Daily Clips
April 13, 2018
LOCAL
Royals' bats can't back Kennedy in defeat
April 12, 2018By Jeffrey Flanagan/MLB.com
Gordon hopes to avoid surgery on hip tear
April 12, 2018By Jeffrey Flanagan/MLB.com
With Shohei Ohtani in town, Royals' altered lineup proves useless in loss to Angels
April 12, 2018By Maria Torres/KC Star
Royals now valued at more than $1 billion, according to Forbes
April 12, 2018By Pete Grathoff/KC Star
Alex Gordon says hip pain is similar to discomfort that required surgery in 2009
April 12, 2018By Sam McDowell/KC Star
For the second straight April, the Royals have been weighed down by an anemic offense April 12, 2018 By Rustin Dodd/The Athletic
MINORS
Redbirds Narrowly Defeat Chasers Again, 5-4
Schwindel hits first home run in loss
April 12,2018By Omaha Storm Chasers
Naturals Shutout Missions In Finale Behind Griffin
LHP Foster Griffin tossed 6.0 scoreless innings and struck out five in the 4-0 victory over San Antonio
April 12, 2018By Northwest Arkansas Naturals
Late Offensive Surge Gives Wilmington Home Opening Victory
DeVito Delivers Go-Ahead Hit in Eighth Inning
April 12, 2018By Wilmington Blue Rocks
Legends Spoil Inaugural Game For GreenJackets at SRPPark with Game One Victory
April 12, 2018By Lexington Legends
NATIONAL
Mauer reaches 2,000-hit milestone with single
Twins legend becomes third player to reach mark with club
April 12, 2018By Rhett Bollinger/MLB.com
MLB TRANSACTIONS
April13, 2018 •.CBSSports.com
LOCAL
Royals' bats can't back Kennedy in defeat
April 12, 2018By Jeffrey Flanagan/MLB.com
Right-hander Ian Kennedy turned in yet another superb performance, tossing six innings of one-run ball.
But the meager Royals' offense, which has been held to three runs or less in nine of their first 11 games this season, couldn't solve Angels starter Nick Tropeano, as Kansas City fell, 7-1, to Los Angeles on Thursday night at Kauffman Stadium.
Kennedy gave up a leadoff home run to Ian Kinsler in the first -- Kinsler's 47th career leadoff homer, moving him into fourth place all-time. But Kennedy shut out the Angels after that, giving up seven total hits and two walks while striking out three. Kennedy owns a 1.00 ERA through three starts, all of which have lasted six innings, this season.
"Definitely a mistake to Kinsler," Kennedy said. "First pitch was fastball down. Second one leaked right over the middle of the plate."
Overall, Kennedy was pleased with his effort on a night he didn't think he had his best stuff.
"I felt it was a little bit of a grind," Kennedy said. "But they're a tough lineup. I mean, you have [Mike] Trout hitting second, [Justin] Upton, [Albert] Pujols. It's tough, but I got what I needed out of some tough situations."
The game got away from the Royals in the seventh when reliever Blaine Boyer was charged with five earned runs -- three of those came when Brandon Maurer relieved Boyer and gave up a bases-clearing triple to Shohei Ohtani.
Boyer (23.14 ERA through five appearances) and Maurer (12.46 ERA through five appearances) are both off to rough starts, but Royals manager Ned Yost said he needs those veteran relievers to establish their roles in the bullpen.
"We're still trying to give opportunities," Yost said. "Tonight was a great opportunity, a 1-0 ballgame, and to stay with Blaine in that situation, second and third and two out … my mindset was I wasn't going to use Tim Hill with us behind again [because] we used him yesterday. [Justin] Grimm was available if we had a lead, [but Brad] Keller was not.
"It came down to those two guys [Boyer and Maurer] that we counted on in the beginning of the year and do count on now to get us through the seventh and eighth innings. Today was a struggle for them to do it."
MOMENTS THAT MATTERED
Soler hangs on: Royals right fielder Jorge Soler made a fine running catch to rob the Angels of perhaps two runs in the third inning. With runners on first and third, Albert Pujols sent a liner into the right-field corner. The hit probability, per Statcast™, was only 23 percent, but the degree of difficulty was there because Soler collided hard with the padding on the right-field wall, went to the ground and managed to hang on for the third out.
