Royals Rumblings - News for January 19, 2018

Not a lot on the Royals front again today. We’ve reach the doldrums of a slow offseason.

BPKC’s Clint Scoles takes a look at the Omaha pitching situation for the upcoming season:

The Royals’ roster additions this offseason have led them to an interesting place with a potentially interesting Omaha pitching staff as they suddenly have a flood of fringe options at the upper levels. Should the Royals decide to keep both Rule 5 picks, Burch Smith and Brad Keller, on the 25 man roster along with Nate Karns being ready or nearly ready for the opening day spot, then the roster in Omaha will feature multiple pitchers refining their stuff while knocking on the major league door.

KOK’s Nathan Williams “Re-examine(s) the Lorenzo Cain market”.

KC Kingdom’s Leigh Oleszczak looks forward to Raul Mondesi’s 2018.

Continuing the Month of Will, this might be my favorite Freneau article: Nick Van Stratten and the Fact of Failure.

It’s personal but universal. It evokes raw emotions but isn’t emotional. It’s in Will’s voice but not egotistical. It’s partially autobiographical but parallels a baseball backdrop.

However, because of survivor’s bias, no one is writing a glowing biography of the guy who kept submitting his screenplay for 20 years and was never even listened to by a single agent. No one at CNBC is arranging an interview with that woman from your church group who started a coffee shop three years ago and lost her life savings. There’s no chapter about someone who ran away to Vail to be a ski instructor and ended up selling insurance in Pueblo three years and a divorce later.

FYI: Nick Van Stratten is still playing independent ball at age 32. In 2016, he was with the Wichita Wingnuts, who are managed by Pete Rose Jr. Who knew?

Wednesday, we talked a lot about the CBA and current MLB economic situation. CBS’s Mike Axisa cited the Jeff Passan’s story we talked about and outlined changes the MLBPA should be fighting for in the next labor agreement:

Quality young players are gold in today’s game. Teams are smart to build around them. It’s not a coincidence so many recent World Series champions were built around an excellent young core. And because young players are valued so highly, the MLBPA should work to make sure those young players are fairly compensated. That is the single best thing the union can do to fix the game’s broken salary structure.

Last week, I eschewed the normal OT Rumblings format for a number of links about world wars. This week, we’ll go back to the links that have been building up on my “to read” (or “already read”) pile:

In the New Yorker, a philosopher asks: “What If Parents Loved Strangers’ Children As Much As Their Own?”

Honestly, I don’t remember what we were talking about but a couple of weeks ago, I ended up on Gizmodo and stumbled across this article to help communicate about large numbers.

Google Maps has a huge knowledge gap over competitors and it’s only growing.

A hipster on Slate complains that critics are too nice in rewarding high scores because “It can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. is crap.” I would argue that, to some extent, the average critic is too hard to be entertained because they are only looking for something new or different rather than something done well (and they can easily be duped with a handful of genres of film or book all but guaranteed to be declared “good” while great examples of less critic-friendly genres are deemed unworthy simply by being about the wrong time and place).

I have to be honest. It’s been a pretty unpleasant week in our household with ice storms, throwing up toddlers, and no water due to a boil water order so I’m going to take a cheap way out this week on Song of the Day.

Matt had a fun OT writeup on Mario Kart Rainbow Roads yesterday and commented “The Mario Kart 8 soundtrack is one of the marvels of the modern age”. I started poking around with that soundtrack and came across this gem.

This is the music for Dolphin Shoals. The level starts out underwater and is nice and tame. But about halfway through, players burst out of the water and the music explodes into an amazing jazzy sax solo (or if you just prefer the solo):

I even ran across this video analyzing it from a “Music 101” perspective. Originally, I was just going to link to it, but it was good enough that I’ll embed it here: