Daily Clips
November 3, 2017
LOCAL
3 questions facing Royals this offseason
November 2, 2017By Jeffrey Flanagan/MLB.com
Early predictions for the 2018 Royals aren’t encouraging
November 2, 2017By Pete Grathoff/KC Star
David Glass can block the Braves, but without a second step he’s only hurting the Royals
November 2, 2017By Sam Mellinger/KC Star
Former Royal Brian McRae is expected to join revamped baseball staff at Shawnee Mission East
November 2, 2017By Maria Torres/KC Star
A man reportedly won $14 million on World Series wagers
November 2, 2017By Pete Grathoff/KC Star
Royals announce special All-Time Team vote to celebrate 50th season
November 2, 2017By Daniel Barnett/KCTV5.com
Why the Royals can’t keep the band together in 2018 and beyond
November 2, 2017By Jared Koller/KCTV5.com
MINORS
Beltrán, Hinch, Dauer Win Fall Classic with Astros
At least 1 Omaha alum has won World Series in each of last 6 years
November 2, 2017By Andrew Green/Omaha Strom Chasers
NATIONAL
Upton bypasses opt-out, signs with Angels
Slugging outfielder's five-year deal includes full no-trade clause, runs through 2022
November 2, 2017By Maria Guardado/MLB.com
Sano to have surgery, should be ready for spring
Twins slugger undergoing procedure for stress fracture in left shin
November 2, 2017By Rhett Bollinger/MLB.com
Sources: Wakamatsu returns to Rangers' staff
November 2, 2017By T.R. Sullivan/MLB.com
MLB TRANSACTIONS
November 3, 2017 •.CBSSports.com
LOCAL
3 questions facing Royals this offseason
November 2, 2017By Jeffrey Flanagan/MLB.com
With the World Series over, a critical offseason now begins for the Royals as they ponder a slight rebuild, a medium-sized rebuild or a major makeover.
Kansas City has nine potential free agents, as general manager Dayton Moore begins to plot a course for the future of a team that made back-to-back World Series appearances in 2014-15 and won it all in '15.
Free agents: 1B Eric Hosmer, SS Alcides Escobar, 3B Mike Moustakas, CF Lorenzo Cain, LHP Jason Vargas, OF Melky Cabrera, RHP Peter Moylan, RHP Trevor Cahill, LHP Mike Minor.
Note: Minor has a mutual option for 2018 that will be declined, and right-hander Ian Kennedy has already indicated he will not opt out of the remaining three years on his deal.
Arbitration-eligible players: RHP Kelvin Herrera, RHP Nate Karns, RHP Brandon Maurer, RHP Mike Morin.
Hosmer, Moustakas, Escobar and Cain represent the core of a group that went to consecutive World Series. The dropoff in terms of replacing Hosmer, Moustakas or Cain will be significant.
Who will get qualifying offers?
Moore and his staff have been debating this for months. It's almost a given that they will tender qualifying offers to Hosmer, Moustakas and Cain -- all of whom should get contracts (if they don't re-sign with the Royals) of $50 million or more on the open market, which means the Royals would get a compensatory pick that would land between the first round and the Competitive Balance Round A of the 2018 MLB Draft. The qualifying offer this winter will be $18.1 million, which is why a small-market team like the Royals simply can't hand them out like Halloween candy.
Which players will the Royals target?
The focus will likely be on Hosmer for several reasons. First, he's their best position player, offensively and defensively. Second, we still don't know what his ceiling is (the belief here is he is still an ascending player, even after a .318 season with 25 homers and 94 RBIs). Third, even if the Royals decide to rebuild, Hosmer is the perfect veteran to shepherd a young group through the next era. He is the most competitive player on the team, is a great clubhouse leader, and cares about the community.
Given the Royals' financial limitations, the other player they really need to re-sign is Minor, who completely stabilized the bullpen when he took over the closer's role in September (and we know how Moore values a shut-down bullpen). The Royals will also try to get Vargas and Moylan back on club-friendly terms.
Will the payroll allow any other free-agent signings?
Not likely. The Royals banked on making the playoffs the past two seasons, which is why they had franchise-record-setting payrolls each year. The playoff revenue didn't come in, which meant owner David Glass once again had to subsidize the losses. As even Moore admitted recently, that's just bad business.
"Eventually, the bill comes due," Moore said.
The Royals have about $110-115 million committed to payroll for 2018, and that might leave them about $20-30 million to play with to go after Hosmer and Minor. That's a tight fit.
Early predictions for the 2018 Royals aren’t encouraging
November 2, 2017By Pete Grathoff/KC Star
The Houston Astros’ parade isn’t until Friday, but that doesn’t mean we can’t look ahead to the 2018 baseball season, right?
