Daily Clips
October 19, 2017
LOCAL
Moore reiterates his commitment to Royals
KC general manager not interested in Atlanta GM vacancy
October 18, 2017By Jeffrey Flanagan/MLB.com
Sveum shifts from hitting coach to bench coach
Maier permanently named first-base coach
October 18, 2017By Jeffrey Flanagan/MLB.com
Rusty Kuntz won’t coach first base for Royals next season
October 18, 2017By Rustin Dodd/KC Star
40 years ago, George Brett punched Graig Nettles in the ALCS. Then the game continued
October 18, 2017By Rustin Dodd/KC Star
Why Royals’ Dayton Moore is taking his staff to Atlanta to study Martin Luther King
October 18, 2017By Rustin Dodd/KC Star
Dayton Moore affirms commitment to Royals — and keeps options open
October 18, 2017By Rustin Dodd/KC Star
Royals hoping to win starting jobs next year will keep playing together this winter
October 18, 2017By Maria Torres/KC Star
Royals’ new stadium lights could be used in celebrations in 2018
October 18, 2017By Pete Grathoff/KC Star
Astros’ bullpen collapse had fans sadly recalling Royals’ comeback in 2015 playoffs
October 18, 2017By Pete Grathoff/KC Star
NATIONAL
Royals GM Dayton Moore, staff to study Martin Luther King Jr.
October 19, 2017By Tom Schad/USA Today
Dayton Moore still won’t comment on Braves opening
October 18, 2017By Gabriel Burns/Atlanta Journal-Constitution
MLB TRANSACTIONS
October 19, 2017 •.CBSSports.com
LOCAL
Moore reiterates his commitment to Royals
KC general manager not interested in Atlanta GM vacancy
October 18, 2017By Jeffrey Flanagan/MLB.com
Royals general manager Dayton Moore held his end-of-the-season news conference Wednesday, and eventually the question of the open Braves general manager position surfaced, as one would expect.
And once again, just as he did two weeks ago, Moore reaffirmed his conviction to the Royals organization. He also said the Atlanta job had not been offered to him.
"To me, it's really unprofessional to comment on another vacancy in another organization," Moore said. "I will say this: Nobody has presented that [job] to me. I will say at this point in time I'm extremely passionate about leading, and I'm committed to leading -- not only as a general manager, but in this community as a husband and as a father.
"As long as I get an opportunity to do that, I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. I don't say I do it well, I'm just saying I'm committed, and I'm passionate about doing it."
Moore and owner David Glass spoke for several hours Tuesday, much of the discussion centered on the 2018 Royals, which Moore said is his focus.
"I can't think of [anyone] that would be better to work for than the Glass family," Moore said. "I adore Mr. Glass and the opportunity he has given us. [The Atlanta opening] is not something I think about or something I discuss publicly or privately with our leadership team. We're focused on what we're doing in Kansas City."
Moore also said he understands how rumors about the Atlanta job get started.
"I get the connection there, because that's where I started, so it's natural for someone to ask that question," Moore said. "But again, I don't think it requires me to comment any further about that point."
Sveum shifts from hitting coach to bench coach
Maier permanently named first-base coach
October 18, 2017By Jeffrey Flanagan/MLB.com
The Royals began firming up their coaching staff for 2018 and hitting coach Dale Sveum will switch roles and become the bench coach, general manager Dayton Moore said Wednesday.
Moore also indicated that Mitch Maier, who took over as first-base coach late in the season because of Rusty Kuntz's eye issues, will become the permanent first-base coach.
Kuntz will remain in the organization as either a roving instructor, a job he has coveted for years, or as the team's quality control coach, a position the team is creating. The quality control coach will act as a liaison between the front office/analytics department and the coaching staff.
The Royals at the end of the season parted ways with pitching coach Dave Eiland and bench coach Don Wakamatsu. Kansas City also did not renew the contract of bullpen coach Doug Henry, though Moore has left the door open for Henry to return if the new pitching coach wants him back.
Moore said there is no timetable for the hiring of a pitching coach or a hitting coach, and suggested at season's end that one or both positions could be filled internally.
Rusty Kuntz won’t coach first base for Royals next season
October 18, 2017By Rustin Dodd/KC Star
Rusty Kuntz won’t coach first base for the Royals next season and will instead take another role with the franchise.
Kuntz will be replaced by former Royals outfielder Mitch Maier.
Dale Sveum, who was the Royals’ hitting coach, will be the Royals’ bench coach next year, replacing Don Wakamatsu, whose contract was not renewed.
The moves mean the Royals will be looking for new hitting and pitching coaches after Dave Eiland’s contract was not renewed.
40 years ago, George Brett punched Graig Nettles in the ALCS. Then the game continued
October 18, 2017By Rustin Dodd/KC Star
The clip is grainy. It is short. It is 3 minutes and 22 seconds, to be precise, and it is amazing.
It is 40 years old, too, its anniversary coming earlier this month, and as the baseball playoffs continue in Chicago and New York, it is a window into another time, one hardly recognizable today.
On Saturday night in Game 1 of the National League Championship Series, Cubs manager Joe Maddon was left puzzled and upset after his catcher, Willson Contreras, stuck his leg in front of home plate, allowing the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Charlie Culberson to be ruled safe without ever touching home. Contreras had blocked the plate, failing to provide an unobstructed path for the runner. Culberson avoided a major collision and was vindicated by rule and a replay review.
“It’s sad the direction our game has gone,” Cubs pitcher John Lackey said afterward. “That’s a textbook play by the kid, and he got penalized for it.”
And then there was 40 years ago: Game 5 of the 1977 American League Championship Series in Kansas City, the Royals’ George Brett tripling in the bottom of the first inning, sliding hard into third base and hurling a fist at Yankees third baseman Graig Nettles. The overhand right ignited a wild brawl. The scene ended in the strangest way possible.
Nothing happened. Nobody was kicked out. Both sides dusted themselves off and played out the rest of a decisive Game 5, the Royals losing 5-3 to New York in another heartbreaking postseason defeat.
“He kicked me and I slugged him,” Brett said, matter-of-factly explaining the play. “But I didn’t come into him dirty or anything.”
The melee was the culmination of a heated and physical American League Championship Series, one fought between two bitter rivals across five days in October. It included hard slides and harsh words and a nearly Shakespearean drama between the old guard and a young upstart. But what stands out about the series now is not just Kansas City’s Hal McRae catapulting himself into Willie Randolph at second base in Game 2 or the trash talk of Yankees manager Billy Martin (“It won’t take us long to win it this year,” he said before the series). It was how normal it seemed then.
“They beat us last year because we didn’t know what we were doing,” Brett told reporters before the series. “We know what we’re doing now.”
Forty years later, the clip is still short and still grainy and it lives forever on YouTube, where an MLB licensed video has more than 345,000 views. In the comments section, viewers marvel that no one was ejected.
“UNBELIEVABLE,” a user named Skelter wrote. “Nobody got ejected.”
Yet even now, with the Yankees back in the ALCS and baseball a billion-dollar industry, with the game sanitized and corporate and smooth at the edges, it is worth another look.
It begins on the night of Oct. 9, 1977, the ALCS tied at two games apiece, the Kansas City hosting New York at then-Royals Stadium. With one out in the first, McRae singled off Yankees starter Ron Guidry. Moments later, Brett saw a pitch up from Guidry and clubbed a line drive over the head of center fielder Mickey Rivers.
The baseball bounded off the AstroTurf and up against the center-field wall. McRae scored easily as Brett sprinted around the bases, sliding hard into third base. In Brett’s memory, it was a bang-bang play. As he slid into third, he popped up at the bag, falling awkwardly into Nettles, the Yankees’ veteran third baseman.
By that point, the series had already been shaded with controversy. The verbal sparring came first. Then McRae laid out Randolph with an infamous body block in Game 2. Then McRae and New York’s Cliff Johnson nearly came to blows before Game 4. Then Nettles came in hard against second baseman Frank White in a Yankees victory in the same game.
This was the mood when Brett arrived at third base in the first inning of Game 5. And then, with Brett on all fours and Nettles knocked off the bag, the Yankees’ third baseman slyly lifted his left foot in the air and smacked Brett in the face.
“Nettles didn’t do anything,” said former Yankees announcer Phil Rizzuto, as he watched the replay live. “And … oh, there he did. Yep, he kicked him.”
Brett was incensed. He hopped to his feet and wound up for a haymaker. He connected with a glancing blow before third-base coach Chuck Hiller grabbed Nettles around the neck and Brett around the shoulder, hoping to separate the two. Moments later, Nettles and Brett, along with pitcher Ron Guidry, tumbled to the turf at third base. The scene turned into a scrum as both benches emptied.
“What you gonna do when someone kicks you in the face?” Brett told The Star after the game. “You gonna lay there and say, ‘kick me again?’ No.”
“If the same things happens next year,” he continued. “I’ll do it again.”
In the moments after the punch, it was madness. Brett remembers the late Yankees catcher Thurman Munson covering him up at the bottom of the pile, protecting him from cheap shots. Forty-eight seconds in, the camera cuts to Martin, the Yankees’ manager, standing with his left arm wrapped around Royals shortstop Fred Patek. First baseman John Mayberry appears from out of the frame, wrapping his paws around Martin. Together, all three surveyed the scene.
