Royals Rumblings - News for May 17, 2019

After Nicky Lopez was called up, Clint Scoles at Royals Academy asks “Who’s Next?” YOU WON’T BELIEVE #4! Actually, yeah, you totally will.

4. Bubba Starling – Fans will undoubtedly think this spot is two positions too low but they aren’t really watching Starling game to game. The centerfielder/corner outfielder has started out of the gate very well this season as one can see with his .333/.371/.438 slash line. That batting average is solid as is the OBP but that slug number is representative of his .105 ISO rate. In game action, I don’t see much carry in either his line drives (just 14.1%) or his flyball contact. Still, he’s making more contact (19.8%), running more on the bases (6 steals in 30 games) and playing solid if unspectacular defense. If Brett Phillips continues to struggle with the bat and the Royals needed a centerfielder without exposing Whit’s legs every day to the position then Bubba could get the call.

Sam McDowell with a nice piece about the Royals father’s trip? I didn’t know this was a thing but it’s pretty cool.

The Royals began the tradition in 2013, modeled after the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team. A team fathers’ trip is a common occurrence in the NHL. It’s an abnormality in baseball... The Royals have scheduled daily functions for the fathers and sons during the trip. Some dads will tag along in Los Angeles, others in St. Louis and many for the duration of the weeklong trip.

CBS’s Mike Axisa takes a look at Hunter Dozier’s great start to the season:

That’s a lot of words and tables and numbers to say Dozier has an elite chase rate, an elite contact rate on pitches in the strike zone, and elite exit velocity. That is an excellent combination. That’s how you put up a .318/.413/.621 batting line despite playing your home games in spacious Kauffman Stadium. The process behind Dozier’s results has been sound.

Over at Beyond the Boxscore, ANOTHER FINE SBNATION BLOG, Daniel R. Epstein looks at Terrance Gore and his propensity to be caught stealing this year. He had me with this intro:

I bought a Compaq Presario with my bar mitzvah money, complete with Windows 95, which became my life coach and spiritual adviser. The state-of-the-art machine included pre-installed AOL for internet browsing with our dial-up modem, a spacious 500 MB hard drive, and most importantly, customizable screensaver options. Instead of trippy, colorful lines and shapes that would portend the original Devil Rays logo...

One “Alex Duvall”, if that is his real name, writes about “The Rise of Gabriel Cancel” for Royals Farm Report.

Gabriel Cancel has been one of my favorite fringe prospects for a few seasons now. It all started, for me, when he hit a booming home run while playing for the Lexington Legends back in 2017. Cancel was a blossoming prospect in 2017, coming off of a rather impressive year in 2016 with the Burlington Royals (rookie).

Anyone know who Field Level Media is? Both Yahoo and MSN linked to this story from them entitled “Royals face Angels, still trying to follow Yost’s plan”

“Everybody has to have a goal, and everybody has to have a team goal to shoot for,” Yost told reporters. “... So if we get to four games over for the month of May, four games over in June and four over in July, we’re back to .500 in August. It’s not inconceivable. A lot of good things have to happen, like we have to stop walking guys.”

Fortunately, we had a lot of feature-level stories as we had nothing from the Fansided network yesterday.

But we do have a listicle:

The CBS Sports staff hands out quarter-mark MLB grades:

Royals

GRADE: C-

This Kansas City team was expected to be bad, and, yes, they are indeed bad. Based on runs scored and runs allowed, the Royals should be a bit better than their current record, but the reality is that they’re on pace for a franchise-record 107 losses. -- Dayn Perry

Random stuff around baseball?

The last time Christian Yelich struck out looking twice in a game before Wednesday? It was September 2017. The last time a Royal did it? Yesterday, Alex Gordon. Before that, it might have been Toronto, 2009.

A Brooklyn city councilman is fed up with squishy rain delay rules:

The first is to require all Major League Baseball games to start within an hour of the scheduled first pitch. If weather forces a postponement lasting longer than one hour, he wrote, umpires should instead call the game and “prevent loyal fans from lingering endlessly.”

The second suggestion is that if a delay lasts a certain amount of time, fans are entitled to a “rain check,” essentially a free ticket for a future game. Currently, the Yankees don’t offer anything for rainouts, while the Mets do, with some conditions.

The Inaugural HBCU World Series starts next week

African-American players comprised not even 8 percent of MLB’s opening day rosters this year. College participation is closer to 5 percent and black participation rates in the two HBCU conferences have fallen below 50 percent, per Baseball America. Participation at the youth level is also down. The announcement of an inaugural Historically Black College and University World Series, set for May 24, is a step to try to change those numbers.

Out of ideas and time for some real creativity on today’s song of the day so we’re revisiting Animal Crossing. I like this song when I get to work in the morning as this upbeat tune makes me feel like I should accomplish something to start the day (spoiler: it doesn’t always happen).