Welcome new writer Michael Augustine

The departure of Josh Duggan will be a huge blow to Royals Review, and no one can replace the wit and lexicon of the Nicholas Cage-ophile. But like the Royals, we will roll with young new talent.

That’s why I’m pleased to introduce Michael Augustine to our writing staff. Michael is a pretty experienced writer who has contributed to the community section at Fangraphs. He garnered a lot of attention for this excellent article on Brad Keller recently, enough so that he was invited to appear on The Program with Soren Petro on 810 WHB. Michael seems to really know his stuff when it comes to analytics and mechanics, and if you love baseball GIFs, he can bring it. I’ll let him talk more about his background:

Baseball has been the one constant in my life so it was only fitting that I got involved with writing about it. I all started back in 2011 when I got a writing gig for Bronx Baseball Daily, a subsidiary of ESPN’s Sweet Spot Network. I then moved over at Rant Sports writing about the St. Louis Cardinals about a year later. I eventually started my own site, Behind in the Count, and ran that for another year or so before I went on a short hiatus. Last year, my fiance suggested I get back into writing. On a whim, I applied to fill an open Fangraphs position and my application/cover letter was apparently interesting enough to warrant a reply from the (then) former editor-in-chief, Dave Cameron, who is now a part of the San Diego Padres player development team. His words encouraged me to dive right back in and I owe a lot to him for his inspiring reply.

I decided to start up another blog, The Junkball Daily, which got the attention of Nick Pollack (site owner) and Alex Fast of Pitcher List. I joined the team about a year ago and was recently promoted to manager of the Going Deep section. It was also during this time period that I started getting into Pitching Ninja’s work and thought I could do the same kind of thing. I then took the time to teach myself how to create gifs, overlays, and various other types of effects in just a few weeks. I started a gfycat page and have accumulated almost six million views since late June 2018.

As for my personal life, I’m a system administrator for a suburban St. Louis, MO high school since 2011. My all-time favorite player is Don Mattingly, my current favorite player is probably J.T. Realmuto. I’m a pitching fiend and right now Blake Snell gives me the most enjoyment to watch. My favorite baseball memory was watching the 1996 New York Yankees win the World Series as I endured the mediocre to downright awful teams of the late 80s-early 90s. Being from NY, I grew up a Yankees fan but nowadays I consider myself a general baseball fan.

I look forward to writing (and learning) more about about the Royals this year and to help the fans get and, hopefully, stay positive as the season unfolds.

A Yankees fan as a kid? Well we all make mistakes in our youth. But I look forward to the analysis and gifs Michael has to offer. You can follow him on Twitter at @AugustineMLB. We will likely be adding additional writers in the next week or two, so if you’re interested, click here for more info and get your submission in to me by this weekend.

In the meantime, please join me in welcoming Michael to the site!