Royals Rumblings - News for September 22, 2017

Dayton Moore still believes the decision to buy at the trade deadline was a correct one.

"It's a fair question," Moore told MLB.com. "Those are good questions, and they should be asked. But where were we on July 30?"

The Royals were 55-48, just two games back of the Indians for the American League Central lead, and 2 1/2 games ahead in the battle for the second AL Wild Card spot. And they were just 1 1/2 games back of Boston for the top Wild Card spot.

With Mike Moustakas passing Steve Balboni on Wednesday, can he get the Kansas City professional home-run record?

Now, Moustakas just needs to catch Bob Cerv. Cerv, who died in April at the age of 91, hit more home runs in a Kansas City uniform than any major-league player when he clubbed 38 for the A’s in 1958.

With fans keenly aware that it may be the last coupl weeks of Moose and Hos in Kansas City, a hug shared on Wednesday was popular on the social medias.

Peter Moylan would like to remain in Kansas City, though, by the sounds of it, he’d really like someone to give him a major league contract:

A year ago, he won a job in the Royals’ bullpen in May and turned in a respectable 3.43 ERA in 50 appearances. He entered the offseason expecting to choose from two or three major-league offers, he said. But the options never came. He settled for a non-guaranteed minor-league deal with the Royals as camp began. He would prefer to avoid that fate again...

Moylan says he feels healthier than he has in years. He all but cut out alcohol from his diet after finishing his second Tommy John rehab in 2015, he said. He shed close to 40 pounds from his 6-foot-2 frame and found a formula for staying fresh.

Apparently the lead Kevin, Max, and former RRer Clark Fosler were on the same wavelength yesterday. Max wrote about 8 games that could have gone differently. Clark picked one per month for BP KC.

Yahoo’s Jeff Passan has some strong words of condemnation for teams that lack protective netting (FYI: He gives kudos to the Royals for being one of the teams that has protective netting). This was in response to a young girl being hospitalized after being hit by a foul ball Wednesday at Yankee Stadium.

None of this is excessive. It is right, and it is just, and if teams aren’t willing to act themselves, it is Manfred’s duty to make them. There’s a sense that it’s going to take something worse than what happened Wednesday to force change – the death of a child. Only that happened already. In 1970, a 14-year-old boy named Alan Fish went to a Dodgers game and was hit in the head by a line drive into the stands. He died four days later.

Fangraph's Travis Sawchik has an idea to improve the Wild-Card round:

But what if I told you there was a way to give the No. 1 Wild Card a much greater advantage while keeping the Wild Card round to one day? Would you be interested? I thought so.

The solution already exists in the real world, in practice, in the Korea Baseball Organization. In South Korea, the Wild Card round is a best-of-two affair. The lower seed, the road team in both potential games, must beat the No. 1 seed twice. The top seed must win just once to advance.

With natural tragedy and rebuilding continuing to dominate the news, how about something positive? I don’t really care for the NFL, but with week 3 coming up, it’s time to look back at the most significant week 3 game I can remember in my lifetime. In 2006, the Saints returned home post-Katrina in one of the best NFL stories ever. With last year being the 10th anniversary, both SBNation and ESPN took a look back at the emotionally charged game. NFL Films also did a segment on it.

Max tucked an article about the Toys R Us bankruptcy into Wednesday’s Rumblings but I wanted to throw out a couple of others. The first, here, talked some about the history of the company. There was a lot of talk about the leveraged buyout (probably) and bad management (likely) causing them problems. Also, there’s a lot of talk about the inevitability of the web eating away at retail. Humorously, there was this article from 2004 about them considering getting out of the toy business back then.

Unfortunately, what I couldn't find was a good nostalgia article about going to an old Toys R Us with the really tall aisles of endless toys that just looked like they went on forever. At least that’s what it seemed like to children of that era. With retail theory evolving somewhere in the 90s, they got rid of that and their unique awe-inspiring experience was lost. FYI: I don’t think that’s what killed off TRU, but it was one of their unique calling cards.

Speaking of nostalgia, we were talking Reboot last Friday. As it was one of my favorite shows from the 90s I did some more reading and ran across a couple of fun panel interview “articles”. The first was a legit article with a lot of behind the scenes stories from Gavin Blair and Dan DiDio. The second was more informal: someone’s Reddit post with more convention stories from Gavin Blair.

I’m sure the award-winning Kansas City Star is proud of this article about a malicious marathoner in Colorado. It uses more poop puns than the average grade-schooler.

Music time: Last week, I threw out there the idea that One Winged Angel may be the most famous song by the most famous video game composer of all time. How about “the most famous video game song of all time”? I’ll nominate a Russian folk song: Korobeiniki. Better known to US video game fans as Tetris music “A-Type” in the Game Boy version of the game.

Tetris lays claim to the record of “best-selling game of all time” with 170 million copies sold. Only three games have even ¹⁄₄ of Tetris’s total sales: Minecraft (122M), Wii Sports (82M), and Grand Theft Auto (80M). The Gameboy version sold over 35M copies by itself. If no other versions of Tetris existed, it would be the 6th best selling game of all time, after the aforementioned three, NES's Super Mario Bros (40M), and Mario Kart Wii (37M). Of course, looking back, the game has a pivotal role in video game history, helping launch nearly three decades of Nintendo handheld dominance. Publishing a Soviet game and the circumstances around the rights were about as confusing as you'd expect them to be.

Different versions of the game have different songs. Per Wikipedia, for the Game Boy version: "'Type A' is based on the Russian folk song Korobeiniki (also known as Korobushka), and 'Type C' is an arranged version of French Suite No. 3 in B minor, BWV 814: Menuet (transposed to F# minor) by Johann Sebastian Bach." "Type B" was composed by longtime Nintendo composer Hip Tanaka. Among music on the the NES version are a midi version of Tchaikovsky's "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" (aka "That song you know from 'The Nutcracker') and the Toreador song from Bizet's Carmen (also in Punch Out). The Tengen version has additional Russian songs like the popular folk song Kalinka (found in NHL arenas near you). Russian folk songs? Bach? Opera? Ballet? Who says there's no culture in video games?

We'll rock out to the Ol' Grey Brick today. This video includes both the aforementioned Type A (Korobeiniki) and Type B music: