Royals Rumblings – News for March 7, 2025

Yesterday, the Royals announced :

As the Kansas City Royals prepare for the start of the 2025 season and Opening Day, we are giving all baseball fans the opportunity to watch the boys in blue warm up before the big day. On Wednesday, March 26th, fans can join us for our Royals Workout Day, and you can catch all the action for FREE.

They also announced the roster for the Spring Breakout game on March 14th:

On Thursday, KC announced its 2025 Spring Breakout roster which includes No. 1 prospect Jac Caglianone and catching duo Blake Mitchell and Carter Jensen. Mitchell is on the roster, but will not play due to surgery to repair a hamate bone fracture in his right wrist.

Also at the Star, Sam McDowell talks to MJ Melendez about his new swing:

Seattle pitcher Bryce Miller, who posted a 2.94 earned-run average a year ago, threw Melendez the kind of pitch that so frequently tied him up a year ago: a cutter on the inside part of the plate. It was a perfect location, really, on the black of the inner half.

Melendez has hit that pitch out before, though infrequently. This was different. To him. And that’s a pretty important piece.

“Not that I’ve never gotten to a pitch like that,” Melendez said, “but it felt a lot easier than it might’ve in the past.”

Vahe Gregorian writes about how the Royals hope to give Salvy a break this season, but how that may not be possible:

As Perez was attended to by athletic trainer Dave Iannicca and Quatraro, longtime Royals broadcaster Steve Stewart quite aptly reckoned Perez “may own the Royals record for trainer visits to him on the field between being a catcher and his longevity.”

Speaking of Salvy, Pete Grathoff shared a cute story about Perez and his daughter doing a dance on TikTok.

We’re out of official stories, so how about a couple of listicles from CBS Sports:

R.J. Anderson ranks the 2024 playoff teams most likely to miss in 2025:

2. Kansas City Royals

The Royals were one of the best stories in baseball last season. They didn’t punt on the previous winter after losing 106 games. They didn’t accept another losing season as a fait accompli. They spent money and made trades, currying favor with fortune (if you believe such a thing is possible) all the while. Clearly it worked out OK in the end, as the Royals became just the second team in a full season to ever clinch a playoff berth a year after losing 100 or more games.

Unfortunately, I have to rank Kansas City high on this list because … well, the Royals didn’t attack this offseason with the same fervor as last. I was fine with the Jonathan India trade and the Carlos Estévez signing, and I don’t mind retaining Michael Wacha and Michael Lorenzen. But I would have liked to have seen the Royals show more aggressiveness in improving a lineup that ranked 13th in runs scored, 19th in on-base percentage, and 20th in FanGraphs’ park-adjusted wRC+ metric.

Maybe the Royals’ patience with MJ Melendez, Maikel Garcia, and a few other homegrown position players will be rewarded. I just fear that they’ll be left with a lineup that runs four or five batters deep, and that the pitching staff may experience some slippage from a few of the veteran arms. Should both of those concerns manifest, the Royals stand a real chance of missing out on a return trip to October.

Meanwhile, Matt Synder asks which MLB teams could get a new stadium soon:

Kansas City Royals – Kauffman Stadium opened in 1973 and shares a gigantic lot with Arrowhead and the Chiefs. The Royals have been planning to build a new ballpark and move pretty soon. In fact, it’s been floated that they want to be in a new home as early as the 2027 season. Some political battles are forthcoming, but Royals ownership appears to be very committed to moving pretty soon. The sort of motivation they have means it’s likely going to happen, one way or another, even if it takes a few extra years.

Speaking of ballparks, I’m going to sneak in a Jeff Passan story that mentions the Royals. He talks about “What A’s, Rays moving to minor league ballparks means for MLB”:

Earlier this spring, commissioner Rob Manfred called the minor league parks “intimate” and “charming,” real estate euphemisms instantly recognizable to anyone who has looked at too-small houses and apartments. It’s not just the size of the ballparks, either. Temperatures in Sacramento regularly climb into the triple digits in the summer, and Sutter Health Park lacks the roof of big league parks in other scorching cities. In lieu of playing at the Trop, the Rays will spend 2025 at the open-air Steinbrenner Field and contend with summer rains that threaten to destabilize their schedule.

