Royals Rumblings - News for September 20, 2024

Nine huge games to go!

Let’s look in on those playoff odds. Even though it may not seem like it, they’re still quite high as of 7pm last night:

• Baseball Prospectus: 86.5% to make playoffs, 0.0% to win division, 1.2% to win World Series
• Fangraphs: 90.0% to make playoffs, 0.1% to win division, 2.5% to win World Series
• Baseball-Reference: 85.4% to make playoffs, 0.2% to win division, 4.1% to win World Series

In other words, even with a rough week, odds are only down a few percent from last Friday. Basically, the percent chance to make the Wild Card is the same but the chance to win the division is basically gone.

Both of The Star’s stories look at the Royals playoff chances. Pete Grathoff breaks down Royals tiebreakers. They win with the Guardians, Tigers, and Mariners and lose to the Twins and Orioles. Three way in the Central?

The Twins won the season series against the Tigers and Royals, so they have the edge if all three teams finish with the same record.

Jaylon Thompson asks around about how everyone is feeling with the playoff hunt.

“We still control our own fate as far as getting into the playoffs, and that’s all you can really ask for,” Royals manager Matt Quatraro said. “We have to play better and we have to win some games.

Anne Rogers talked to GM J.J. Picollo and Assistant GM Scott Sharp about the turnaround this year:

“J.J. is a very calming presence in a room, but he wants to win,” Sharp said. “He really believes that the city of Kansas City is owed a competitive Major League team on a nightly basis. He did not panic last year, but there was no level of content. We knew we had to get better. He stuck with his vision.”

How about a few lighter stories?

Vote for Salvy for the Roberto Clemente award.

Listicles?

At CBS Sports, R.J. Anderson revisits their preseason breakout players:

Kansas City Royals: 3B Maikel García

What we wrote: “The catch with García is that he doesn’t elevate the ball as frequently as those more famous lads do; for as long as that remains true, it’s unlikely his slugging output will consistently match his innate strength. A breakout year from García, then, might resemble something from the B-Ref pages of either Yandy Díaz or William Contreras.”

What he did: García not only hit fewer balls into the “sweet spot” launch angle range (10 to 30 degrees), he also made less authoritative contact. He’s a good defender and baserunner, and those traits (plus some additional playing time) allowed him to outpace last year’s WAR total. Even so, we’re calling this one a loss because we were bullish on the innate potential in his bat and he just didn’t make good on it.

Verdict: Whiff

At The Athletic ($), Jim Bowden makes award predictions:

AL Manager of the Year

1. Matt Quatraro, Royals

2. Stephen Vogt, Guardians

3. A.J. Hinch, Tigers

The Manager of the Year Award isn’t given to the best manager in each league; more often, it goes to the manager whose team overachieved the most or improved the most from the year before. Quatraro should win the AL award after taking a team that went 56-106 last year to the cusp of a playoff berth this year. His bullpen management, lineup juggling and emphasis on putting the ball in play and “moving the chains” have helped make this season a huge success in Kansas City. He has great leadership and communications skills and is well-respected by the players and front office. The Royals’ lineup ranks third in the AL in runs scored and last in strikeouts, and their pitching staff is sixth in ERA. Stephen Vogt deserves serious consideration as he’s done a marvelous job in replacing future Hall of Famer Terry Francona in Cleveland, showing a special leadership style with his players in guiding the Guardians to a (likely) division title.

Also:

American League MVP: 2. Bobby Witt Jr., SS, Royals (9.2 WAR)

AL Cy Young: 3. Seth Lugo, RHP, Royals (4.7 WAR)

Blog time?

Only one long story yesterday, from Craig Brown:

That’s where I land on Wednesday’s game. Yeah, it was frustrating the Royals couldn’t get anything going with the bats, but Tarik Skubal (and the Detroit bullpen) is really good.

Make no mistake…We’ve been calling this team resilient all season. Now is the time they get to prove that they can bounce back when it matters the most. They still control their own destiny. Now they have to finish the task at hand.

Blog roundup:

• Darin Watson at U.L.’s Toothpick This Date In Royals History—1984 Edition: September 19 - The Royals blow two different leads in a loss to California
• Jackson Wilks at Farm to Fountains: Naturals Avoid Being Swept After Rough Final Series
• Preston Farr at Farm to Fountains: Royals set to finish 2024 with best intra-division record
• Preston Farr at Farm to Fountains: Royals playoff scenarios with nine games to go
• Jacob Milham at Kings of Kauffman: 4 KC Royals prospects who lost their shine after a rough 2024 season
• Mike Gillespie at Kings of Kauffman: After ugly sweep, KC Royals are done with the American League...for now
• Mike Gillespie at Kings of Kauffman: Former KC Royals MLB Playoffs hero is leaving the game

From one NPB star to another... Sure, this isn’t Royals news, but jeez, Shohei! He becomes the first member of the 49/49, 50/50, and 51/51 club all in one game. 6 for 6 with 2 SBs, 3 HRs, and 10 RBIs! Insane!

