Royals Rumblings - News for July 1, 2020

It’s a bummer day for fans of the farm systems, following yesterday’s announcement that there will be no Minor League Baseball season.

Omaha Storm Chasers president Martie Cordaro shared his thoughts in an Omaha World-Herald story:

“It’s not surprising, but there’s still a sense of shock that it’s happening for the first time in 118 years,” Storm Chasers president Martie Cordaro said. “That’s through the Spanish Flu, World War I, World War II and everything else that’s happened in our society. That’s a long time.”

Cordaro doesn’t believe this could have been avoided. COVID-19 has changed sports and entertainment forever, he said, and discussions over the past few weeks seemed to show the cancellation was inevitable.

“I think the impact for us is going to take a few years as we move forward to 2021,” Cordaro said. “We don’t know what the new normal is. Going forward, maybe we only have ‘X’ percent of people allowed at Werner Park or at the CHI Health Center or Memorial Stadium. We don’t know.”

Andrew Bucholtz at The Comeback reported on the call with MiLB president Pat O’Conner, and it looks like dark days ahead for the minors, for years to come.

O’Conner did say that the cancellation here was “months in the coming” and “the only thing to do,” plus “not acrimonious” between MLB and MiLB, so it’s not that this particular cancellation is unexpected. But the pandemic has hit MiLB hard, and O’Conner’s comments about how many teams could be in trouble seem absolutely fair. As he notes, MiLB is much more about in-person revenue than broadcasting revenue, so they don’t have a huge amount of already-paid broadcast fees to fall back on. (They do have a low-seven-figure deal with TuneIn and MLB/MiLB.tv, and they’re hoping to improve that in the future, but it’s a long way from the broadcast money MLB teams get.)

The Royals have announced which games they will re-air in July, including some 2009 Zack Greinke action tomorrow evening.

Joe Posnanski appeared on the KC Star’s SportsBeat KC podcast to talk about the “Tip Your Cap” campaign for the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.

MLB is still ironing out umpire travel, since their usual volume of travel after every series wouldn’t make sense in current conditions.

Rockies outfielder Ian Desmond is opting out of the 2020 season, and wrote an essay on Instagram about system problems in the game. Namely, he focused on how expensive access to youth baseball is and how many young players that leaves out.

Speaking of barriers to entry, here’s Joon Lee at ESPN on the Ivy League takeover in MLB front offices.

Seven bidders have been approved for the sale of the Mets.

The KBO is just a few days away from allowing a limited number of fans into their games.

A group of softball players is forming a new type of league called Athletes Unlimited, which will run a 30-game season. However, top performers will be named team captains who will draft new teams each week, rather than forming distinct clubs. The games will air on CBS Sports and ESPN beginning in August.

Doug Glanville, retired ballplayer, wrote an essay on life as a Black player, and how people’s whole lives are defined in comma clauses just like the one earlier in this very sentence.

CVS will start selling makeup for men in about a quarter of its stores. Very helpful in this age of Zoom meetings!

Here’s a free webinar to teach parents how to teach children life skills. To the parents in the crowd: what chores do/did your kids do, and at what ages? Or, what chores did you do as a child?

What made chicken plants so prone to Coronavirus outbreaks?

Since the newest season of Queer Eye was based in Philadelphia, the Fab Five met up with Flyers mascot Gritty to do their thing.

This Etsy shop makes custom replicas of houses...out of LEGOs.

A flowery ode to onion rings, and also how to make them.

Poker and the psychology of uncertainty.

Loving reminder to change your furnace filter if you haven’t done so lately. It makes such a difference in preventing expensive service calls!

MUSIC: The MiLB news necessitated a sad song. So, I went with “Sad Song.” Just replace the “you” in all the lyrics with MiLB and that’s my theme song now!