What Dayton Moore Had to Say About What Went Wrong in 2017

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October 20, 2017

LOCAL

What Dayton Moore had to say about what went wrong in 2017

October 19, 2017By Lee Judge/KC Star

Danny Duffy, through attorney, enters not guilty plea for DUI

October 19, 2017By Rustin Dodd/KC Star

This burger joint is on the radar of the Royals’ Bubba Starling

October 19, 2017By Jill Wendholt Silva/KC Star

Tourette syndrome kids now have answers. Former Royal Jim Eisenreich had few.

October 20, 2017By Andy Marso/KC Star

NATIONAL

Source: Gardenhire picked as Tigers' manager

October 19, 2017By Jason Beck/MLB.com

Brantley could be out 5 months after surgery

Right ankle injury plagued All-Star in second half of season

October 19, 2017By Jordan Bastian/MLB.com

MLB TRANSACTIONS
October 20, 2017 •.CBSSports.com

LOCAL

What Dayton Moore had to say about what went wrong in 2017

October 19, 2017By Lee Judge/KC Star

On Wednesday, Royals general manager Dayton Moore held a press conference and the big news that came out of it is that Rusty Kuntz will no longer be the first-base coach.

I might be screwed.

I once told Rusty it was my job to get as much baseball knowledge as possible out of his head and into mine before he rode off into the sunset. Fortunately, if I have a question I’ve got Rusty’s cell phone number; unfortunately, Rusty assures me he won’t answer when I call.

Nevertheless, Rusty will still be around the organization in a role that has yet to be fully defined, so it sounds like the Royals don’t want to lose that source of baseball information any more than I do.

On Wednesday, Royals general manager Dayton Moore held a press conference and the big news that came out of it is that Rusty Kuntz will no longer be the first-base coach.

I might be screwed.

I once told Rusty it was my job to get as much baseball knowledge as possible out of his head and into mine before he rode off into the sunset. Fortunately, if I have a question I’ve got Rusty’s cell phone number; unfortunately, Rusty assures me he won’t answer when I call.

Nevertheless, Rusty will still be around the organization in a role that has yet to be fully defined, so it sounds like the Royals don’t want to lose that source of baseball information any more than I do.

When asked about the 2017 season, Dayton talked about starting pitching.

The Royals got off to a 7-16 start in April, but Dayton said the offense had a lot to do with that poor start (more on that momentarily). After that, the Royals were about as good as any team in the American League for the next three months.

In May, June and July the Royals played 81 games and went 48-33, which is a .592 winning percentage. The only two teams with a higher winning percentage over the entire 2017 season were the Indians and Astros.

Unfortunately for the Royals, the season is 162 games long, so performing well over an 81-game stretch doesn’t cut it.

After those three months, underperformance and injuries caught up with the Royals and the staff ERA of 3.91 put up in July jumped to 5.89 in August.

Baseball people will tell you that it’s rare for a team to be hitting on all cylinders at the same time, so when the starting pitching scuffles, the other parts of a team’s game — the bullpen, the offense and defense — need to make up for it.

And in 2017, Dayton thought the rest of the Royals’ game wasn’t strong enough to cover for the starting pitching.

The offense in April

In April the Royals hit .210 and slugged .336. For comparisons sake, the Royals hit .279 in July and slugged .462. In 2017, the American League average in those categories was .256 and .429.

So a shortage of runs scored in April — 63 compared to 141 in July — led to that 7-16 record in the first month of the season.

One of the theories thrown around about that first month is that all the spring training talk about hitting more home runs got into the players’ heads and that got the Royals hitters away from their “keep the line moving” style of play.

Like all smart people, Dayton answers the question he wants to answer and that might not be the question you asked.

The home run question never laid a glove on him, but Dayton did talk about hitters expanding the strike zone and chasing pitches. In Dayton’s opinion the Royals did a better job of getting pitches to hit after the first month.

Dayton also pointed out that it’s only natural for players to try to put up numbers when they’re about to become free agents, and that might have led some players to be overly aggressive at the plate.

Taking the bad with the good

Apparently one of the Royals fans frustrated by the team’s willingness to chase pitches out of the zone is the Royals owner, David Glass.

Dayton explained it this way:

The Royals as a group are aggressive players. They run the bases aggressively and play defense aggressively, so it’s not surprising that they’d also be aggressive at the plate.

As everyone who has ever signed a player or gotten married finds out, you don’t get to keep the best traits of a person and discard the others. As frustrating as it might be, people come in complete packages and you have to take the bad with the good.

If Alcides Escobar were less aggressive at the plate, he might not be such a great shortstop on defense.

We like it when Escobar goes to his backhand, then leaps and makes a throw to first base from the outfield grass, even though it’s a low-percentage play and his throw could wind up in the dugout. We’re not so thrilled when Escobar swings at a low-percentage pitch.

But it’s two sides of the same coin.

You can try to get Escobar to be a bit more patient at the plate and convince him a slider at his ankles is not a good pitch to hit, but his aggressive style of play is going to show up in all parts of his game; it’s part of the entire package.

Why didn’t the Royals hold a fire sale?

One of the great things about not running a baseball team is getting to wait until the dust clears and then telling people who do run baseball teams what they should have done.

When they reached the 2017 trading deadline the Royals went for it instead of selling off players to the highest bidders. That didn’t work, so Dayton was asked if he now regrets not holding a fire sale.

Dayton said if the Royals were going to do that, the best time to do it would have been right after the 2015 World Series championship, when the players’ value was highest.

But when Dayton took the job in 2006 he listened to Royals fans and one of their complaints was the team’s habit of trading star players like Johnny Damon, Jermaine Dye and Carlos Beltran.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

The window of opportunity is only open for a short while, so the Royals decided to keep this group of players together as long as possible, let them have their run and see if they had another championship in them. Turns out they didn’t and, depending on what happens in the free-agent market, giving those players one more chance to pull off a miracle might set the Royals back for a few years.

More on that later, when we take a look at what Dayton Moore had to say about 2018.

Danny Duffy, through attorney, enters not guilty plea for DUI

October 19, 2017By Rustin Dodd/KC Star

An attorney representing Royals pitcher Danny Duffy, who was cited for driving under the influence of alcohol in August, entered a not guilty plea on Duffy’s behalf Friday morning in Overland Park Municipal Court.

Duffy’s next court appearance is scheduled for Dec. 1.

This story will be updated.

This burger joint is on the radar of the Royals’ Bubba Starling

October 19, 2017By Jill Wendholt Silva/KC Star

It’s always refreshing to discover a burger joint as beloved in its own hometown as the local sports heroes.

So far, Blazers Restaurant, a diner and drive-thru located at 131 N. Center St. in Gardner, Kan., doesn’t seem to be attracting the attention of the national, regional and metro listicle makers.

Maybe they don’t know about the Bubba Starling connection?

“We’ve been on a couple of those lists from time to time,” says owner Wally Borth who, with his wife, Dawn, took over the burger spot six years ago. “The only thing we did different is clean it up. It’s been here for 37 years in the same site.”

Blazers got its start in an old house back in 1976. The name comes from the local Gardner Edgerton High School mascot, the Trailblazers. The counter-service menu features burgers and chicken sandwiches, fries, onion rings and ice cream treats, such as milkshakes and malts.

The mushroom and Swiss burger ($4.99) is a juicy, ground in-house patty cooked over a flat-top grill and served up on a toasted bun. The onion rings ($2.99 small and $4.29 large) shatter deliciously with each crunchy bite. The tub o’ cherry limeade ($2.39) could have used more lime for my taste, but that’s quibbling.

The handsome grilled chicken sandwich came with lovely char marks ($6.39) and the deep-fried okra ($4.99) was lightly breaded and just out of the fryer. Other items of interest include patty and tuna melts, corn dogs, deep-fried pickles with ranch (chips or spears), as well as a wide variety of fries, tater tops and chips.

Borth’s personal favorite is the chicken-fried steak sandwich on Texas toast with “all the dressings” and American cheese for $7.49.

Blazers has long supported many of the school sports teams, but when the Borths bought the business, the local Trailblazer sports memorabilia had been torn down. They decided to run an ad on Facebook trying to get some of the jerseys, ball caps, helmets and team photos back.

Starling — a two-sport phenom who signed out of Gardner Edgerton High School as a first-round draft pick with the Royals and is now with Class AAA Omaha — contributed several items that now hang under a “Bubba Starling Blvd” street sign.

Whenever he’s back in Gardner, Starling stops by Blazers to have a burger and often orders a chocolate milkshake and a double cheeseburger to-go for his mom, who works for the school district.

“He’s been coming here since he was little ... he’s still grounded and very devoted to his town,” Borth says.

Tourette syndrome kids now have answers. Former Royal Jim Eisenreich had few.

October 20, 2017By Andy Marso/KC Star

When former Kansas City Royal Jim Eisenreich was a kid, he didn’t know he had Tourette syndrome, or even what Tourette syndrome was. All he knew was that he was different, because his body would twitch, grunt and sniff spontaneously. And he didn’t know what that meant for his future.

“Would I ever be able to have a normal life?” Eisenreich said last week during an interview at his home in Blue Springs. “Which meant to me, getting a job, having a family. I didn’t know if I could do that.”

