Crown Jewels: Spring Stories, QT on Display and Hos Retiring

The Royals play baseball today, but I've got some other things to bring up.

If you’re making a list of important days for the baseball season, you can check off pitchers and catchers reporting and the first full-squad workout. Later today (or maybe earlier if you’re reading this late), the Royals will take the field against the Rangers for their first game with their largely new team on the field. Of course, it won’t resemble much of what we’ll see on March 28 against the Twins at Kauffman Stadium, but it’ll still be a bunch of baseball players wearing real-life jerseys and real-life baseball pants. That’s a big thing that makes me happy.

So now that the games are about to start, this team will have questions to answer to determine just how good (or bad) they’ll be. There are always caveats about spring statistics. The level of competition varies from game to game. The altitude is different. Pitchers are working on things and sometimes don’t care about the results. The same is true for batters. The infields are hard. The sun is incredibly difficult to navigate that time of year in Arizona. I can go on, but you get the point. Even with all of that, it’s still so much fun to read way too much into a handful of at bats or innings. BASEBALL IS BACK!!!!

Spring Stories

I wrote yesterday about some players who have the most to gain from spring training, so I’m repeating myself a bit here, but there are still some stories to watch. On a broader scale, we’ll see if Royals pitching can actually throw more strikes this season. It was a point of emphasis last year and there was some improvement but not nearly enough. This season, they’ve gone out and gotten pitchers who throw strikes to fill the pitching staff. If it doesn’t happen this year, there’s clearly something wrong in Kansas City in general.

But there are some legitimate position battles. The infield is anchored with Bobby Witt Jr. and Vinnie Pasquantino, but second and third base aren’t guaranteed to Michael Massey and Maikel Garcia respectively. While both are the presumptive starters, Massey faces competition from both Adam Frazier and Nick Loftin while Garcia faces competition from Loftin. If I had to guess, I’d say it would take something beyond belief for Garcia to lose his job, but Massey doesn’t have nearly the hold he’d have liked to have had. If he performs the way he did last spring, he’ll be on the field on March 28, but if not, there’s a chance he’s in the minors.

There’s also an outfield battle brewing as well. Kyle Isbel is the center fielder because he’s the best defender they have at that spot. But nobody else is guaranteed a spot. I think MJ Melendez and Nelson Velazquez have to play their way off the team, but that could happen. The real battle, to me, is between Dairon Blanco and Drew Waters. I have heard next to nothing about Waters for weeks to months now, which made me actually shift to thinking that Blanco might have the inside track on that fourth/fifth outfielder spot. Plus, as a righty who can complement Isbel, it just makes more sense. That’s an interesting battle.

But I think the biggest competition is sitting in the bullpen. There are four absolute locks in Nick Anderson, John Schreiber, Chris Stratton and Will Smith and one other almost lock in James McArthur. Matt Sauer is someone they like and will want to keep, so that’s six. And then John McMillon is said to be fully healthy and he’s probably the most talented pitcher in that bullpen, if he’s healthy. So that leaves just one spot.

I know I wrote about it the other day with the Shreiber deal, but think about who could take that spot - Dan Altavilla, Jake Brentz, Luis Cessa, Austin Cox (is he healthy? I don’t know), Steven Cruz, Tyler Duffey, Carlos Hernandez, Sam Long, Daniel Lynch IV, Alec Marsh, Josh Taylor, Anthony Veneziano and Angel Zerpa. Every single one of these pitchers has had big league success. Maybe they’re really vying for two spots or even three if someone gets hurt, but even if that’s the case, that’s 13 possibilities and it’s not even difficult to see how any of the 13 are the best option.

And then there’s the overarching story of a team that feels almost entirely new. On a 26-man roster, they have added nine big leaguers this winter. That’s more than one-third of a roster. There will almost assuredly be some surprises, maybe because of injury, where the roster doesn’t quite reach the heights of that much newness.

QT Patch

The Royals were one of a handful of times last season to not have an advertising patch on their sleeves last year. We all knew it was only a matter of time, but I was hopeful it would be longer than this season. Then on Wednesday, the news hit like a freight train. I actually saw the picture first.

