With it being part of the Thanksgiving holiday, it’s a bit of a light Friday today. Not a lot of Royals news yesterday.
Drew Osborne at Royals Farm Report uses Thanksgiving to do a “Prospects We’re Thankful For” blurb:
Last Thanksgiving we started doing a post on prospects we’re thankful for. This year I’m thankful for Kyle Isbel. Isbel was the Royals third round pick in the 2018 draft and first position player selected by the Royals. Isbel is a true CF prospect. He has the speed, pop, and even though he hasn’t been an outfielder for very long he has the defensive combination that the Royals really value.
Nothing at The Athletic for over a week now. Offseason dormancy, I guess.
The usually reliable BPKC didn’t have anything new up, as of 1:30 yesterday (hint: this may be when Rumblings were written). Everybody gets a day off at some point.
Over at KOK, Tyler Dierking did a mailbag post:
On Twitter, Kings of Kauffman asked a simple question. What potential questions about prospects, season predictions, Winter Meeting moves, offseason signings and more do you have about your Kansas City Royals? Some questions were answered on Twitter, while others were saved for this article.
Craig Edwards at Fangraphs dug into some financial postings about the Braves:
Major league baseball teams closely guard their financial information. They have no problem talking about how much money players make, but they prefer to be more circumspect when disclosing the revenue teams take in or the scale of the profits owners make after those players have been paid and expenses accounted for. Because baseball’s ownership is a fairly insular group composed mostly of individuals and privately held businesses– and because there relatively few franchise sales to use as gauge–teams have been largely successful in preventing their financial information from going public. The Atlanta Braves present an exception.
So, not a lot of new content. But you know what we had a lot of? Listicles!
CBS’s Mike Axisa gave us “One reason for every MLB team to be thankful this year”:
Royals: Adalberto Mondesi’s breakout
Back in 2015 young Adalberto Mondesi became the first player in modern baseball history to make his MLB debut in the World Series. Now, in 2018, the still-only-23-year-old Mondesi enjoyed a breakout season with the Royals, one that cemented him as the shortstop of the present and future. Mondesi swatted 14 homers, stole 32 bases and played strong enough defense to post 3.2 WAR in only 75 games. The Royals are still very early in their rebuild. At least now they have a centerpiece to build around.
MLB.com’s Richard Justice listed “A player to be thankful for on each team”:
Royals: Salvador Perez led the wave of touted prospects that arrived in 2011 and eventually helped the Royals to reach the World Series in consecutive seasons (2014-15). He’s still around, beloved by fans and teammates alike, hopeful of leading the Royals back into contention.
ESPN’s David Schoenfield named “The top offseason priority for all 30 MLB teams”:
Kansas City Royals: Power hitting, power pitching. As bad as the Royals were, at least there were a few bright spots: Adalberto Mondesi suddenly developed some power, slugging .498; Jorge Soler came back from a lost 2017 and hit .265/.354/.466 in 61 games before going down for the season in June; Ryan O’Hearn came out of nowhere to slug .597 in 44 games; Jakob Junis and Brad Keller flashed some ability in the rotation. Still, the Royals were 13th in the AL in home runs and next to last in pitching strikeouts.
Targets: They should look to trade Whit Merrifield for some pitching prospect with upside, but Dayton Moore has said Merrifield is not on the table. They could bring back Mike Moustakas, who is looking at a similar free-agency situation to last year, when he had to scramble back to the Royals after going unwanted. The bullpen was terrible, so they could look to sign a couple relievers and then deal them in July.
As for the Friday features, The Best of Royals Review is on hiatus for the holiday week and the Song of the Day is going to be a new song from an old game. Today’s song of the day is going back to the Monster Hunter soundtracks with Thousand Blade Wyvern (it’s the theme for Seregios):