After playing 15 years in Major League Baseball, getting married and raising four kids, Eisenreich, 58, has answered all those questions. He’s also become a national ambassador for Tourette and a hero to thousands of kids who have it.

The story of Eisenreich overcoming Tourette to return to the baseball field as an adult is well-known. But last week he opened up with new details about what it was like to grow up with Tourette in the 1960s and 1970s, and how much things have changed for kids growing up with it now, especially in Kansas City.

Since 2014 the Tourette Association of America has designated nine hospitals across the country as Centers of Excellence for advancing the care, research and education of Tourette and other tic disorders. Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City was added last year, becoming the association’s first center of excellence in the Midwest and the only one at a children’s hospital.

The nine-member Tourette team at Children’s Mercy includes neurologists, a psychiatrist, a family therapist and other professionals. Eisenreich said he’s close to the center’s co-director, psychiatrist Bob Batterson, and has watched it grow into a one-stop shop for families trying to figure out what’s going on and their options for limiting symptoms.

“I mean, we need it, you know,” Eisenreich said. “They just need answers.”

Keith Coffman, a neurologist and the co-director of the Tourette Syndrome Center at Children’s Mercy, said there’s still a widespread misconception that Tourette is a condition marked by involuntary profanity, which happens in 10 percent of cases or less. But it’s changing.

“That’s part of why the Centers (of Excellence) were created, to help change the public perception of Tourette so people who blink their eyes and clear their throats all the time are really the face of Tourette as opposed to what comedy movies have used for years to depict Tourette,” Coffman said.

Coffman said when he started practicing medicine about 15 years ago, the rate of Tourette and other tic disorders was believed to be about three people per thousand. It’s now about one person per hundred, due to better recognition of it.

He and co-director Bob Batterson, a psychiatrist, said much more is known about the neurological and hereditary components of Tourette and the strong correlation between Tourette and psychological conditions like obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Caring for Tourette patients is still about limiting symptoms, rather than treating the syndrome itself. But Batterson said new medications, like Abilify, have shown promise in quelling the tics and there are also new non-drug options that use modified cognitive behavior therapy.

“Do the little Jim Eisenreichs of today have better treatment?” Batterson said. “I think it’s absolutely possible that they would. I think there’s at least better information out there.”

Social costs

Eisenreich grew up in St. Cloud, a city in central Minnesota about an hour north of the Twin Cities. He went to Catholic school, at a time when having tics could get you rapped on the hand.

“I still had nuns for teachers,” Eisenreich said. “Like the stereotype of nuns, it can be a little rough.”

He didn’t want to be a distraction, in school or in church. But he could not sit still. Sometimes his head jerked, sometimes he grunted, sometimes be blinked uncontrollably.

His parents took him to doctors, but Eisenreich said they just told him he had “habits,” and he and his family got accustomed to the tics. He made it through school because he was a good student and his parents were influential in their church and could run interference with the nuns.

But there were social costs.

“As a kid I never went to the movies,” Eisenreich said. “Couldn’t. I would have been the center of attention. So I didn’t go.”

Eisenreich maintained a measure of social acceptance in high school because he was a talented athlete who played football, hockey and baseball.

But the normal teenage insecurities were magnified by his tics. He said he wanted to date, but he was “scared to death” to ask anyone out. It’s one of the things he most regrets about his youth.

“My wife always asks, ‘So you never went to the prom or to homecoming?’” Eisenreich said. “No, I didn’t do that. Deep down, I might have wanted to. But I had to, like I said, hide and escape from that.”

Sports were his refuge and his ticket to St. Cloud State University, where became a baseball star. But he still wondered about his future. SCSU was an NCAA Division II team and playing baseball for a living didn’t even seem like a possibility until his junior year.

A Major League scout was in the stands watching one of his teammates that year when Eisenreich hit a grand slam off a left-handed pitcher from the University of Minnesota.

“He didn’t see the rest of the game, where I was 0-for-4,” Eisenreich said with a laugh.

Eisenreich and his teammate were both chosen in the 16th round of the Major League Baseball amateur draft. Eisenreich was picked by the Minnesota Twins, the team he grew up rooting for.

He was at his parents’ house when the Twins’ representative called. He went outside to the garden where his dad was working and told him as nonchalantly as possible.

“My dad’s eyes lit up and I joke that he set the long-jump record right there over the strawberry patch,” Eisenreich said. “It was like we made it. It wasn’t me, it was like we did. We got drafted.”

Sitting out

The next leg of Eisenreich’s journey with Tourette is probably the most well-documented.

The Twins were going through a rebuilding phase and after just two years in the minors, Eisenreich was called up to the big leagues.