The Sunday Ramble

The Royals are undefeated in Arizona. The Yankees are no longer clean. ESPN broke up with baseball. And the Royals were never seriously in on Nolan Arenado.

Two Cactus League games; two wins in the books. It’s time for a handful of notes on the Royals, along with some general baseball items that caught my attention over the last week.

I was insanely impressed by the Royals pitching on Friday’s lid-lifter with their complex mates, the Rangers. Seven guys combined for 101 pitches total, with 76 of them thrown for strikes. At times, it felt like both teams had late afternoon tee times scheduled with the way the hitters from both teams were up there hacking, but I’m not going to complain. The “Raid the Zone” mantra from a couple of springs ago lives.

There’s not much utility in a pitching chart for seven pitchers, and from the first damn exhibition game, but in this case, I’ll make an exception.

Saturday’s game against the Dodgers was the opposite: an 11-10 slog. Ok, the Royals drew a total of 12 walks, which is impressive. They also swiped eight bags. John Rave provided the dagger, with a two-run triple in the ninth to take the lead. But there should be a law against spring training games that last longer than two and a half hours.

The most impressive player to me in the first two games has been Noah Cameron, who pitched the third and fourth innings against the Rangers on Friday. He lit up the zone, throwing just 13 pitches to get six outs, with 11 of them for strikes. His fastball averaged close to 96 mph, which is about 3 mph faster than what he threw last season. Impressive, especially for his first outing of the spring. If he can maintain that velocity, look out. It will give him around 13 mph separation on his changeup, which is his best pitch.

This spring, the league is experimenting with an automated balls and strikes challenge scheme. The ABS system, which has been in use in Triple-A, allows teams—more specifically hitters or the battery—to challenge a ball or a strike call. Teams get two challenges and keep said challenges if they are correct. It’s a simple, straightforward and quick system. It feels much better than the tomfoolery around instant replay reviews.

I have to wonder about the players and when they decide to challenge…It’s not like there’s a video review guy lurking around giving advice. Players make the decision and have to do it almost immediately. What will happen to a player who consistently makes poor challenges and thus prevents his teammates from making them later in the game? Consider Eddie Rosario against Carlos Hernández on Sunday when Rosario was rung up on strikes and then flushed a challenge for his team on a pitch that wasn’t even borderline.

That was fun.

This at bat was made even better by the fact that Rosario was hit with an auto strike for a pitch clock violation. Just an absolute self-own all around.

I cannot believe I’m going to write about this: The Yankees rolled back their facial hair policy and will now allow “well-groomed” beards.

Where have you gone, Don Mattingly? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

My honest opinion is I’m sad the Yankees caved and have finally, after almost 50 years of this inexplicable rule, joined the rest of the league on this all-important issue. Is there any team in professional sports that is more full of themselves than the Yankees? They don’t have City Connect uniforms because, oh my god, the pinstripes!!! They don’t have names on the backs of their home jersey. Although they do have ads on their sleeves. Money, you know.

I’m for anything that makes this team look foolish, like a pitcher failing to cover first in the fifth inning of a World Series game. Forget pitcher fielding practice! Let’s keep a policy about facial hair in 2025, I say!

Supposedly, this move (which was called “stunning” by The Athletic) was 10 years in the making. Ten years! Can you imagine thinking about beards for that long? Frankly, I’m surprised Bud Selig wasn’t asked to convene one of his “blue ribbon” panels to investigate.

It does give me pause that Johnny Damon and I are on the same side of this incredibly important issue. Although for differing reasons. This, knowing Damon as we do, will not surprise you:

“I think we need to keep it how it was,” Damon said on Instagram Friday, adding, “The Yankees are a tradition. Let’s keep it.”

Ick.

On Thursday, MLB and ESPN agreed to “mutually terminate” their broadcasting agreement that had been scheduled to run through the 2028 season. It will now expire at the end of this year.

