Another sampling of abandoned articles by the Royals Review staff

The August heat is upon us, which means we’re getting into the ‘dog days of summer,’ as it were. Over 100 baseball games have been played, and some psychopaths have recently celebrated Christmas six months early for no discernible reason. Come on, guys. Stop it.

And at this point in the year, the staff at Royals Review dot com has written many things. Some of those things are great. Some are not. But they all share one quality: they were published. They got through the gauntlet of mind and keyboard and wormed their way through a series of tubes to your computer or tablet or phone for you to click on them.

Some of them have not been published. They are failures, or rather booming successes of procrastination and writer’s block. Last year, I took a look at a sampling of abandoned articles by the staff, and it’s now time to do this again.

This is particularly painful for me because I could not possibly be a worse offender. I get hairbrained ideas that work amazingly as introductions and then evaporate into nebulous nothings, or I half write something that’s poignant in that particular moment and nobody cares about four weeks later.

Well, regardless, here’s how the sausage is made: with Pop Tarts and angst.

The Royals stories in history that would have broken Twitter

Max Rieper, July 28

Pine Tar incident

Bo Jackson - throw, HR to right in MIN, upper decker in TEX, 3 HR night, breaking bat

Quote on Bo Jackson coming at the right time in media - Pos?

Vida Blue drug stuff

Don Denkinger

Twitter is mostly just a stupid electronic megaphone that you can use only in short bursts or in dozens of short bursts at a time. It takes advantage of the nearly instantaneous speed of the internet more than anything else because it’s a stupid megaphone. You can yell into the void as fast as you can type or as fast as Siri can understand you yelling at it, which may not be very fast at all (here are the web results for Cam Ron Galahad Gore).

But Twitter makes things Things, and can you imagine if it did that for past games? Can you just imagine the memes that would have happened to George Brett losing it and sprinting out onto the baseball diamond like a wild Harambe? It would have been glorious.

Another All-Star game, another year of lazy excuses from jealous fans

Matthew LaMar, July 6

There’s no text in this article, but the title speaks for itself. The only thing in the body is the above picture, which is a glorious representation of the determination and ingenuity of the Kansas City sports fan.

#voteomar

The baseball draft as an ‘EVENT’ will never work

Matthew LaMar, June 16

Visiting our 2012 draft day thread now is a rather amusing experience, especially with the gift of five years’ hindsight. Correa as the first overall pick was 100% the correct move; he’s already a superstar and could have a Hall of Fame career in front of him if he stays healthy. But other than Houston, none of the first ten picks went particularly well. The Oakland Athletics’ selection of Addison Russell at 11th overall was a good one, as was the Los Angeles Dodgers’ selection of Corey Seager at 18th overall and the Toronto Blue Jays’ choice of Marcus Stroman at 22nd overall.

Of course, none of us wanted the Royals to draft Seager, Stroman, or Russell, all of whom were still first-rounders and have had significantly better careers than anyone not named ‘Carlos Correa’ in the first ten picks. And, God, some of our takes were really fantastically horrible, but some were great, but most were terrible. A sampling:

Fine with Zimmer | Safe pick, but Giolito will be the name we all remember

The more I hear about Zimmer the more I like him | He must have a fantastic arm—there’s no other explanation

nationals kill it again | adding the top talent in the draft at #16

the draft is such a crapshoot | any one of these next 8 pitchers could be hochevar or lincecum. No telling.

My main point in this article, which may still see the light of day, was that there’s no way to make the MLB draft like the NFL draft because nobody is particularly interested in college or high school baseball. Nobody has heard of any of these players, and if they make the Majors at all it’ll be in three years. That makes for a boring show.

But I’d like to draw your attention to the 2012 draft thread, which is a Sad Panda, and our collective enjoyment of the Kyle Zimmer drafting because he was a ‘safe pick’ with a ‘fantastic arm.’

Another relief ace?

Patrick Brennan, June 15

Scott Alexander has been purely dominant this year. One of the more reliable options out of Ned Yost’s bullpen this year, Alexander has dazzled this year, posting a 1.37 ERA this year in 19.2 innings.

Now, I'm well aware Alexander is due for some regression. It's very hard to maintain a .200 BABIP the whole season. His underlying numbers are honest too, as his FIP and xFIP more than double his ERA. But I have my reasons to believe that BABIP won't skyrocket.

Well, since June 15 Alexander has posted a 3.42 ERA and has a BABIP way up to .388. Sometimes, it’s good that analysis doesn’t get posted, because baseball can sniff when someone is trying to make a claim about the future and acts accordingly to make that individual look as foolish as possible.

This time, it happened to Patrick. It has happened to me. Don’t let it happen to you. Don’t make predictions about baseball.

