Royals Rumblings - News for March 9, 2018

NOTE: Obviously this was written before yesterday’s big news about Moose

It’s never too early for a mock draft! Royals Farm Report mocked the top 42 for the upcoming draft which, coincidentally, includes the Royals top 4 picks. Here are a couple of the takeaways:

Drake selected Alec Bohm, RHP Tristan Beck, OF Trevor Larnach, and RHP Luke Bartniki for the Royals. You’ll want to read about them in Drake’s analysis of each player next week.

I would consider a lot of the players taken after the Royals first pick at 18 to be better prospects than some of KC’s options at 14 last year. This draft is incredibly deep, and I think the Royals picked a great year to have 4 of the first 39 picks.

I’m fortunate to have each new installment of Darin Watsons’s “50 Greatest Moments in Royals History” drop every Thursday so I can link to it on Fridays. This week’s #30-21 includes a number of playoff moments from different decades for the franchise.

CBSSports’s Matt Snyder looks at Vegas’s win totals and picks five overs and five unders on the season. Guess which side the Royals are on!

Last week, I linked to a KC Kingdom story by Leigh Oleszczak entitled “Signing Lucas Duda puzzling move for rebuilding Royals”. She is confused by the Jon Jay signing as well.

Royals Blue is back after a period of dormancy with two new stories:

• First, they look at who will play first (see what I did there?) for the Royals this season.
• Then they release (an update to) their Royals All-Time Roster.

Usually I reserve this space for Royals-only stories but we’ll just pretend Aaron Judge is a future Royal. National writers are already bending over backwards to excuse why we won’t see him in another Home Run Derby. After all, it’s what’s best for Judge, the Yankees, and, I’m sure, by extension, baseball.

Continuing Fanpost Month at The Best of Royals Review, we present Scott McKinney’s Dayton Moore Blames Parking Lot for Poor Hitting.

Yes, the sounds-like-an-onion-article thing is a little bit played out. But this one works beautifully, especially, since the story it was parodying was so absurd to begin with. Part of the below quote is from Moore while part is facetiously attributed to him. It can be difficult to see where the reporting ends and the satire begins:

“We have the largest parking lot in terms of square footage of any ballpark in baseball. All of that black asphalt and the hot, beating Missouri sun gives rise to a lot of heat. And that heat rises. The whole complex is a massive hot air column. And that hot air shooting up lifts balls when they come off the bat. But it doesn’t help the balls carry. It lifts them straight up . It turns line drives into routine flyballs. It turns hard hit flyballs into infield popups. When pitchers come here, they have the mindset to use that heat and rising air. They throw strikes and attack the zone to put balls in play. There isn’t the same fear factor of getting beat deep that you might have elsewhere. I think that plays a huge factor in that walk statistic.”

Here in Texas, Tuesday was Election Day and we apparently have the first primary in the country. We’ve already degenerated into this sissy slap fight: Rafael (Ted) Cruz justifies mocking Robert (Beto) O’Rourke’s name.

I’m not trying to spoil the fun for those of you who love digging in deep about that local county clerk candidate who you can’t even find a Facebook or Google mention of. But for the rest of us, here are a handful of resources:

The best I found was, naturally, from the League of Women Voters. Their “on your ballot” tool has some good basic questionnaires. It also has a host of other information like links to poll locators and government sites for absentee voting, early voting, candidate filings, campaign finance, and more.

Ballotpedia has information about the races but not much about the candidates. However, it typically has links to the candidates’ webpage, Facebook page, etc. so you can dig in deeper on candidates and see what they claim to stand for.

Local newspapers vary in quality, of course. For instance, the Houston Chronicle’s website contains more stupid listicles than Buzzfeed rather than, you know, acting as the most important news source in one of the largest cities in the country. But many contain endorsements and other useful voter information. E The People links to a number of these on their front page.

Finally, there are a number of obscure resources that vary greatly based on locality. For instance, Texas’s Bar Association has a webpage where you can see if any lawyers running for judge (or any lawyers) have faced public disciplinary hearings.

SoulCalibur is one of the best games of all time. It was the second game of all time to get a 40/40 from Famitsu and got 5/5 or 10/10 from a number of prominent gaming sites including IGN and GameSpot. We will talk about that game another week, but today we’re going to look at its predecessor: Soul Edge (or Soul Blade).

This is a bit of a personal favorite of mine as I was never good at 2D fighting games, combo-based or button-mashing. But, spatially challenged as I am, the 3D plane from the Namco fighting series was something I turned out to be pretty good at. The game was also eminently approachable due to its arcade roots. Whereas 1994’s Killer Instinct relied upon players memorizing long complicated strings of moves to cobble together long combos, 1995’s Soul Edge allowed you to map more complicated moves directly to a single button and execute them quickly.

I always had a soft spot for the Soul series as I thought it was a bit more more balanced and unique than Tekken, Namco’s other hugely popular fighting series. There was a good balance between speed, power, and weapon distance and the characters were well spread out across the continuum. For instance, Taki was extremely fast but with limited weapon power and no distance while, say, Siegfried had good range and decent power but was slow. Sophitia fought very defensively with a shield and Voldo’s fighting style is wholly unique. While the original was a bit flawed with only 10 characters and some gameplay limitations, it was quite influential in the direction of future fighting games.

The reason I went with Soul Blade today over it’s critically acclaimed successor is not only because it was first chronologically but also because I think it has a better soundtrack. The video below contains the entire soundtrack and I queued it up to Mitsurugi’s theme The Wind and Cloud: