Royals Rumblings - News for October 26, 2018

We’re still in that postseason time when there’s not a lot of baseball offseason news yet.

Fortunately, old friend Craig Brown has a good article over at BPKC about Ned Yost trends during his career on “manager things” (my quote not his) like sacrifice bunts, steals, pinch runners, and intentional walks.

Baseball Reference unveiled a neat addition to their managerial stat pages with what they call managerial tendencies. The tendencies break down how often a manager calls for steals, intentional walks and substitutions. It also measures successful sacrifice bunt attempts. It breaks those numbers down into what they call Rate+, which is a metric that determines a percentage of where on the spectrum (above or below league average) a manager falls. Ned Yost’s manager page doesn’t show much evolution. Rather, it’s a detailed look at how a manager bends to the personnel available.

For your Fansided link today, KOK’s Tyler Dierking asserts “What you see should be what you get”:

Therefore, the Royals should roll into 2019 the way they ended 2018. It may not be pretty, but it will be more entertaining to watch younger future players than veterans who are at the end of their careers.

Some ex-Royals made the news.

Mike Axisa of CBS Sports did the “How they were built” story about the Dodgers. A number of Royals notes there.

• There’s a mention of Clayton Kershaw getting drafted in 2006 at #7 after one Luke “Aplakia” Hochevar
• The Scott Alexander trade makes an appearance.
• Ryan Madson is there, too...

...which brings us to Jay Jaffe’s Fangraphs headline of “A Madson Moment Turns World Series, Again”

Wobbly Dodgers starter pitches his way into a jam. Red Sox lineup turns over to the third time through the order. Manager Dave Roberts summons reliever Ryan Madson. All runners score, Red Sox take the lead for good. You could be forgiven for feeling a sense of déjà vu regarding the basic template of the first two games of the 2018 World Series.

The Tigers cut Louis Coleman, who is now 32.

By this time next week the 2018 World Series will be over. This is out final opportunity this year to do a playoff game thread at The Best of Royals Review.

Last year, I went pretty overboard with World Series games, using 2014 Game 7 and 2015 Games 1 and 5. These are easily the most notable of the Royals World Series games (since RR has existed). I was thinking about the other two games won in 2015. However, I decided that 2014 Game 6 is even more notable. In a lot of ways, it was the zenith for the 2014 Royals (unless you consider the 3rd inning of Game 4).

It’s also sentimentally important as, for a lot of Royals fans, it’s the enduring image of Yordano Ventura.

2014 World Series Game 6

Unfortunately, my internet is not working tonight so I’m tethering off my phone. That means the bandwidth costs money so we’re going with something old. Ok, so I was already going to do this game but go with me for a bit here. Earlier this week, my wife was playing the venerable Minesweeper and it got me thinking about other old Windows games. Today’s game is a little off the beaten path, but we’re going with Ski Free.

From wiki: “Microsoft Entertainment Pack was designed by the company’s ‘Entry Business’ team, whose job was to make Windows more appealing to homes and small businesses. Ex-Microsoft product manager Bruce Ryan said the company did this because it ‘was concerned that the operating system’s high hardware requirements meant that people would only see it as a tool for large enterprises”. The project had “almost no budget’, and no major video game publishers got involved because they doubted Windows’ legitimacy as a gaming platform; therefore Ryan compiled a series of games that Windows employees had been working on in their spare time.” A number of these would go on to be bundled in future Windows versions like the aforementioned Minesweeper. I believe I first ran across them in the “Best of Microsoft Entertainment Pack” which even got a port to Game Boy Color.

SkiFree was originally in Microsoft Entertainment Pack 3 and, to this day, boasts the Geocities-styled ”The Most Officialest SkiFree Home Page!” This page is “maintained” by Chris Pirih, the creator of SkiFree. There you can even download a copy that plays on Windows 10. He talks about the history of the game and links to fun things like fan emails, a fan version on the TI-92 calculator, and a fan fiction site.

Here’s a nice little video about the history of Ski Free, which I think used pretty much the same sources I did (wiki and the homepage):