The Star’s Rustin Dodd has an excellent primer on Royals heading into free agency, and you are probably aware of the number of players who could leave Kansas City, including Eric Hosmer, Lorenzo Cain and Mike Moustakas.
The Royals still have a number of very good players returning, including catcher Salvador Perez, pitcher Danny Duffy and second baseman Whit Merrifield, so who knows what the future holds?
And, obviously, much will be done between now and the start of spring training, which is about 15 weeks away. But that hasn’t stopped people from speculating about the 2018 season.
First, the gaming site Bovada has the Royals as a 50-1 shot to win the World Series. That’s actually not bad. Eight teams have worse odds, including the Minnesota Twins, who are a 66-1 shot, despite having played in this year’s American League Wild Card Game.
The outlook from ESPN’s David Schoenfield isn’t quite as rosy. His “way-too-early 2018 power rankings” have the Royals at No. 29.
“Even with Hosmer and Moustakas having their best seasons, the Royals weren’t very good in 2017, winning 80 games and getting outscored by 89 runs,” Schoenfield wrote. “Without a new pipeline of talent to replace the free agents, it’s going to be a long rebuilding process …”
There is a sliver of good news: the 30th-ranked team on the list is the Detroit Tigers, so if Schoenfield is correct, the Royals won’t finish last in the AL Central.
The Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook odds are also not great for the Royals. They are one of eight teams with an 80-1 shot of winning the World Series. The only team with worse odds is the Detroit Tigers, who have 300-1 odds.
David Glass can block the Braves, but without a second step he’s only hurting the Royals
November 2, 2017By Sam Mellinger/KC Star
Owning a Major League Baseball team is a sweet gig. Can you imagine? The best seats, the tax loopholes, the certainty that no matter what happens on the field your ROI makes everyone but Facebook’s initial investors jealous.
David Glass has lived the good owner’s life, too. He bought in for $96 million, and now his Royals are estimated to be worth 10 times that much. Glass helped turn Wal-Mart into a global powerhouse, but he never lost that boyish obsession with baseball. For him, owning the Royals is even better than his childhood dream, playing second base for the Cardinals.
But ownership is not entirely privilege, or at least it shouldn’t be. There’s real responsibility, too — or at least there should be. Responsibility to do right, to treat your people well, to reward those who’ve helped you make money and gain credibility.
Last week, Glass stiff-armed the Atlanta Braves’ request to talk to Moore about their open GM position. That is Glass’ right. Moore is under contract for a few more years, and Glass is not required to do anything more than meet the terms of that deal.
But, come on. Glass owes Moore and everyone else on the baseball side of the club more than that.
Right now, that means the 82-year-old telling Moore about the club’s ownership-succession plan and asking what he wants and needs to solidify the future. A raise, a front-office restructuring, more support. The Royals are likely on the brink of their second rebuild under Moore, and they’ll need to be even better and smarter than the first time around.
That’s pretty basic, right? Moore literally does not know what will happen if Glass decides he no longer wants to run the team, or is unable to. That’s not specific to Moore. Nobody in the organization seems to know, with the possible exception of club president and owner offspring Dan Glass.
The owner can do what he wants, but denying another team the opportunity to talk to Moore without the second step of support to his front office would only harm his own reputation and make it harder for the Royals to compete.
Three years ago, the Braves were interested in Moore, and Glass said he wouldn’t restrict anyone from talking about other jobs. Why would he want to keep someone against their will, he said. But now he won’t allow it?
Moore isn’t a job-hopper. He was with the Braves for 12 years, and has been in Kansas City for 11. He turned down the Red Sox and Diamondbacks before coming here, and declined to pursue the Braves’ job least twice since.
Even so, Glass has now formally blocked Moore from talking. That doesn’t mean Moore is being kept against his will, but if this is as far as Glass goes, he’s being short-sighted and in the long run counterproductive to the Royals’ best interests.
All the credibility and most of the respect Glass enjoyed while Lorenzo Cain, Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Alex Gordon, Wade Davis and others won a World Series is gone if this is all he does.
This is a real opportunity for Glass. An opportunity to lock in the future of his franchise. An opportunity to chase the next championship with the same innovation this club showed in capturing the last one. An opportunity to make sure 2015 doesn’t become this generation’s 1985 — the last smile before decades of disappointment.
A general manager is the single most important person in a baseball organization; they are the most influential GMs in major sports. The game of baseball is entirely about the players, but GMs are ultimately responsible for who those players are. Owners decide how much money is available, but they need GMs to tell them where to spend it. In the Royals’ case, Glass needed Moore to convince him to spend a little more, too.
Before Glass met Moore, the Royals were on their way to a third consecutive 100-loss season, an almost unfathomable run of incompetence made even worse by a mostly rotten front office, terrible morale up and down the payroll, and deficient basics like scouting resources, minor-league equipment and an international presence ranging from bare-bones to nonexistent.
