Royals Rumblings - News for June 15, 2018

Thanks to Rumblings the last couple of days, I get my pick of Royals news for today. So, of course, we’ll be talking about Kingdom Hear— (or, alternatively: “You could pick whatever you want and we got this slop?”)

Both the KCStar’s Sam McDowell and MLB.com’s Jeffrey Flanagan were present Wednesday to hear Ned Yost talked about expanding replay:

“There’s a lot of them that I think should be added to the list — interference, obstruction, infield fly rule, trap plays in the infield, fair or foul in the infield, foul tip, batter’s interference, batted ball hitting a runner, runner out of the basepath, 45-foot lane violation. All those things,” Yost said. “There’s no reason why they couldn’t. I think we got the technology to be able to review those things.”

Also in the Star, Pete Grathoff with a pair of lighter stories:

• ’Mike Moustakas hates puppies.’ Indians make parody video for All-Star Game voting
• Relievers for Royals’ Class AAA affiliate show off funny dance moves in bullpen

Clint Scoles at BPKC continues his Royals draft recaps with rounds 21-30 and rounds 31-40.

It’s obvious this Royals draft is quite different from drafts in the past as they loaded up with college pitching at the front of the draft. They are telling us that wasn’t the plan but if you watch as many Royals minor league games as I do then you already know how poor the pitching is in the system, especially starting pitching. There had to be some draft for need combined with the way the board laid out to take this many pitchers overall. The best case scenario a couple of these guys blaze through the minors and join *Jake Junis and Brad Keller along with a few of the position players that are there or close to stagger out wins in preparation for the Low-A crew that hopes to be there later.

Colby Wilson, BPKC, examines why Royals pitchers can’t strike anyone out.

The narrative here is that the Royals don’t strike anybody out, really. They also don’t walk anybody, but fortunately they’re holding their own in the three true outcomes sense by allowing a league-high 97 home runs. In an era defined by three true outcomes, the Royals are only really accomplishing the one that hurts them the most.

Next up is your daily Royals from The Athletic? Yes, I get that it’s paid and it seems like we link to a lot of their stories, but it’s with good reason: they have some of the best Royals stories out there. They basically are on par with the KC Star for the best Royals content out there from paid reporters (as opposed to blogs out there like RR and BPKC who can do good analysis but don’t have boots on the ground every day covering the team) and have some of the biggest names like Rustin Dodd, Rany Jazayerli, and Jayson Stark. So, yes, not everyone has a subscription but I feel obligated to link to the stories because they fit in Rumblings. That said, if you don’t have a subscription, I try to make that easy, too - I just post their stuff in tweet form, which I do with hardly any others, so it’s easy to scroll past.

Joel Wagler at KC Kingdom talks about the power from Seuly Matias and links to Patrick Brennan’s story about him.

KOK’s Tyler Dierking looks at what to do when Lucas Duda comes back from injury.

He also thinks the “The future seems bright with starting pitchers”. Color me a little skeptical.

Last, but not least, a pile of stories from Royals Farm Report:

• Marcus Meade notes that the walk rates down on the farm are looking up.
• Alex Duvall compares the best Royals prospects in the system to the bottom of MLB.com’s top 100.
• Wilmington (4) and NW Arkansas (7) have announced their All-Star selections.

For the national stories:

The Royals land exactly 0 players on “The top 50 players in MLB right now” from Dayn Perry of CBS Sports.

MLB.com’s Scott Merkin writes about Danny Duffy as a Royals player making a comeback:

Royals: Danny Duffy

On May 19, after getting rocked for seven hits and five runs through four innings, Duffy watched his ERA balloon to 6.88 -- the worst in the Major Leagues among qualified starters.

Presumably the ace of the staff, Duffy was frustrated and out of answers. But Duffy finally may have found the solution that will turn his season around -- commitment to his fastball. Duffy’s usage of his four-seamer had dipped below 40 percent this season (in 2012, by contrast, he used the four-seamer 65 percent of the time).

In his past four starts, Duffy has gone back to using the four-seamer nearly 50 percent of the time, and combined with his two-seamer, opponents were seeing hard stuff well over 60 percent of the time. And the results have been encouraging. In those four starts, Duffy posted a 2.10 ERA, with opponents hitting .202 against him. In his most recent outing Saturday against Oakland, Duffy threw seven shutout innings and struck out a season-high 10.

Now it’s time for your regularly scheduled video game song of the day (as opposed to Hokius hacked Wednesdays). I’m not sure how much of an introduction I need to give this game or what little nuggets I can add that haven’t already been explored. How about this? I didn’t like this list, but I loved this description (well, aside from the fact that it makes me feel old): “The holy grail of sports video gaming according to your dad and his friends mom doesn’t like”. Yes, we’re talking Tecmo (Super) Bowl.

If you’re somehow unfamiliar with the game, it’s from the 8-bit and 16-bit era and, while not necessarily realistic, exudes arcade fun. We can talk about how “Eric Dickerson and Bobby Hebert do not appear in Tecmo Super Bowl because of contract disputes” (like Jordan and others in last week’s game, NBA Jam). Or how it’s one of the most beloved games to all time with tournaments still being played 30 years after its release. Or I could bore you talking about the time I played a season controlling 5 different teams.*

But, really, let’s just watch the unstoppable Bo Jackson in the original Tecmo Bowl:.

*If you’re curious about the “how” question: I played all 16 games as the Oilers but when 2 of my other teams played, I let the computer sim them or play as whichever team had some crazy stat I was working on.