The A’s and Rays are cautionary tales of what happens when big, complicated challenges are met with half-measures and inaction — and reminders to teams with unsettled stadium issues in places like Chicago and Kansas City, Missouri, that the longer they take to reach resolution, the messier these situations get. With every city council meeting that ends with no deal, every local voting result that kicks the can down the road to the next election, every ballpark rendering torn up before a shovel ever enters the dirt, the likelihood of best-laid plans being replaced by worst-case scenarios multiplies.

Blog Time!

David Lesky writes about his first Royals game of the year:

As you walk through the gate in left field to enter Surprise Stadium, you’re instantly met with the perfect confluence of a game that is meaningless and something so much more. The smell of hot dogs and kettle corn and perfectly manicured grass stings the nostrils. I know I’m a baseball romantic but I will never walk into a stadium for the first time of the year and not appreciate just how special it is. It gets even more special when your toddler is with you and looking around with the same awe I’m sure I did decades ago (and honestly probably still do now). Sure the credit card bill comes due on the souvenirs and the food that goes largely uneaten, but the memories made in those moments will be remembered long after the money is spent.

It also provides such an interesting moment for me as someone who wants so badly to analyze something…anything. The result of the game is truly meaningless, but every moment matters to the individuals. At the same time, baseball is a game that can fool you with small samples and there is basically no smaller sample than one game, particularly one game that nobody plays all nine innings. And yet, there I was, frantically putting notes in my phone about how this pitcher looked or how that batter reacted to situations. What exactly can you learn from these games? The answer is somewhere between nothing and something, which I know is a thrilling piece of fence riding that you subscribe to learn.

Craig Brown combines two topics from other stories above: yesterday’s game and MJ Melendez.

Fair is fair, so I have to—and want to, really!—give MJ Melendez some credit. After looking overmatched at the plate the first couple of games, his new swing has come alive. He hit a home run on a 91 mph inside cutter on Wednesday, his second of the spring and is now hitting .300/.364/.700 in 22 PAs.

…Also, he’s generally smoking the cover off the ball. His average exit velocity is 94.3 mph with close to 55 percent of all batted balls being classified as hard-hit. We can drop all the small sample caveats we want or talk about how it’s been done in Arizona, but small steps have to be taken before we see large-scale changes. I’m not saying I’m sold. I’m saying that this is very promising.

Preston Farr at Farm to Fountains writes about “The best tools in the Royals farm system”? Power? You guessed it: Frank Stallone! Oh, maybe not.

Power: Jac Caglianone

This is no surprise to anyone. Caglianone has 70 grade power at worst, and it may truly be the rare 80 grade. He’s the best power prospect the Royals have ever had in their system and one of the better power prospects the game has seen in recent memory, to say the least. “Cags” only hit two home runs with High-A Quad Cities last season, but his time there came after a long college season that saw his team play into the College World Series. There was plenty of fatigue, but even with that, he went to the Fall League and showed off impressive exit velocities. In 2025, Caglianone again lit up the league with a dominant 115.4 mph home run to deep center field. The power itself is enough to put Caglianone on the cusp of the big leagues and may very well get him there this season.

Blog Roundup:

Did you know there aren’t any bird teams in the Cactus league? Blue Jays? Orioles? Cardinals? All in Florida!

We’ve already dabbled in birds this year, talking about Superb Owls. But how about some more general bird talk?

Growing up, my dad was always pointing out birds and later became what I would classify as a casual bird watcher. He wasn’t going to be hiding in a tree with binoculars, waiting for some rare breed to add to his life list. But if a bird watch was an option for a cruise expedition on a trip he took with my mom, he’d likely select it.