At some point, Martin found third-base umpire Marty Springstead, who delivered the news: There would be no ejections.
“Nettles thought he was pushed,” Martin said after the game. “And Brett came up swinging.
“Springstead told me he wasn’t going to throw Brett out. This is a championship game and not the time to be throwing players out. If this game would have been played in July, Brett would have been gone.”
Brett was not gone, but the decision would not save the Royals. They would waste a 3-2 lead in the ninth inning and lose 5-3. They would wait three more years before breaking through and making their first World Series.
Four decades later, Brett still marvels at the old video. These days, he says, you’d be ejected and suspended for a week. These days, the story would go nuclear on social media and Twitter. It would lead the postgame show and dominate talk radio the next day. A fight between an All-Star and a future Hall of Famer in a decisive game of a playoff series? Can you imagine that?
But on that night in Kansas City, none of that happened. The umpires calmed the situation. Royals manager Whitey Herzog gave Brett a quick chat. Brett took a deep breath as he stood on third base. Both teams returned to the dugouts and the relievers trekked back the bullpens in left and right field.
“Well, the batter will be Al Cowens,” Yankees broadcaster Bill White said, as the camera cut to the left-field bullpen. “The Yankees will have to bring their infield in. Neither Brett nor Nettles thrown out of the ballgame.”
Why Royals’ Dayton Moore is taking his staff to Atlanta to study Martin Luther King
October 18, 2017By Rustin Dodd/KC Star
The idea was born last summer. The inspiration hit all at once. On a steamy July day in Atlanta, Royals general manager Dayton Moore had taken his teenage son, Robert, to the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood near downtown.
Moore had long admired the civil rights icon, he says. Captivated by King’s leadership and fascinated by his faith life, Moore held his teachings and life in high esteem. But as Moore toured the center and learned more about King’s life, he had an epiphany of sorts: His staff needed to see this, too.
So on Monday, Moore and the rest of the Royals’ baseball operations department will fly to Atlanta and spend four days in the city. The traveling party will consist of close to 20 people, from assistant general managers to scouts to directors of analytics. The itinerary includes meetings on character and leadership, race relations in the United States and a close study of the life of King, the Baptist minister and civil rights activist.
“If you’re living and breathing, you all understand that there’s issues that we encounter daily,” Moore says. “And I’ve always been a great admirer of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And so I think he’s one of the greatest leaders our country has ever seen. So I think it makes sense to study him.”
This is how the Royals’ front office will begin a pivotal offseason that could define the next decade of baseball in Kansas City. This is where the organization’s brain trust will retreat for a week before the chaos of free agency takes hold in November.
The club will ration its baseball discussion in Atlanta, Moore says. There will be some of it, of course. Put enough baseball men together and that’s unavoidable. But the focus will be on leadership, on philosophy, on molding the minds who will guide the franchise into the future.
“This is something I want our baseball front office to be a part of,” Moore says.
Most Major League Baseball front offices are hardly bastions of diversity, of course. Moore understands this. The Royals have worked to be different, though, and in 2017 the organization featured minorities in three senior baseball operations positions directly under Moore.
But this is just part of the issue. Moore points out that he was born in 1967, one year before King was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn. In the baseball operations department, he’s one of the few with gray hair.
“I’m one of the older guys in the office,” Moore says. “We didn’t grow up in the civil rights era. I certainly remember studying it a little bit. But I want us to study that. I want us to understand what other people experienced the best way we know how.
“No matter what you try to do, it’s hard to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. You can only really look at life through your own eyes.”
For Moore, the point extends beyond race and culture. He wants his assistants and staffers to be curious, to be open-minded to new ideas and perspectives. The game of baseball, like any industry, is always evolving and morphing and innovating. The Royals have to embrace that.
“When you’re in a leadership position,” he says, “and you’re expected to hire people, and you’re expected to embrace diversity and different culture and different races and all different walks of life, and people with great wisdom, and young people coming into the game with new ideas … if you really want to embrace and respect diversity, you need to study it.”
The challenges of the Royals’ offseason will not be solved over the course of three or four days, of course. In early November, the club will watch Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Lorenzo Cain and Alcides Escobar become free agents for the first time. Club officials will wait to see what the market bears. They are already weighing their options and mapping out plans.
The Royals are expected to prioritize Hosmer and look for creative ways to be competitive in 2018. But internally, club officials are already bracing for a rebuild that could span the next two to three seasons. The plan could include banking resources in 2018 and 2019, waiting for a new television contract to juice revenues and aiming for contention in 2020 or 2021. But the end goal, Moore says, would ultimately be sustainability.
“We don’t want to be in a situation in 2021 where we win for four or five years,” Moore says. “Let’s figure out how we can do this better and have winning baseball for 10 to 12 years in a row.”