Royals Rumblings - News for January 31, 2020

Jeffrey Flanagan has the annual “the truck is off to Spring Training” story!

Royals general manager Dayton Moore is so looking forward to the 2020 season, he said at last weekend’s FanFest, that he would be leaving for Spring Training two weeks earlier than he ever has. “We have a lot of players there already,” Moore said, “and I want to be there.” That means Moore will beat the Royals’ Spring Training trucks, which were loaded outside Kauffman Stadium on Thursday morning.

Pitching in the Royals farm system is in the best shape of its life (sub required):

And... that’s it from the “big name” outlets. I think everyone else is off covering the Chiefs. Those of us in the “blogosphere” continue to toil away, though.

Royals Blue has roared back to life with (*checks notes*) two stories this week.

They had my favorite story yesterday as Kellen Stevens ranked the 10 jerseys the Royals wore last year.

They were one of a number of outlets who looked at the return of fan favorite Greg Holland:

• Alex Burbidge wrote about it for Royals Blue.
• Kevin O’Brien covered it for The Royals Reporter.
• At Fansided, Travis Neely tackled it for KC Kingdom.
• While Mike Gillespie (*grabs Thesaurus*) detailed it for KOK.
• Of course, if you didn’t see it yesterday, Craig Brown wrote a nice, long RR article with the title: “Does Greg Holland have anything left?”

Rounding out the Fansided stories at KOK are the following trio:

• The aforementioned Gillespie asks “Does KC’s Whit Merrifield deserve more?”
• Michael Huckins does a season preview for Josh Staumont
• While David Scharff writes one for Jake Newberry

We’re finishing off Recap Month with a repeat offender. We at Best of Royals Review really prefer to share the plaudits but, dammit, Old Man Duggan was just so good at these. And it’s not even fair because I think half the time he was just crapping them out to make the deadline. Today, however, was an instance of his Royals frustration birthing a meme: Royals’ defense and Guthrie’s struggles give Tigers 9 - 5 win.

If you don’t recognize the title, you’ll know it as the “Guthrie is still pitching” recap. While later recaps would make this more of a joke, this one was art born of pure frustration:

It all comes back to the third inning, though. No one could do anything right. If ever there were a Royals’ inning that was a shitshow through and through, it was this one. Jason Grimsley, Ken Harvey, Terrence Long, Chip Ambres, and Yuniesky Betancourt may as well have been playing. Guthrie could only throw strikes if it meant grooving a pitch for the Tigers to line all over the park. Yost froze when he should have pulled his starter at least three runs earlier. Hosmer blew multiple plays. Escobar was anything but sure-handed.

Not a lot around MLB either, so we’re going to go the Twitter route and take the top 3 baseball-related ones I saw:

(Referring to this article)

I hate to leave you with a rerun but, since it’s a new year, I’m grabbing something off one of my favorite video game soundtracks: