Royals Rumblings - News for August 15, 2018

Royals Rumblings - News for August 15, 2018

In his Mellinger Minutes, Sam doesn’t see how the Royals will be contenders by 2020 as David Glass expects.

Maybe that’s how it can go again. Maybe by 2020 we’ll be talking about Adalberto Mondesi hitting in the middle of the order, and Khalil Lee turning into a productive big leaguer, and Brady Singer taking his turn in the rotation, and so on.

If that’s the standard, I think it’s realistic.

But otherwise, this is something baseball people say to give themselves hope, to talk fans out of tuning out.

Set the over-under on losses for the 2020 Royals at 91 and I will enthusiastically take the over.

Ryan O’Hearn knows that to stay in the big leagues, he has to hit the ball hard.

But internal metrics had done the heavy lifting, highlighting O’Hearn’s stroke as one of the hardest in Class AAA in terms of exit velocity. He immediately made the Royals look good when he launched White Sox starter James Shields’ hung curveball over the right-field fence for his first career hit in his second at-bat of a 4-2 win....

“(Opposite-field power is) something that’s kind of gotten me here,” O’Hearn said. “I’d like to think I can pull a ball, hit it to center and go anywhere. That’s definitely something that’s been one of my strengths.”

Adalberto Mondesi is very fast.

Yost also added that Jorge Lopez, acquired in the Mike Moustakas trade, will be called up to start tonight instead of Burch Smith.

Craig Brown questions how Danny Duffy was handled before suffering a shoulder injury.

His downfall just happens to coincide with a recently elevated pitch count. Duffy has thrown 110 or more pitches in a start 13 times in his career. The most pitches he’s thrown in a start since returning from Tommy John surgery is 114. He matched that number in back to back starts in the middle of last month.

What you have is a pitcher who threw an unusually high (for him) number of pitches in back to back starts on normal rest. The very next start, if we are to believe Yost, Duffy started to battle through his shoulder issues. Is there something to this? It’s worth investigating.

Marcus Meade at Royals Farm Report sees progress in Seuly Matias.

When I watched Matias swing in the first half of 2018, it looked like he had a grooved swing, like he was unable or unwilling to adjust his swing to simply make contact and avoid a strikeout. His grooved swing was made to hit home runs or miss completely. Consequently, he couldn’t hit balls that weren’t in his wheel house. He also hit very few singles. From the beginning of the season until July 11, just 19 of his 56 hits were singles. Since then, he has 17 hits and 10 of them are singles. How is that happening? Because he’s making contact with balls on the edges or just outside strike zone that he was missing completely. His swing has more flexibility to it.

Prospect Kyle Isbel has been hot for the Royals down in Lexington.

Clubhouse Conversation talks to Royals minor league pitcher Carlos Hernandez.

The Pirates send 2017 first-round pick Shane Baz to the Rays to complete the Chris Archer deal.

Outfielder Leonys Martin is hospitalized with a life-threatening bacterial infection.

The case for and against calling up Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. to the majors.

Why the dropped third strike rule is the worst in sports.

The minor league strike zone is different than the big league zone.

Inside Derek Jeter’s plan to rebuild the Marlins.

How baseball created Robinson Cano’s impossible contract.

Bud Light is putting free beer all over Cleveland for when the Browns win a game.

Is the real future of football as an esport?

Walmart wants in on the media streaming business, but is it too little, too late?

Youtube is adding fact-checkin links from Wikipedia to some videos that inspire conspiracy theories.

Grading this summer’s box office winners and losers.

Your song of the day is The Knocks (featuring Foster the People) with Ride or Die.