I find myself taking to it a little bit, too, as I grow older. I point out some of our local birds and bird calls to my son and he seems to enjoy it. We used to have a little feeder in the backyard and enjoyed watching it. We don’t have the northern problem that if I forget for a day, birds are going to starve, even in winter. But our neighbors cut down their tall greenery in the backyard and replaced it with smaller bushes. Our feeder population dwindled down to nothing and I eventually threw away the old tube feeder that had served us well, what few mechanisms it had, succumbing to the Houston sun.

In the last couple of weeks, I have replaced it with a feeder in the front yard. However, there have been difficulties with that. The HOA has some questionable rules around bird feeders and bird baths so I keep it hidden in our bushes. However, that makes it harder for the birds to find it and easier for the squirrels. Those darn squirrels (oh, hey, we’ll get back to kids books later on this year)! I shouldn’t complain too much, though, as it’s right outside the window in my home office and I get more of a chance to see them now.

The suburb I live in is a weird transition zone where we don’t have a ton of bird variety in our yards. The subdivision is about 20 years old so the trees aren’t very mature. Up north and of Houston are national forests and woodland birds. South and east of us is that thin strip of shoreline bird ecosystem. But we’re kindof in a no-man’s land between the two with a lot of urban and suburban birds but not much else. I’ll list of what we do see and everyone else can compare with what they have.

Our feeder used to be inundated with common House Sparrows and House Finches. The latter are gorgeous red birds – well, the males are – the females are similar to female sparrows. We would also get some curious grackles, but they don’t fit as well. I’ve never been able to distinguish between the Boat-tailed Grackle, Great-tailed Grackle, and Common Grackle. We have all of them and the only one that looks unique is the female boat-tailed. Occasionally, we’d get the jerky brood parasite Brown-headed Cowbird, too. None of these are to be confused with the smaller, shiny European Starling, which is common in Houston proper but I never see them where we live. I think they all liked bugs more than seed and would be more frequent after I mowed the lawn, but they would sometimes feast at the feeder.

I’ve come to really appreciate Blue Jays in the last few years. They are very expressive and have fun personalities. Last year, I had a trio of “teenage” blue jays that hung out in the bushes outside my window. I picture the parent blue jays up in our large oak tree thinking it was a safe place to let their kids play. A couple of years before, there was an incident where I heard a loud commotion outside. Apparently, a squirrel had tried to raid a blue jay nest for tasty eggs and the blue jays were fiercely attacking. They were losing, even with the assistance of a Northern Mockingbird, who I think joined in because, well, they like to fight. I really don’t get what Harper Lee was thinking – our state bird is just a giant jerk. In our backyard, they didn’t care for the seeds, but they loved to go after our fig tree. They wouldn’t eat a whole fig, they’d poke their beaks into a half dozen figs, spoiling all of them. We also got the occasional Red-Winged Blackbird but they only migrate through. Though they don’t stay, their distinctive trill is one of the sounds of Spring here.

Under the feeder, we got a mixture of dead-eyed Mourning Doves and White-winged Doves. Sometimes, a Rock Dove (i.e. pigeon) would get mixed in, as if they had stumbled off course from the city and ended up in a suburb. They were all content to walk around on the ground and pick up what the other birds knocked out of the feeder. They’ve already started doing that in the front yard, too. That’s it! That’s all the birds we saw across the few years with the backyard feeder?

Northern Cardinal? I literally have never seen them in my neighborhood. Meanwhile, at my mom’s house this weekend in a northern suburb, I saw some in her front yard. A male and female pair landed in the tree, only to be joined by another male and then bird drama began. Heck, on a nature trail with a small bit of woods and a city park, each a couple miles away, they are thick. I don’t get it.

I think the American Robin might be the perfect songbird. They are colorful and distinctive. They have an easily recognizable song and seem friendly enough, even if a little territorial. Up north, they seemed to be a sign of Spring. What’s not to like? Back when we had the feeder, there were none in our neighborhood. In the last few years, we started getting a handful of migratory ones. Now we have at least a couple of pairs that live in our neighborhood year-round.