CBS Sports threw together a quick list of his top 10 games.

I hope you appreciate witnessing history because we are seeing a unicorn. I don’t think we’ll ever see one a player like him again.

Maybe I’ll pick up the Topps Now for this moment.

I know I had said we’re doing Universal Hollywood last week but I had something else come up this past weekend that felt like it was more “timely” so we’re doing that today. That means Universal is next week and Minions movies are the week after that, if you’re looking for sneak peaks. They’ve already been written - but these are so long already that I only want to run one per week.

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a friend of mine. I mentioned how our library has some cool stuff to check out and, as part of our homeschooling during the pandemic, we borrowed a little backyard telescope from the library on a full moon day and took a look with our son (we also told him the story about how we got shot at for going on a public farm road, trying to see a comet, but that’s a story for another time). He got excited asked if I had ever seen Saturn’s rings in a telescope, because he has a decent telescope and would love an excuse to get it out. After a couple of failed attempts due to rain and COVID, this is how I spent my last Friday evening (09.13) and thought I’d share some of it with you.

• To help with viewing time, I like Weather Underground’s site to find out when different sunrise and sunset times are. Here’s the Houston page for 09.07, for instance. Wiki has the different definitions, but the basics are that sure, there’s sunset - but there’s still light at that time until astronomical twilight. We started about 6:30, an hour before 7:30 sunset. Astronomical twilight was 8:51 that night and we stayed out until 9:30. For the purposes of this narrative, we could have gone longer but my kid was hyper and wiped, running around a bunch the last hour. My wife was also getting tired - she arrived about 8:20 from a church meeting so that’s why we looked at some objects twice.
• My friend’s telescope is an older Orion 8” Dobsonian telescope. I couldn’t tell you anything about the differences between telescopes beyond what you can read on that page. I think this might be the exact telescope, but I’m not sure. The long and short is that it has an 8” mirror and a 2x and 5x zoom so you can make up to 10x if you combine the two. Though it was really hard to focus with the 10x zoom - it also makes things a bit darker and stuff moves out of the view finder /fast/ because of the earth’s rotation. We set up in maybe 15 mins: chairs, putting together the telescope, tightening the base, letting my kid run around on the playground, etc.
• First off, we took a look at the sun as it was still up (but near the horizon) and he has a sun filter. The sun looked big and yellow and you could see some darker sun spots. With the zoom, the sun looks darker and bigger but not much else. But it was a cool thing to start out with. We also noticed that because of the shape of the telescope, it was harder to get it steady while focusing on things near the horizon - as it’s getting a little old and it’s meant to be pointed up. FYI: any pictures I put below are from the Getty archive, but I’m trying to approximate what we saw.

• Next up, we looked at the moon. The sun was still up so it was that milky white moon in the blue sky, not the bright white in the black sky. However, when we zoomed in, especially at the top and bottom edges, you could really see the elevation and the craters and how they extend above the moon’s surface. When you put the telescope on that 10 times zoom, it shows you just how fast the earth is rotating – even something as big as the moon, which at high magnification takes up several widths of the telescope, moves quickly into and out of your viewfinder. While we were doing this, the sun set.

• Next, we started looking at planets. This time and date site is good about letting you know when particular planets rise and set in the evening (change the date and location, as needed). Venus was the first “star” up and was setting by 9 so we were having to look close to the horizon. When we started to use the magnification, you could see that Venus has a little crescent “bit” out of it, like the moon. I did not know this, but it makes sense: apparently, Venus has phases. With the higher zooms, it also looked red/white/blue-ish but that could have been distortion as Venus was getting closer to the horizon so we were looking through more of the atmosphere.

