Yankees have the highest fastball speed of any team in baseball but the lowest usage rate by a significant margin.

After a rough Twins debut, Bartolo Colon may (finally) retire.

Completely stolen from Rock Chalk Talk’s thread yesterday: a minor league team has “a bat dog named Rookie who goes out and grabs the bat after each at-bat”.

If Farmhand’s story helped get you ready for next month’s eclipse, make sure you get legitimate eclipse glasses for safe viewing.

McDonalds is one of many purveyors trying to peddle provisions in the PM between lunch and dinner.

The Sri Lankan navy rescued an elephant that had swam 8 miles out to sea.

If you guessed our song of the day was from the best RPG of all time, you’d be right! I believe this is my first SNES entry and why not lead with Chrono Trigger.

Looking back, the team that developed the game has always been referred to as a "dream team" or "All-Star". The main trio were Hironobu Sakaguchi (Final Fantasy creator), Yuji Horii (Dragon Quest designer back before Squeenix bought Enix), and artist Akira Toriyama (of Dragon Ball fame). Horii and Masato Kato's plot introduced well done versions of several tropes to video games like time travel, a futuristic dystopia (as opposed to FF6's fantasy dystopia), and the idea of a past civilization more advanced than any modern civilization that was lost to time. Toriyama's character design is brilliant with many characters still memorable to this day (albeit there's still the curious decision of the silent protagonist). And there were a number of gameplay innovations such as onfield random incounters, combo attacks, and multiple endings. While these were not all first done by Chrono Trigger, it could be argued these were the first time they were done on a large scale and commercially successful for the video game playing masses. And this game has rightfully been placed at or near the top of numerous RPG and SNES lists

The soundtrack was composed mainly by a rookie, Yasunori Mitsuda (now of Chrono, Xeno, Inazuma Eleven fame and dozens others), who had gone to Square's VP and told him that he would quit if he were not allowed to compose. He worked himself sick literally: he gave himself ulcers and the great video game composer Nobuo Uematsu, at the height of his career, had to finish some of the soundtrack. But it's one of the greatest soundtracks of all time, pushing the limits of the Super Nintendo. Here’s the intro, which has a couple of songs put together. It’s not my favorite track (that’s Robo’s theme or the Ocean Palace) and it’s not a great quality capture but I wanted to use probably the most famous track from an original SNES capture.