Welcome to Into The Fountains
The inaugural post of a newsletter dedicated to the Kansas City Royals.
So I’ve been kicking this idea around for awhile…
When I started writing about the Royals, they were not a good baseball team. They were just abjectly awful from top to bottom. Abysmal. David Glass was tight with the pocketbook and had a son who meddled in day to day operations. Allard Baird was making bad trades as the general manager. Tony Peña was the manager—and was suddenly taking showers with his uniform on. It was a grim time to follow Royals baseball.
So why did I start writing about such a dreadful team? Well, it was my team. I grew up in Kansas City and followed the Royals almost from the beginning. It seemed like a fun way to pass a summer. A distraction. Who knew?
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There was soon a new manager; then a new GM. The team drafted and (sort of) developed. They improved. And they won. Somehow, they won.
And now there’s a newish owner, a newish manager and a semi-familiar feeling of a rebuild. And I’m still working on this…what did I call it…distraction. In a way, we’ve come full circle.
If you’ve followed my writing for any length of time, you may have clicked links for me at Baseball Prospectus. Or Royals Authority. Lately, it’s been at Royals Review. But not unlike these rebuilding Royals, I have that itch to start something anew. To strike out on my own and take the leap into the latest writing trend on the internet—the newsletter.
Yeah, yeah, it’s kind of cliché—subscribe to my newsletter!—but I’ve missed having my own spot to write whatever I want, whenever I want. So this is the first post at Into The Fountains. The name was chosen because it represents one of the distinctive features at The K, recognizable to any fan of just about any Major League Baseball team. And while fountains aren’t unique to Kansas City, it’s part of our identity. And my hope for this site is that, over time, it too will become a distinctive feature (or voice) in the Royals’ online community.
So really…Subscribe to my newsletter.
I do hope you’ll decide it worthwhile to subscribe. For starters, it’s free! (Maybe in the future that will change, but for the time being…it’s free!) The goal is to have posts published on this site or sent to your inbox by 8 am. And I hope to maintain the flexibility to comment on breaking news of the day. I’m still sorting out some of the features I’d like to include (game recaps? Player profiles? General baseball talk?) so if you have any ideas, drop them in the comments. I don’t want to spam you. I want to present interesting stories that inform and entertain.
As always, thanks for reading. I’ll close—as usual—quoting the immortal Marty DiBergi: “Enough of my yakkin'. Whaddaya say? Let's boogie!”
I would love to see a discussion about traditional baseball stats versus sabermetric driven stats. I believe that both have merit, yet the saber driven group seems to have taken over. For example, obp is valued higher than ba, yet no runner advances to third on a walk. OPS is valued more than RBI, yet actual runs scored is how games are one. Would Mike Trout produce more runs in the 3 hole, because he bats more often with runners on base? Or do the additional ab's generate more runs over the course of a season? I don't know, but I believe it can be measured by someone as passionate about the game as you Craig.