Royals Rumblings - News for April 17, 2020

First off,

You know I’m a sucker for stories about the Royals from non-standard outlets. Today’s is from the Daily American, a small town paper in Pennsylvania. In the paper, Brad Rosemas, profiles Wade Fyock, a local prospect who was drafted by the Royals back in 1990 in the 6th round:

“At that point, Bob Mayer was the high school coach, and he gave me a lot of advice,” Fyock said. “He told me the best way to develop yourself is playing pro ball. I actually went a little lower in the draft than we expected, but after we looked at what the Royals could do, I went with them.”

Mike Axisa at CBS Sports does a mock draft. You won’t believe who the Royals pick at #4!!

Royals Pick: RHP Emerson Hancock, Georgia ($6,664,000 slot value)

The Royals would probably love Martin or Torkelson to make it to this spot, but that didn’t happen in our mock draft, so Hancock is the selection. Hancock had a chance to pitch his way into consideration for the No. 1 pick before the shutdown and he has the highest upside of any pitcher in the draft class. A poor 2020 debut (six runs in four innings) hasn’t scared teams away. It was just a bad night.

Hancock struck out 34 and walked three in 24 innings prior to the shutdown and he takes three swing-and-miss pitches (fastball, curveball, slider) to the mound on his best days, plus a good fourth pitch (changeup) and control. Kansas City had 13 first-round picks from 2012-19 and used 10 on pitchers. The Royals emphasize arms early in the draft and Hancock would fit with the trend.

And, uh, that’s it for the non-blog entries.

Fortunately, they’re still doing a lot of good work!

Kevin O’Brien continues his good work at Royals Reporter:

• Four reasons why the Royals should move Kennedy back to the rotation in 2020
• Three Takeaways from the Forbes Team Valuation of the Royals
• Who would ‘win’ and ‘lose’ if the Royals play in Arizona in 2020?

Kings of Kaufman adds more entries to their “Projecting KC Royals Prospects” series:

• Jordan Foote: #1 Bobby Witt Jr.
• Shawn Bauman: #5 Erick Pena
• Jordan Foote: #8 Khalil Lee
• Jordan Foote: #11 Austin Cox
• David Scharff: #20 Yefri Del Rosario

At Royals Blue, Connor Miller asks a pair of questions about relievers:

• Should the Royals Extend Ian Kennedy?
• Did the Royals Strike Gold with the Trevor Rosenthal Signing?

Finally, Darin Watson of UL’s Toothpick continues his stroll through 1980.

Unfortunately, today’s “We need a better title than ‘Stuff about today from Wikipedia” is being abbreviated due to work. But we can still get in some baseball birthday notes.

Hall of Famer Cap Anson was born on this date in 1852. The next highest pair in terms of bWAR were also from the 19th century: Jake Caubert (1884) and Charlie Ferguson (1863). Ferguson only played 4 years but accumulated 31.6 WAR! He threw an astounding 416.2 IP in 1884 and didn’t even lead the league. He was only 6th! Hall of Famer Old Hoss Radbourn led the league with 678.2 IP and had an ERA of 1.38! He pitched in 75 games, throwing 73 complete games and finishing 2 others. The only former Royal born on this date was Dennis Paepke.

Not a lot of other stuff today, either. But here’s a couple of interesting Kansas City stories at The Athletic (sub not required for the first):

Jorge Castillo of the LA Times has an interesting article about baseball in Taiwan. It has some interesting pictures like the cardboard cutouts of fans in the empty stadium:

The CPBL regular season was slated to start March 11. It was initially delayed to March 28, then rescheduled for April 11. Rain pushed opening day back another day. The all-star game was canceled, but the league hopes to hold 240 total games through mid-October. Fans are at least temporarily barred, but one club, the Rakuten Monkeys, has placed robots in the stands to cheer them on at home. The league is eyeing allowing 150 fans per game in two months.

For today’s song of the day, we’re going to revisit Monster Hunter 4 with the Tigrex theme