Old Man Duggan’s First Trip to the K

Josh Duggan, May 25

After finishing the third and final year of my bachelor’s degree at Minnesota with two summer courses, three friends and I set out on an not-quite-epic journey—a four-day trek from Minneapolis to Denver to Kansas City and back, passing through the terrifying Great Platte River Road Archway outside of Kearney in the dark of night with no idea what we’d just seen or why the hell it was there before wandering aimlessly around the Colorado University campus to burn enough time before the first Coors Brewery Tour started where we poured four peoples’ worth of drinks down the gullet of one sleep-deprived soul, grabbed a catnap, took in a Ween/Tenacious D show at Red Rocks, passed out still seething at a middle-act Galactic playing an interminable and awful two-hour set while all we wanted was for Ween to come on and play and finish which would allow us to go back to our hotel and sleep after not sleeping for two days, ate breakfast with one of the other guy’s uncles, ventured east across the topographical monotony of eastern Colorado and, um, all of Kansas, foisted a burned copy of a Galactic album upon an unsuspecting Wendy’s drive-thru worker in Colby saying it was our band, and rolled into Kansas City just in time to walk in the gates during the first inning.

This is one sentence, a John Stuart Mill-esque leviathan of prose that began with a car drive from Minnesota, involved Coors beer and Wendy’s employee trickery, and ended with Kansas City Royals baseball.

I’m not sure if there’s a more apt metaphor for the Royals Review experience.

How to talk to your kids about the Kansas City Royals

Max Rieper, May 5

It is a lesson in humility. After all, we’re not Cardinals fans.

The University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford have an intense rivalry. They are two similar schools, old and elite academic institutions in the same small country with similar sizes, setups, and cultural impact. It’s like Harvard and Yale, without any of the other Ivy League schools muddying the rivalry water.

Both universities are comprised of a multitude of ‘colleges.’ These colleges are not aligned with a specific academic subject, as colleges within a university are in America, but are rather subsets of the university that provide more intimate communities and groups—think the Harry Potter houses.

Anyway, there’s a college in Cambridge called St. John’s, and there’s a popular chant/saying among other Cambridge colleges that is, ‘I’d rather be at Oxford than St. John’s,’ which always struck me as profoundly counterproductive and bizarre.

This is all to say that ‘at least we’re not Cardinals fans’ is maybe not the best barometer for establishing your fandom, but it still works on some level.

Fanfiction for that McDouble commercial that airs during Royals games

Max Rieper, May 1

Bobby rifled through the t-shirts in his closet, not really knowing what it was he was looking for. The shirt he was wearing was starting to smell rank. He could still smell the remnants of yesterday’s dinner, and he noticed the splotch of ketchup on his sleeve that had dripped off his french fry the previous night.

“I can’t find my shirt!” he yelled to his mother.

“Wear the one I laid out for you,” she replied.

His face rankled as he looked on the bed at the Royals t-shirts that lay on his bed.

“Does that mean we’re getting McDonald’s again? You don’t mess with a streak, mom.”

“You don’t mess with a streak, Bobby.”

Baseball!

Matthew LaMar, February 14

BASEBALL!

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I wrote this in order to celebrate the beginning of baseball after an extra-long offseason. We got used to another month of baseball over the last two years, and going cold turkey from World Series clubs to no postseason baseball at all was a shock.

Eventually, this article saw the light of day, somewhat, as ‘Alex Gordon hit a home run’ became a rallying cry for a recap.

A formal ode to Dayton Moore

Ryan Heffernon, January 24

Even if the Royals stopped winning. Even if Dayton never figures out how to develop a starting pitcher or power bat. Will he be that right guy?

That is the question I am asking myself right now. Do I want wins or do I want the man at the helm of my team and my city doing his job with integrity?

I would like to say the latter, but as it stands, I don’t have to ask myself that question for a while.

The sad thing about baseball is that sports is that winning trumps so many other things like integrity or loyalty. It’s a cutthroat business.

Thankfully, as Ryan points out, we don’t have to worry about it in regards to Moore for a while.

A thing

Matthew LaMar, December 20

Dayton Moore won a World Series. For that, he will go into the team Hall of Fame, as he should. He has been the best thing that happened to the Royals for thirty years.

But everything has its time. Some relationships serve us in the moment, and can be extraordinarily memorable and even life-altering, but are ultimately temporary experiences. Close your eyes and think of your childhood best friend, your old haunting grounds. Listen to the wind rush by as you speed by on your bicycle, or feel the aching of your thumbs as you try one more time to defeat that level in your favorite video game.

For some of us, that childhood best friend is still around. But for many of us, they are gone. At some point, one or both of you moved on. Maybe you needed to. Either way, it was probably for the best. Nothing stands still; even the ground races with us through the cosmos.

Royals fans will remember Moore's imprint on us as the architect of the most sports fun we have had in years, decades, maybe the expanse of our entire lives. But even as Moore's team continuously sent one more batter to the plate to imprint their legacy on the playoffs, the experience was only temporary. It was only ever temporary.

Some day, Dayton Moore will get fired.

It is inevitable. Either he’ll do that or he’ll take another job elsewhere. Those are the only two options for Moore at this stage in his career.

And at some point, if the Royals don’t go back to their winning ways, the mid-2010s Royals are going to be more of a memory than a tangible team, as the stars retire or go their separate ways.

In the middle of December, months away from baseball on either side, I ruminated on this melancholy. Hopefully there will continue to be a bright light.