Royals Rumblings - News for August 25, 2017

Royals Rumblings - News for August 25, 2017

Salvy’s injury is “playable” but he was not in the lineup for Thursday’s day game:

Royals catcher Salvador Perez has appeared in noticeable discomfort while playing in two games since returning from the disabled list. He has winced in pain after swings and gone down to one knee on multiple occasions during at-bats. In such moments, he still appears limited by a strained intercostal muscle that forced a trip to the 10-day disabled list in early August. Yet manager Ned Yost sought to tamp down concern on Thursday, stating that Perez was playing through a manageable level of discomfort in his side.

Moose also sat due to injury:

Battling a sore right knee, third baseman Mike Moustakas received a day off Thursday as the Royals concluded a three-game series against the Colorado Rockies. The discomfort surfaced on Wednesday night in Moustakas’ final at-bat, Royals manager Ned Yost. Moustakas felt a pop in his knee and moved gingerly as he returned to the dugout after flying out to center field.

Greg Holland got a nice ovation before the game Tuesday night

The Rockies were impressed and tweeted video of the love that Kansas City fans showered on Holland, and Colorado even gave a hat tip to the Royals with the hashtag #RaisedRoyal.

He even gave the Royals a nice gift on Wednesday.

“It was up in the zone. It was pretty much a hanger,” Holland told Patrick Saunders of the Denver Post. “There were not a whole lot of positives today. They don’t pay me to get close, they pay me to get the job done.”

But his last couple of months have now been bad enough that Dave Cameron took a look at his season:

Holland was responsible for a lot of their first-half success, but he’s now going on three months without being able to command his pitches well, and the Rockies probably shouldn’t count on seeing the dominant guy they had in May again.

Just a reminder that it’s Players Weekend and MLB is re-running some stories about the event:

• Royals Players Weekend nicknames
• “What you need to know”
• ESPN’s take

Those custom wristbands players wear? Mims Bandz has been making them for 30 years and MLBPA is now suing the owner for selling players’ likenesses.

Now that we’re into at the end of eclipse week, here’s some take out the trash stories about it:

• CNET has some suggestions on what to do with those eclipse glasses.
• Did you stare at the sun? Then maybe you’re cool with getting medical advice from Buzzfeed.
• Want some visualization about upcoming eclipses?

More science? Hurricane Harvey is expected to hose Houston with heavy rain over the next week. Want to read about “Mighty Hercules”, one of the hurricane hunters?

Or how about why we sleep under sheets even when it’s warm?

We’ll probably be hearing about tax repatriation in the upcoming months as part of the upcoming tax wrangling. Of course, Vox has a primer.

I’m slow and just caught up on some movies over the last couple of weeks (toddler!). As we’ve discussed, Friday can be a bit of leftovers day and this articles may already have been posted here but I just got around to reading them to avoid spoilers. The first one talks about Johnny Depp's casting in Fantastic Beasts and the second about the CGI in Doctor Strange. The third ties the two together. I’m not sure I should have done that but did anyway.

Speaking of things to watch, we touched on the new Duck Tales series a couple of months ago. The premier debuted this week and can be seen online and a couple of times a day on Disney XD. They got a lot of things right, didn’t screw up a lot of things they could have, are a bit rough around the edges in spots that can be cleaned up, and I’m excited for the series. Here’s AV Club’s review. In fact, if you want some juicy nostalgia goodness and haven’t seen it yet, why are you reading this junk? Wait- that came out all wrong.

Mark Muller and Jeff Pescetto teamed up for the Duck Tales theme song. They also made another popular Disney Afternoon theme song: Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers. The parallels don’t end there as Capcom turned both Disney franchises into excellent NES platformers and million sellers.

I’m sure we’ll have more about Capcom games in our future. After all, this is the studio that brought us Mega Man, Street Fighter, and Resident Evil. Heck, I’ve already picked out some music from Monster Hunter and from Project X Zone, which is this crazy Sega-Capcom-Bandai Namco crossover but that’s for another day.

But for today’s purposes, we’ll hit on this generation as opposed to their arcade porting roots: Capcom has been one of the largest publishers in the industry, going back to the 8-bit era. For the NES, Nintendo was the top publisher with 76 games but then Konami, Capcom, and Acclaim (RIP) were the next highest with 32, 31, and 31 games published, respectively (yes, I created a pivot table with the data from here to do the math). And, for Capcom, 7 of those 31 sold more than 1 million copies.

One other unique thing about this pair of games is that, traditionally, licensed games are not usually good. For every Duck Tales or Rescue Rangers, there are seemingly a dozen Superman 64s or Atari ETs (though each of those are fun pieces of video game lore in their own way).

So here’s the midi theme song for Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers

Or if you want the original version in what looks like all of its VHS glory