• We started looking for other stars that were showing up. We’re still in suburban Houston with lots of light pollution so it’s going to be bright, no matter how late we go. But we did the best we could, finding a hill in our flat, flat swamplands. We saw Arcturus, which is the 4th brightest star in the night sky and then Antares. The former looks blue with the latter has a red tint, which makes sense as it’s a red supergiant. Using the zooms on those did next to nothing- they just looked like slightly bigger dots.
• Then we started to see Saturn over the horizon. The original reason we picked this time of year is because we’re really close to Saturn’s opposition (closest point to Earth). It really is an amazing sight to behold. Right now, the rings are getting ready to disappear but it looks like a planet on its side with a little line sticking out of both the top and bottom, like a Greek Phi. Apparently, sometime next year, they’re going to disappear from view entirely as we’re just at the wrong angle to see them – they’ll be facing us head on. Apparently, the rings are only about a kilometer wide and, considering Saturn is more than a billion Km away, yeah, we’re not going to be able to see that. Thankfully, we can definitely see them right now, even at minimum magnification. As we increased the zoom, the rings got bigger. About this time my wife showed up and my friend was like “What should we show her?”. I said “I mean, we’re looking at Saturn right now” and he was like “but that’s the star of the show – shouldn’t we build up to it?” We stuck with it and she was spoiled with her first view of the night. This is the best approximation of what it looked like (couldn’t find anything in the Getty archive that looked like this) and even that’s a little clearer than what we saw.
• Next, we went back to the moon as she hadn’t seen that earlier. It looks even more dramatic against the black sky and some of the features on it look much clearer. We also had to put on a moon filter as it was bright. You can see so many craters. I think one we kept focusing on is called Copernicus and it has a bunch of lines coming out of it (a ray system?). With the 10x focus, you could see some big craters and “mountains” on the moon – there’s a real topology. It’s not just the 2D circle you see in the sky with the naked eye - it’s a real object up there.

• We then started looking for other stars, but nothing in particular. We still could only see maybe 2 dozen stars in the night’s sky. Again, high light pollution city. Still, we made do with what we had.
• My son requested we look back at Saturn again. We saw the rings but then we started seeing objects around it, even at 1x zoom. The first time we looked at it, we thought those were distant stars “behind it”. But, no, I think we saw 4 or 5 of Saturn’s moons. There were 3 “below” and 2 “above”, almost in line with the planet. For Titan, we thought it was too far out to be a moon but, now that we knew what we were looking at, it was obvious. I saw 4 different moons, my son and friend each claimed 5. There’s something just awe inspiring about seeing moons of a distant planet.

• Finally, we tried to find comet 13P/Olbers. Apparently, comets are notoriously difficult to find – they’re moving, they’re fuzzy, and magnitude estimates are often way off. Unlike everything else we were looking at, it wasn’t visible to the naked eye so there was no way to use the view finder to try and line the telescope up. For a last ditch attempt, we got cute and tried to do what felt like rudimentary science. We focused on Arcturus, which was near the comet. Then we attached his phone to the back of the telescope so we could see the distances from where Arcturus was on my friend’s iPhone sky app to where it was in the sky. Then we tried to adjust the telescope about the distance to where the comet should be. Sadly, we did not find it. We were looking for a really dim object, kindof close to the horizon with a lot of light pollution. It’s not really surprising we didn’t find it, but it was fun to try.

We had such a blast doing this that we’re going to try and do it again in a couple of months. The reason I wanted to get this out there today was that almost everything we were talking about is still up there in the sky right now. The moon is going through phases and the planets will be slightly later or earlier, but not substantially.

Here’s a couple of future notes:

• Later on this month, there’s the potential of a comet that /could/ be visible with the naked eye. Again, these things are impossible to predict - it could get too close to the sun and lose much of its mass, it might go the wrong way to not get light on it, etc. Many potential “comets of the century” comets have fizzled out long before they are visible. However, there’s a chance that there’s going to be a comet that we can see in the early morning hours (5-7am) the last week of September into early October.
• We’re looking at trying to get together in early December when Jupiter is at opposition (again, closest to earth). At 8pm, it will long be dark and we should be able to see a lot. My friend said you can faintly make out the big red spot on Jupiter as well as a number of its moons. The other gas giants, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are all supposed to have good viewing conditions in the early evening that time of year, too! Mars rises around 9, so that gives us another object we could look at if we stayed a bit later. Also, some major constellations we were not able to see will be up like the Pleiades cluster and Orion with its big name stars and nebula. I’m already looking forward to this next time.

For the sotd, let’s remember that time Rex called the moon a planet. But rather than poke fun at Rex, I want to dig into it a little deeper.

Rex:”...it’s a beautiful planet”

(about 5 seconds of dead air)

Ryan: “Well, it’s it’s a moon ...”

Rex: “Well, it looks like a planet to me!”

This is, of course, the part of the broadcast that gets the most run. However, I like Rex realizes the mistake and he tries to save it with a wholesome cross-promotion and some self-deprecation.

Rex: “Tomorrow’s school day at the K”

Ryan: “Maybe they can cover the whole star, planet, and moon concept”.

Rex: “That might be good. I need to be refreshed a little, I guess.”

Yes, he said something a bit silly - not sure if it was a misspeak, a brain fart, or that he forgot his grade school science as it was a long time ago. But I appreciate that he sees the mistake and tries to make lemonade out of those verbal lemons.