My first reaction was one of extreme yikes. There’s some serious shock seeing that kind of red on a Royals uniform that has only really seen blue, powder blue and white for years (and black for a few years as well, but those were some dark franchise days). So it’s a bit of a shock. I still think it looks kind of terrible. A couple of people were wondering why they couldn’t use actual Royals colors, and while that’s a fair question, it’s one asked without much of an understanding of how and why companies advertise.

QuikTrip isn’t putting their logo on a sleeve to get lost. If it was blue and white with powder blue shadowing (or something like that), it would absolutely look better but how noticeable would it be? The answer is not nearly as noticeable. Maybe you don’t care. I know that I didn’t, at least until I saw what the advertisement was going to go to.

It’s a really cool deal with community investment more important than bringing in revenue. The partnership is focusing on literacy, which is a key pillar of The Kansas City Royals Foundation’s mission. According to the press release the team sent out, only 21 percent of third graders in Kansas City’s public school district and charter schools are reading on grade level. And that’s a metric that’s a primary indicator for high school graduation as students who can’t read proficiently by third grade are four times less likely to graduate high school. Research has shown that lower literacy rates are tied to higher risks of violence, drug use, and other poor health outcomes.

So while the look and feel on the uniform are something that we may never get used to, at least we know they’re doing something good with this.

Thank You, Hos

The other big news this week that has nothing to do with the team on the field is that Eric Hosmer announced his retirement. He announced a new media venture, which I can’t say I care too much about, but it gave us a chance to reflect on his career with the Royals. He was the third overall pick of the 2008 draft and while he struggled early in his minor league career, he shot up prospect lists in 2010 and heading into 2011, ranking eighth on the Baseball America list. In 2010, he hit .339/.406/.571 between high-A and AA. In AAA to start 2011, he hit .439/.525/.582 in 118 plate appearances and the Royals simply couldn’t keep him down any longer.

His debut was one of the most anticipated I remember for the Royals, rivaling Alex Gordon’s in 2007. You might recall spring training that season when Jon Heyman was asked who the best team in Arizona was and his response was the 2013 Royals. So there was a lot of hype. Then the Royals started the year 17-14 and had won five of six when Hosmer got the call. They drew more than 30,000 fans that night for a game started by Sean O’Sullivan. It was pretty crazy. I remember driving around that day and hearing a sports radio caller make the point that the Royals retired numbers of 5, 10 and 20 added up to 35, Hosmer’s number, and that it had to mean something.

It wasn’t smooth sailing. Hosmer was very good in his rookie season, but started 2012 very slow and I think he made too many adjustments. He got away from the swing that got him to the big leagues and his 2012 was kind of a mess. He was solid in 2013, average in 2014, really good in 2015, average in 2016 and finished his Kansas City career on a high note in 2017 with a .318/.385/.498 season that earned him a nine-figure payday with the San Diego Padres. I’ll never forget when he decided to wear number 30 in San Diego to honor Yordano Ventura.

His career didn’t go the way that we all thought it would when he was called up in May of 2011, but a .276/.335/.427 career with 1,753 hits, 198 home runs and 893 RBIs is nothing to sneeze at. As far as number three overall picks go, he had the eighth-most homers, fifth-highest average and 10th-most RBIs. But in Kansas City, while the results for him may not have been what we hoped for, he was an integral part of a two-time American League champion and a World Series champion. And he had one of the most iconic plays in franchise history.

On a personal level, Hosmer got me on track the first time I was ever in a big league clubhouse. I studied journalism in college, worked on school papers and had interviewed many people in my life. But I had never interviewed Major League Baseball players. I think he could sense that I was awkward and did a great job of just answering questions to the best of his ability and it got me back in the typical interview mindset. I remember asking him if hiring George Brett in 2013 was the catalyst to get him back on track and he gushed about getting to work with a Hall of Famer, but I thought it was so interesting that he kept giving more and more credit to Pedro Grifol. That was around the time that I knew Grifol would be a big league manager someday.

For me, Hosmer is a Royals Hall of Famer without a single question in my mind. He’s 10th in franchise history in home runs, 13th in doubles, 10th in total bases, 11th in hits, ninth in RBIs, tied for 13th in adjusted OPS+ (with Carlos Beltran) and fourth in Gold Gloves. I think team Hall of Fames are there to tell the story of the franchise and you simply can’t tell the story of the Royals championships without Hosmer. And they never should. I look forward to him getting inducted into the team Hall soon enough.