Splash Hits: Cutting the cord
And more thoughts on Bobby Witt Jr.!
And just like that, the Royals have lost three exhibition games in a row, with the team being outscored 32-12. The Cactus League is rough and tumble, man.
It’s been a busy week, so a quick thank you for subscribing and reading. Feel free to share this newsletter with your fellow Royals fans. Opening Day is less than two weeks away!
Let’s jump straight to some random baseball thoughts.
Fox Sports Kansas City announced their broadcast schedule on Wednesday. They will air 161 games this season with a single game set for coverage on FS1 on June 26. They will also rebrand as Bally Sports Kansas City on March 31.
Of course, this is only good news to fans who subscribe to a service that carries Bally Sports Kansas City. Sinclair, the owner of the Bally Sports Network, has dropped their partnership with streaming services such as Hulu, Sling TV or YouTube TV.
The cable and pay-TV landscape are treacherous for the consumer. With so many carriers and so much fragmentation, everyone is scrambling for their piece of the pie. And the actual viewers are the ones taking the loss.
In the case of Sinclair, the owner of 21 regional sports networks, it seems they have a total failure of understanding what these sports networks mean to fans. With rights fees escalating, for most teams all of the games live in one place, meaning there’s only one way for fans of a team to watch the games. I can’t even remember the last time Royals games were available in Kansas City on an over-the-air broadcast. So in order to watch the team, you have to subscribe to a service that carries Sinclair’s networks. And because of their failure to reach agreements with services such as YouTube TV and Hulu, those options are limited.
Sports franchises may be owned by wealthy individuals, groups with deep pockets, or corporations, but their roots will forever be in the communities where they reside. Access to games certainly isn’t a right, but the gatekeepers of the RSNs should have an understanding of what these teams mean to their fans and their communities and act in a way that serves. Instead, rights to sports team’s broadcasts are just a lever for corporations like Sinclair to fill their pockets. I’m not opposed to corporatists making cash, but when Sinclair pulls the plug on multiple outlets and actively limits access to their product, there’s only one explanation that makes any sort of sense: They want even more cash and they aren’t interested in serving fans of sports teams they own the broadcast rights to if they don’t have their demands met.
The viewers are always the losers in this.
The Royals announced that Arvest Stadium, home of their Double-A affiliate in Northwest Arkansas would be the location of their alternate site. Anywhere from 20 to 28 players who participated in spring training and did not make the big league club will be eligible for the site and will prepare for the minor league season due to start in May.
It will be different this time, with players actually preparing for a season, but the Royals seemed to be one of the teams that leveraged the alternate site in 2020 to their benefit, so it’s safe to expect the same routines to be used in Northwest Arkansas. And it’s probably safe to assume that a number of players who have been early cuts in camp will make their way there once the camp opens.
I’ve mentioned this before, but the best thing about spring training stats is the context provided by Baseball-Reference and their Quality of Opposing Pitchers (or Hitters) metric. It’s based on the level the player faced played in the previous season, assigning a number from 1 to 10. Here’s a brief rundown of what the numbers mean.
10 - MLB
8 - AAA
7 - AA
5 - High-A
With that in mind, here are some random Royals with their spring stats and current Quality of Opposition number.
Mondesi and Merrifield are looking strong and it’s coming against about as tough of completion as you will find at this point in the exhibition season. Witt and the other prospects are doing damage generally against competition more suited to where they would be expected to spend the upcoming summer. And Lopez, as mentioned in the last newsletter, is playing himself out of a spot on the 26-man roster.
Again, like all spring stats, OppQual as Baseball-Reference calls it, is a fun diversion. It doesn’t seem to move all that much which, given the small sample of plate appearances in spring, is a little strange. Obviously, the one I’ve been paying the most attention to belongs to Witt. His number hasn’t budged for a week. But we saw Witt hit a dinger off Jose Urías the other day. That’s a 10. In so many ways.
The other takeaway from the table above is the number of PAs Witt has accumulated. His 40 lead the team by a wide margin. Only three other Royals batters have more than 30 PAs at this point. The Royals know what they have and they are aware Witt is pushing his way to the majors. They’re giving him every opportunity to showcase his process and development.
Just something to look at when the numbers don’t mean all that much.
Speaking of process and development and some more on the Bobby Witt, Jr. front (because every newsletter demands an update), I was listening to MLB Radio and an interview with Terry Francona this morning. Francona said something that, on reflection, is obvious, but it feels worth repeating.
Teams are not looking at statistics during spring training. They aren’t going to make evaluations based on 21 plate appearances or a handful of innings on the mound. They are looking at approach. Process. And that naturally had me thinking about Witt. The few plate appearances I’ve seen from him this exhibition season have looked extremely strong on the process, regardless of the results. The things you read from scouts and insiders about his knowledge of the game and level-headedness are obvious when watching him play. And that’s a good thing.
While process is definitely important in a player’s development, once the regular season starts it also has to be about the results. This is the line teams always have to walk with their prospects. The process with Witt is exceptional. If the Royals are happy enough with how that is going that they decide to bring him north with the big league club, how will that translate to results?
Thanks for reading! Talk to you on Monday.