In my childhood, the bird sound I remember waking up to was the Mourning Dove. I think there was one that lived near our chimney so I’d always hear it. For my Iowa-born wife, it was the Red-Winged Blackbird or American Goldfinch (which are really uncommon and migratory only here). What I really miss from Kansas was the distinctive call of the Black-capped Chickadee. While we don’t have those here, we have Carolina Chickadees, which are almost as fun. Maybe this makes me a bad birder, but I enjoy playing their call on my phone and having them call back. A Carolina Chickadee was the first visitor to my new feeder, one day after I put it in. While not attracted to the feeder, this year’s new resident to our neighborhood is the Yellow-rumped Warbler. This colorful bird loves picking my bushes clean of bugs.

I walk my son to and from school most days. We walk by a creek and a couple of retention ponds. These are a good reminder of how close we are to the coast. The ponds are inundated with ducks, particularly the invasive Muscovy Ducks, the ubiquitous Mallard Ducks, the fishing Double-crested Cormorants, the noisy Black-bellied Whistling Ducks, and the occasional American Pekin Duck.

We also have a ton of shore birds. Want a short, white bird? Long nose (White Ibis) or short nose (Snowy Egret). Something taller? White (Great Egret) or blue (Great Blue Heron)? Less common heron that’s shorter? Green Heron or Yellow-crowned Night Heron? How about something a little rarer? Brown Pelican or even the colorful Roseate Spoonbill? Along the shore, we get the noisy Killdeer by ground and tons of Barn Swallows by air. The latter has that unique flying motion that feels more side-to-side than up-and-down. They love to make their mud nests all along the freeways and apartments complexes here.

If anyone can explain this one – we sometimes see a giant flotilla of birds, mostly Cormorants but also some Muscovy ducks and Pelicans while the shore birds look on. They’ll cross a lake in this giant flotilla with the cormorants ducking underwater – not all at the same time, but in shifts. I’m thinking this is some sort of feeding exercise where they chase out schools of fish but I have no idea.

Hmm… what else have I missed? There are some other migrators. Just this week, I saw a flock of Cedar Waxwings. These beautiful birds have a distinct whistle and travel in giant flocks. They’ll fly as a group, noisily take over a tree for a few minutes, and then all take off again. There’s a Purple Martin house near my son’s school that gets packed in the Spring but is vacant the rest of the year. In the fall, we sometimes see Black-chinned Hummingbirds and Ruby-throated Hummingbirds, but they’re hard to spot and they’re not around long. Dad used to see a lot of the rust-colored Rufous Hummingbirds, but we never see them here.

Finally, there are the big birds. We don’t live that far from a landfill so we see many Black Vultures and a few Turkey Vultures. Laughing Gulls also hang around near the dump. A couple of times, I’ve seen a Bald Eagle around one of the lakes, eating carrion. We have some Red-shouldered Hawks, including one that lives in our neighborhood. When they are about, the rest of the birds get real quiet. A few years ago, it picked a House Finch off of the backyard feeder. In the last year or two, a pair of Crested Caracaras have moved into the neighborhood and one of our local birders on Facebook thinks it’s a mated pair and we might be getting more soon. And, while not a predator or big, we do also have Downy Woodpeckers that like to pound away at fifty foot electrical poles.

As you can see, we don’t have a ton of songbird diversity. But, I guess, when we start getting into shorebirds and others, we do have more than our fair share.

Anyone use apps for birds? I’m a fan of Merlin, which is why I keep linking to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology above. It’s fun to turn on the speaker and see what birds it hears.

Does anyone have a life list? I’ve considered it, but I don’t see all that many birds and I don’t know what I’d use to do it.

How about an oldie for our song today? Not the “oldies” they play on the radio now that are 90s songs, but something from 1958. You know, 30 years ago…