Tough luck: The Royals had an excellent chance to bust out of their offensive slump in the fourth inning when Lucas Duda led off with a single. With one out, Duda hustled to third on another single to right by Abraham Almonte. Ryan Goins followed with a shot toward left field (94.9 mph, per Statcast™) that was snagged out of the air by Angels third baseman Luis Valbuena, who then threw across the diamond to Pujols at first to double up Almonte.
"I thought we hit some balls hard," Royals designated hitter Whit Merrifield said. "We had that first and third and [Goins] hit that liner -- if that's a foot either way, it changes the complexion of the game."
HE SAID IT
"Not going to really reveal what our plan was, but I was executing some good pitches." -- Kennedy, on getting Ohtani to go 0-for-2 against him
UP NEXT
Royals right-hander Jason Hammel (0-1, 4.09 ERA) takes the mound in game two of the series against the Angels on Friday night at 7:15 p.m. CT at Kauffman Stadium. Hammel tossed six shutout innings Sunday in a 3-1 loss to the Indians. He will be opposed by Angels left-hander Andrew Heaney, who will be making his regular-season debut.
Gordon hopes to avoid surgery on hip tear
April 12, 2018By Jeffrey Flanagan/MLB.com
Royals outfielder Alex Gordon, put on the 10-day disabled list Tuesday with a left hip labral tear, said this injury is very similar to the right hip labral tear he experienced in 2009.
The big difference this time around is Gordon is not considering surgery, as he did in 2009. The surgery kept him out three months. This time around, Gordon is hoping to return much sooner.
"Honestly, it's kind of the same [as 2009]," Gordon said. "But I feel like I'm in a different stage of my career right now and surgery is the last thing I want to do. Hopefully with the [anti-inflammatory] shot, I can play without pain. I know a lot of guys do it."
Gordon said his conversations with the Royals trainers didn't go in depth on the healing process.
"They're pretty optimistic about it," Gordon said. "The first thing they said is that this doesn't have to be surgery. That's a good sign. You hear labral tear and you get down in the dumps but they said it's no surgery and that's OK."
Gordon said he believes the injury occurred during Sunday's game at Cleveland.
"I slid into second and I felt some pain in my hip," he said. "I tried to stretch it out and thought it was just locked up. But it never went away, and I woke up Monday and it hurt worse."
Gordon said he has had orders to do no baseball activities for a few days, but he is anxious to start testing the hip soon.
"I know that a lot of guys play through tears and stuff like that," he said. "We'll see how it goes. ... I guess my strong suit isn't my hips."
With Shohei Ohtani in town, Royals' altered lineup proves useless in loss to Angels
April 12, 2018By Maria Torres/KC Star
Royals manager Ned Yost weighed the options.
Give guys like Jorge Soler, who led the team with a .375 on-base percentage, a chance to set the tone for the game from the two-spot in the lineup or leave in that spot Whit Merrifield, whose 11 hits ranked second on the team. Continue with a lineup that through 10 games had averaged .188 with runners in scoring position and batted a combined .222, or shuffle it around.
Yost chose the latter on Thursday at Kauffman Stadium, where the Los Angeles Angels arrived for a four-game series with two-way player Shohei Ohtani in the lineup for his second of three scheduled days on offense.
“See if we can stack some more RBIs up there,” Yost said of his lineup.
But the Royals weren’t able to get those RBIs and lost 7-1. Angels starting pitcher Nick Tropeano, making his first major-league start since undergoing Tommy John surgery in 2016, held the Royals to six hits in 6 2/3 scoreless innings. The Royals stranded six baserunners in the first seven frames. They squeaked across their only run on Lucas Duda's two-out RBI single off Angels reliever Jim Johnson in the eighth.
And Ohtani, the Japanese phenom who draws the sort of media contingent that eclipsed 100 Japanese reporters in each of two starts on the mound, delivered the hardest blow to the Royals’ chances in the seventh inning.