There had been rumblings that this partnership was going to dissolve for quite some time. MLB’s deal with ESPN, signed in 2021, was for $550 million per season. It gave the network exclusive Sunday Night Baseball rights along with the Home Run Derby and the Wild Card round of the postseason. With the broadcast bubble all but popped at this point and given deals MLB has struck with Apple for $85 million and Roku for $10 million per season, it’s not difficult to understand why ESPN had buyer’s remorse. A handful of postseason series is not enough to make up that kind of fiscal difference. The contract the two sides agreed to years ago, included this opt-out.

So ESPN basically broke up with MLB, issuing a statement that talked about “discipline” and “fiscal responsibility” and serving their audience on their “platforms.”

Commissioner Rob Manfred, never one to exercise grace in an adverse situation, responded to the breakup by basically saying, “It’s not me, it’s you.”

“We do not think it’s beneficial for us to accept a smaller deal to remain on a shrinking platform,” Manfred wrote. “In order to best position MLB to optimize our rights going in to our next deal cycle, we believe it is not prudent to devalue our rights with an existing partner but rather to have our marquee regular season games, Home Run Derby and Wild Card playoff round on a new broadcast and/or streaming platform.

“To that end, we have been in conversations with several interested parties around these rights over the past several months and expect to have at least two potential options for consideration over the next few weeks.”

I don’t doubt Manfred has those interested parties he notes. He’s a lot of things, but he’s not dumb and this writing has been on the wall for at least a year. Still, there’s no way they’re going to recoup the money they were owed by ESPN. The shot at the network about being a “shrinking platform” is fun in a twisted kind of way.

Manfred also included this parting salvo:

“Furthermore, we have not been pleased with the minimal coverage that MLB has received on ESPN’s platforms over the past several years outside of the actual live game coverage.”

Honestly, I can’t speak to the veracity of this as I have zero reason to watch ESPN unless I’m going to watch an NBA game. Baseball Tonight, once a flagship program on the network, has been off the air since 2017. It has been clear for decades that ESPN is focused on the NFL and programs where hosts scream absurd opinions at each other ahead of baseball. Sunday Night Baseball has been a difficult watch for years as the game feels secondary to everything else. (Which is a shame because David Cone and Eduardo Perez are really good analysts.) While I’m not sad to see the two sides go their separate ways, I fear this isn’t good for baseball in general. Less coverage, even if they weren’t covering enough to start, isn’t ideal.

We know the Royals checked in on Nolan Arenado this winter. Now we know they didn’t get far.

The Cardinals had conversations with at least nine organizations — including some surprises. According to an industry source, multiple teams inquired about Arenado early in the offseason, including the Detroit Tigers, Kansas City Royals and Los Angeles Angels. Those conversations did not yield much, as all three teams were considered non-starters.

…

Arenado wasn’t going to accept a trade just anywhere. Should he be dealt, it would be to a team that had firmly put itself in a position to contend for a World Series or a team that was planning to in the near future.

That’s why talks with the Tigers, Royals and Angels never got off the ground. Those teams were viewed as non-starters by the player, a source described, and no substantial discussions took place.

According to The Athletic, the only teams Arenado considered were the Dodgers, Red Sox, Yankees, Padres and the Astros. He is well within his rights as he holds a no-trade clause, but faced with a Cardinals team that doesn’t want to contend, he didn’t exactly open up his market. I think it’s also clear that he got cold feet about going to Houston once the Astros traded Kyle Tucker to Chicago.

As for the Royals as a “non-starter”…good. Arenado will be 34 this season and is under contract for the next three years. Aside from a 2022 season that appears an outlier offensively, he hasn’t been the same player since he left Colorado. Some of that is to be expected, for sure, although I think most of it has to do with the fact he’s on the wrong side of 30. And given the Cardinals were reportedly looking to offload most, if not all, of Arenado’s remaining contract, that just looks like a loser of a deal for whichever team would acquire him. That, along with his limited market, is why he’s still a Cardinal.

Are you not entertained?