Royals Rumblings - News for June 12, 2020

You’d think with the draft, we’d have more than enough stuff here today. However, we kindof have that covered here, here, here, here, here, and here. And pretty much every outlet knew that so there’s not a lot of non-draft related Royals stuff today.

Some good news!

Have Royals tickets for this year?

We keep getting more awesome Nick Heath news, this time from a non-standard Royals source: KSN in Wichita. I really hope he makes the show. In this particular instance of good news, he’s part of a minority scholarship for a youth baseball camp.

“I am beyond humbled someone would view me highly enough to name anything after me, even more so to put my name in a situation where I can team up with my former university and be able to help give kids who are minorities the opportunity to come out and pursue this game we all know and love.”

(There’s also an AP article at KSN about how they’re still planning on doing the Field of Dreams game, which, prior to the pandemic, I would have paid a lot of money to go to but now I just can’t see myself traveling to even if I got free tickets)

It’s kindof like a listicle: R.J. Anderson’s CBS Sports OOTP simulation has had the Royals flying high, exceeding expectations. They’re still doing well at 35-28 but have fallen into 4th place in the highly competitive AL Central. Wait- what??

We talked about the new Fansided layout a couple of Fridays ago. It looks like both Kings of Kauffman and KC Kingdom have a lot of draft coverage but I can’t link to those stories individually.

In a shocking upset, Royals Farm Report has nothing about the Royals draft... yeah, who are we kidding. Drew Osborne has been working overtime with profiles for:

• Asa Lacy
• Nick Loftin
• Ben Hernandez and plus Ben Hernandez
• Tyler Gentry
• Christian Chamberlain
• Will Klein (who he loves)

Kevin O’Brien at Royals Reporter wrote a huge retrospective on Hal McRae.

McRae will always remembered for throwing the phone and how it hit the reporter in that 1993 press conference. It is a moment that is just far too burned into baseball fans’ memories at this point. But McRae was more than that: he was one of the best pure hitters in Royals history, and not only was he the only African-American manager in Royals history, but he was also a winning one as well.

Royals Blue looking forward to 2020 with blurbs about Brian Goodwin and Kelvin Gutierrez.

While U.L.’s Toothpick continues to look back at 1980.

---

Time to see what Wikipedia says about June 12th.

Apparently it’s a good birthday if you have a long name. The “French author, playwright, journalist, and politician” Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvrai (1760), Prussian military man Karl Freiherr von Müffling (1775), and President George Herbert Walker Bush (1924) were all born on this day.

On the other hand, it was not a great day for protesters.

In 1775, “ British general Thomas Gage declares martial law in Massachusetts. The British offer a pardon to all colonists who lay down their arms. There would be only two exceptions to the amnesty: Samuel Adams and John Hancock, if captured, were to be hanged.”

In 1921, the Bolsheviks put down a peasant rebellion in the Soviet Union: “Publications in local Communist newspapers openly glorified liquidations of ‘bandits’ with the poison gas.”

In 1962, civil rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated by a Klu Klux Klan member. Twice, in 1964, all white juries could not reach a verdict. However, his wife Myrlie Evers continued to pursue justice and the killer was convicted in (not a misprint) 1994.

In 1964, Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life in prison. Speaking of 1994, in that year, Mandela became President of South Africa.

As for baseball birthdays, there are 3 players with bWAR in the 20s born on this day: Ryan Klesko (1971), Hideki Matsui (1974), and Matty McIntyre (1880) and no others above 10. Keith Miller (1963) was the only former Royal to call today his birthday.

However, the biggest baseball event for June 12th, was the opening of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York in 1939.

---

CPBL News? You bet! As of earlier this week, stadiums are allowed 50% attendance and masks are not required while in your seats.

The (KBO Royals) Hanwha Eagles have lost 7 in a row and are in last place at 7-26. And, like the Royals, they won’t be on ESPN. So, feels like a normal June, right?

As part of their draft coverage, the Boston Globe talked about racial bias in scouting reports.

“The scouting community has its vocabulary,” said Del Matthews, a former White Sox assistant director of player development and scouting who now works as vice president of baseball development for Major League Baseball. “It has its jargon that it uses to paint the picture.

“If you’re African-American, if you’re attuned to language, you can read a report and nine times out of 10 you can tell if the player is African-American, a minority, or not.

“I don’t think it’s anything where there’s an intent to be racist per se. Scouts are trying to the best of their abilities to describe what they see. [But] some intrinsic bias is going to come with that at the end of the day.”

The Minnesota Twins will be donating $25 million “to racial justice, focused on rebuilding impacted communities and pushing for long-term structural change”.

Alex Cora isn’t thrilled that he and Carlos Beltran are being thrown under the bus in the sign stealing scandal.

“There has been a narrative out there of what happened. Ever since mid-November until the commissioner announced the results of the Red Sox investigation, I have read many things that are true and many others that are not,” he said. “Out of this whole process, if there is one thing that I completely reject and disagree with is people within the Astros’ organization singling me out, particularly [former general manager] Jeff Luhnow, as if I were the sole mastermind. The commissioner’s report sort of explained, in its own way, what happened. But the [Astros players] have spoken up and refuted any allegations that I was solely responsible.”

---

I talked about the original Guitar Hero back in 2018*. But I only briefly touched on Guitar Heroes II and III.

*I still badly want an autographed Joel Zumaya Guitar Hero guitar. Anyone with some connections? It would easily be the second centerpiece of my game room upstairs.

Guitar Hero II was an improvement in almost every way on the first game. However, the game was more of an incremental jump over its predecessor: take an unexpected hit and put the full polish of a major gaming studio behind it. The next big leaps wouldn’t occur until both Guitar Hero III and Rock Band introduced additional instruments. But that doesn’t mean GH2 wasn’t well worth playing. Gameplay was smoother and felt more accurate, the stats and career mode were more robust, and the practice mode was a godsend.

Per wikipedia, Developer John Tam said that because a number of bands saw the original game and its success: “They understand that we’re not going to embarrass their music, we’re going to actually pay homage to their music and get it to the point where people are going to fall in love with their music and understand their music in a totally different way than they’ve ever experienced it before.” This opened up the track list a bit more than the first game (which already had a good track list).

Fittingly, the final song for Guitar Hero II was Freebird, which was awesome. Even beating it on Hard felt awesome. Personally, I was never good enough to beat it on Expert. But there was a bonus track that was even more difficult than Freebird. And that was Jordan by Buckethead: