The Royals win on the field and lose at the ballot box

Alec Marsh shoves. Maikel Garcia continues to rake. John Sherman loses big as Jackson County Question 1 goes down in flames.

There was an election in Jackson County and a baseball game in Baltimore. The Royals prevailed in the game, winning 4-1 behind some fantastic starting pitching and some timely hitting. The Royals lost their election by a massive margin.

There’s plenty to cover and I’ll try to make this quick as the Royals and Orioles wrap their three-game series on Wednesday at 12:05 Central. Onward!

Alec Marsh was a force in his first start of the season. When a pitcher throws like that, we like to say he shoved. In Marsh’s case on Tuesday, I don’t think that’s a strong enough term. But let’s use it anyway. The dude straight-up shoved.

First of all, he was generally pitching ahead in the count. Raiding that zone! He faced 24 batters on the night and delivered a first-pitch strike to 18 of them.

For me, the best pitch of the night was the sweeper. It’s a different animal from what we saw last year. For starters, Marsh is getting a touch more spin on the ball. He’s also throwing it a couple of ticks slower. The combination of increased spin with decreased velocity gives it a lot more vertical movement according to Baseball Savant. Around seven inches more. It still has plenty of sweep. Now it has plenty of drop to go along with that sweep. Orioles hitters had a difficult time with the pitch swinging and missing five times and putting only two in play.

One of those sweepers resulted in a run-scoring double off the bat of Colton Cowser in the third. It was a grounder with a little side spin that slipped between third baseman Maikel Garcia and the bag. It was 62 MPH off the bat with a -15 degree launch angle. The expected batting average on a batted ball with those metrics is .050. Baseball is weird, man.

That run was the only blemish on an otherwise outstanding evening for Marsh. He completed seven innings allowing just those back-to-back doubles to lead off the third. The only other baserunner of the night came on a walk with two outs in the fourth. He threw just 76 pitches on the night, 54 of them for strikes. He was ruthlessly efficient. Hell, even three of his five strikeouts came on just three pitches. There’s being in attack mode and then what Marsh was doing on Tuesday.

The location was fantastic as was his mix of pitches. Reining that zone! He balanced his sweeper with his changeup, four-seamer and slider, along with a sinker. I just can’t rave enough about Marsh’s performance. We’ve seen five very strong starts from this rotation thus far and his might be my favorite of the bunch.

It’s fantastic to see Garcia continuing his own personal launch angle revolution. He doubled and tripled on Tuesday, marking the first time in his major league career he’s collected two extra-base hits in a game. That’s astonishing to me given that he played in 123 games last year and was the club’s primary leadoff hitter over the final three months of the season.

Garcia’s double came in the second and was the last in a string of four straight batters to reach against Baltimore starter Cole Irvin. That was worth two runs to give the Royals a 3-1 lead. According to Baseball Savant, the drive down the line in left would’ve left 13 out of 30 ballparks. Chew on that for a moment. The guy hit four home runs in 464 at-bats last year. He came very close to his third in 24 at-bats this season.

In his next at-bat, he knocked one off the wall in right-center and motored around the bases for a run-scoring triple. The Royals scored four runs on the night. Garcia drove in three of them with his extra-base hits.

This development is very pleasing indeed.

With the Orioles starting the left-hander Irvin, Matt Quatraro was able to shuffle his lineup to gain the platoon advantage as much as possible. That meant Nick Loftin, who had a miserable night after entering the game as a substitute on Monday, got the start at second base. He had quite the bounce back, collecting his first two hits of the season to go along with a walk. All in all, he reached base all three times he came up and made a few nifty defensive plays at the keystone.

His single in the first drove in the Royals first run of the night. He walked with two outs in the fourth which brought up Garcia who tripled to provide the final margin. He finished off his night offensively with a line drive single to right in the sixth before exiting for a pinch runner.

Really good to see from Loftin.

Hunter Renfroe got another start and was hitless once again, making him 0-15 to start the season. However, he ran into a bit of bad luck in the third when he smashed a drive to left that was caught on the warning track. The Orioles, as you probably know, moved their left field wall back by a substantial amount a couple of years ago and raised. the height of the wall. Renfroe’s drive went 375 feet and would’ve been a home run in every park in the majors. Except Camden Yards.

That sort of luck can go both ways. Adley Rutschman greeted Will Smith in the bottom of the ninth with a similar shot to left that was flagged down in left. Yep, Rutschman’s ball would’ve been out in 29 of 30 parks.

Friends, the good citizens of Jackson County are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore.

In a defeat that was stunning only in the final margin, the new sales 3/8 cent sales tax referendum to fund $2 billion in magic money for the Royals and the Chiefs went down in spectacular fashion on Tuesday. It was 58 percent no to 42 percent yes.

I wrote this last week:

I think the electorate is better informed after passing separate taxes to fund stadium renovations and to build a new arena. Promises were made in both cases and promises were broken so the fact that this all happened 20-odd years ago means the voters are going to remember. Plus, there’s a general distaste for giving billionaires tax money on top of an already pissed-off electorate in Jackson County…

…all indications are pointing to this going down to the wire. Both sides are sweating the outcome. The deciding factor for me: Never underestimate angry voters.

Turns out the “No” organizers didn’t need to sweat so much. I’ll return to my last sentence above, which was in reference to the way the Jackson County Assessment Department has completely bungled the property tax issue, where property values increased by a whopping 30 percent on average. That’s causing some real pain for homeowners in Jackson County. For a pair of billionaire owners of local sports teams to come knocking on doors asking for money on the back of that fiasco? I’d tell them to read the room but the dudes who have enough cash to own the room usually have others do the reading. Some political consultants ought to be refunding their fees.

The outcome was supposed to be close. It wasn’t. In fact, the vote was so overwhelmingly against it that I kind of doubt that, had the Royals (and the Chiefs) not continually bungled this process with their version of amateur hour, the initiative would’ve passed. Never underestimate angry voters, indeed.

Economist JC Bradbury replied to a Tweet I sent out after it was clear the initiative was not going to pass.

Bradbury has done groundbreaking work on the benefits stadiums provide communities and I absolutely understand why he would think that way. I understand Twitter isn’t the place for nuance, but I think that’s a simplistic explanation for why this went down to defeat. I think the “we’re not giving public funds to billionaires” is certainly a reason some voted no, but as this process evolved, there’s much more at play here to drive the “no” vote.

In addition to a citizenry worn down and betrayed by their county leaders on previous tax issues, the Royals and Chiefs themselves played a massive part in this loss. You have a stadium that is regarded around the game as a jewel that the team’s owner wants to demolish. You have self-imposed deadlines that you miss not by days or weeks but by months. You have concrete cancer in one stadium but not the other. You have businesses that will be uprooted from a beloved arts district. You have an incredibly vague Community Benefits Agreement that was delivered late in the process. Here’s the big one: You have billionaires asking for $2 billion in tax money without presenting a coherent plan for what they are going to do with that money.

“Trust us,” they told the electorate of Jackson County.

“Get bent,” the electorate told them back.

As I Tweeted, this sales tax referendum will be the subject of electoral case studies in universities and political think tanks across the country. I truly believe that. It is astonishing how poorly both teams carried themselves throughout this process. It was an exercise in hubris, incompetence and ineptitude by both the Royals and the Chiefs. It turns out that “give me money today, we’ll tell you how we’re going to use it tomorrow” is a losing gambit.

What now? This is obviously the question on everyone’s mind. Could the Royals leave the area? I don’t think that’s going to happen. This isn’t analogous to the Oakland situation or what was going on in the Tampa area. If the Royals, as an organization, have any kind of self-awareness, they will use this defeat as a learning moment. They held listening sessions last winter where I’m not sure they heard anything. Are they listening now?

I think what is the most shocking to me is that I continue to believe that Sherman bought this team in 2019 with the thought of this new stadium. That he has had almost four and a half years to pull this together and couldn’t come up with anything better than what we saw is alarming. The warning signs were there from the very start. Kansas City and Jackson County politics are difficult to navigate, but Sherman had plenty of time to bring all the parties together with a coherent plan. He just couldn’t do it.

This doesn’t close the door on what Sherman ultimately hopes to do. It kicks him in the ass and sends him a message to be serious. A few drawings aren’t going to push this issue across the finish line. A reassessment is in order. He and his group need to ask for fewer public funds, have some concrete plans that don’t change by the day and, most importantly, details for what they will use those public funds for. Details! It should’ve been simple. Sherman and his group thought asking for a new stadium was enough. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

The vote isn’t the end. Not by a long shot. The Royals will go back to the drawing board and I’m sure Johnson and Wyandotte Counties will come calling. There’s a scenario where this loss turns out to be a positive for the Royals and the greater community, where they ultimately score a better deal from somewhere, although they’d have to be politically savvy to turn this around. After watching how they conducted this entire process, I’m not sure they have that ability. How embarrassing.