Moore helped change all of that. Convinced Glass he needed to invest more in infrastructure, and convinced good baseball men to give this crazy idea a chance.
One scout’s interview overlapped a blowout loss at home. The scout said he was convinced to take the job by a family sitting a few rows back, chanting LET’S GO ROYALS in the late innings of a hopeless game. That scout’s former team took the unusual step of allowing him to copy much of its reports and blueprints, so dire was his new situation in KC.
They built the Royals from the ground up, though that probably shortchanges the challenge, because expansion teams at least have certain advantages in initial player acquisition.
Moore has made mistakes here. The winning came overwhelmingly fast when it came, but the first winning season should not have taken until his seventh full year in charge. The Royals had to eat money and cut Omar Infante, Gordon’s second contract has backfired, and others like Joakim Soria haven’t been worth the price. The Royals never should have attempted this win-now-and-rebuild strategy for 2017.
But GMs without backfired decisions are GMs that haven’t been around long enough. And not all GMs led their franchises to championships, helping their team’s owner make hundreds of millions of dollars.
The respectful move now is to ask Moore what he wants in order to push forward, and make clear where he fits in the franchise long term. Either that, or let Moore go.
Because if Glass is no longer confident that Moore is the best man to lead the Royals forward, then what does it matter anyway?
If the denial is a mechanism to generate compensation, then fine, but there was never an indication Moore wanted to leave Kansas City — quite the opposite, actually — and Glass has now drawn a line that didn’t need to be drawn.
Look, Moore isn’t the only good man for the job. There are many good baseball men out there.
The problem is that if Glass doesn’t take one more step, those good baseball men are going to look for other places to work.
Former Royal Brian McRae is expected to join revamped baseball staff at Shawnee Mission East
November 2, 2017By Maria Torres/KC Star
Former Royals center fielder Brian McRae is expected to join Shawnee Mission East as an assistant baseball coach this spring, further deepening the Royals’ connections to the Lancers.
First-year coach Will Gorden, who previously led Bishop Miege baseball, announced the news on Thursday afternoon on Twitter.
@SMEbaseball: Excited to welcome Brian McRae to the SME Baseball staff! 9yrs of MLB experience and great leadership to our young men!#newyearsamegoal
The hiring of McRae has yet to be formally approved by the Shawnee Mission School District. His application is in the process of being submitted to the board.
McRae will join a revamped staff — former coach Jerrod Ryherd left for the same position at Blue Valley Southwest after eight seasons leading the Lancers — that Gorden said will boast about 23 years of professional baseball experience.
“(McRae) brings a wealth of big-league experience,” said Gorden, who was a head coach at one of MLB’s academies in China until this year. “He’s been a mentor to a lot of young men in a lot of different ways. For me to have a guy with as much experience that he has around a group of young players (will be useful). We’re trying to instruct them for how to play the game of baseball. Nobody knows it better than someone who’s been around it his entire life.”
McRae was the Royals’ first-round pick in the 1985 draft out of Blue Springs High School, which he attended while his father, Hal, was in the middle of a 14-year career as a designated hitter and left fielder for the Royals from 1973-87.
The younger McRae played for the Royals from 1990-94 and was managed by his father at Kauffman Stadium during his last three years in a Kansas City uniform. Brian McRae rounded out a 10-year major-league career with stints with the Cubs, Mets, Rockies and Blue Jays.
McRae was recently a student manager for the University of Missouri baseball team. He joined that staff last August after spending four years as an assistant at Park University.
The gig at SM East isn’t the only coaching endeavor McRae has on his plate. He is the general manager of the Kansas City Sluggers youth baseball program, where he has been an instructor. He also manages the Victoria HarbourCats, a Canadian team that plays in a collegiate wood-bat league in the Pacific Northwest. He plans to lead his own college program in the future.
McRae will spend the next several months finishing up a bachelor’s degree and helping the SM East Lancers, who lost to eventual state champion Blue Valley in regionals and finished 19-3 last season.
The Royals’ connections to SM East run deep. All three of George Brett’s sons, Jackson, Dylan and Robin, played baseball there earlier this decade. Jackson and Dylan also played football.
Former Royals second baseman Joe Randa has also watched his sons, Jake and Justin, play baseball together at SM East. Jake graduated in May. He was not drafted by a major-league team. He enrolled at Northwest Florida State after de-committing from Western Kentucky.
Justin is a junior, and he plays the infield for SM East alongside sophomore Robert Moore, the son of Royals general manager Dayton Moore.
“It’s not a group that probably needs a lot of guidance and help,” McRae said of the Lancers. “They’ve built a pretty good tradition over there with going to state, having draft picks and kids going on to Division-I schools. It’s a good program to be in line with.”