Ohtani, a left-handed hitter turned a 97 mph fastball from Brandon Maurer in on the hands into a two-out triple to right-center field that cleared the bases. The three runs that scored on the hit, Ohtani’s first of the game, were charged to reliever Blaine Boyer, who three batters earlier had allowed a two-run single to Kole Calhoun.
Hours earlier, Yost had expressed excitement over seeing what Ohtani could do. Yost had heard that umpire Jerry Davis had told Royals first-base coach Mitch Maier, “Wait til you see this guy. He’s something else.”
“He’s impressing a lot of people,” Yost said of Ohatani and his major-league wares as both hitter and pitcher. “Could be interesting to see.”
But for six innings, there was nothing to see from Ohtani. In his first at-bat, Ohtani was caught looking at a fastball on the outer edge of the plate for one of Royals starter Ian Kennedy’s three strikeouts. In his second at-bat, Ohtani flew out to left field. The Royals took the bat out of his hands his next time up, choosing to pitch to Angels catcher Martin Maldonado with two outs and a runner on second base instead.
Kennedy, who recorded a quality start in his third straight outing, had rendered Ohtani useless.
"Not let him get a hit with runners on," Kennedy said. "Not going to really reveal what our plan was. But I was executing some good pitches."
Kennedy did much of the same with the rest of the Angels’ lineup after allowing Ian Kinsler to knock in the first run of the game on a leadoff homer in the first inning. Although Kennedy gave up seven hits, he stranded eight runners. As he struggled with his command, he only struck out three batters.
But Kennedy, who has a 1.00 ERA in 18 innings this season, was charged with the loss — the Royals’ eighth in their first 11 games.
Alas, Yost's lineup experiment did little to alter the Royals' fortunes.
Soler, who had struck out seven times in eight games, struck out four times on Thursday. Merrifield went 0 for 4 and had a four-game hitting streak snapped.
While Soler struggled to send any pitches fair, Ryan Goins hit four into the field rather squarely: a two-out single in the second inning, a two-out double in the seventh and a two-out single in the ninth. In the fourth, he roped a liner into the left side of the diamond with runners on the corners. Angels third baseman Luis Valbuena snared it and threw out Abraham Almonte, who couldn't get back to first base quickly enough, ending a threat.
Such has been the Royals' luck. They tallied nine hits but couldn't stop the streaking Angels, who won their fifth straight and saw Mike Trout cap a 3-for-4 night with his fifth homer of the season. The 425-foot blast to straightaway center field in the eighth came on the 11th pitch of a battle with Maurer.
"We just can’t get that big hit right now," Yost said.
"There’s no push-button offense that you can say, ‘OK, you’re cold. I’m gonna get you hot.’ They get hot when they get hot. They just keep trying to put together good at-bats."
Royals now valued at more than $1 billion, according to Forbes
April 12, 2018By Pete Grathoff/KC Star
The Royals dropped three spots in Forbes' annual list of Major League Baseball team valuations, which were released Wednesday.
All but one team is worth at least $1 billion, and the Royals are valued at $1.015 billion, which was 27th in baseball. A year ago, the Royals were valued at $950 million, which ranked them 24th in baseball. Two years earlier, Forbes ranked the Royals 25th with a value of $865 million.
David Glass bought the Royals for $96 million in 2000.
It wasn't all good news for the Royals. The Forbes story says the Royals lost $17 million in 2017, one of six teams with an operating loss. Forbes' calculations found the Royals had $245 million in revenue and $64 million in gate receipts.
“The Royals were able to take advantage of the slow free agency market to bring back third baseman Mike Moustakas on a bargain, one-year deal,” Forbes wrote. “The Royals are expected to spend around $120 million in payroll in 2018, a reduction of more than $30 million from last season. One big challenge: What's left is a bare bones roster and a farm system Baseball America ranks as second worst in baseball. To get a few more bucks, Kauffman Stadium will host a concert for the first time in 39 years when Billy Joel performs in September.”
The top five teams on Forbes' list: the New York Yankees ($4 billion), Los Angeles Dodgers ($3 billion), Chicago Cubs ($2.9 billion), San Francisco Giants ($2.85 billion) and Boston Red Sox ($2.8 billion).
“Team values are enterprise values (equity plus net debt) that include the economics of the ballpark but exclude the value of real estate itself,” Forbes’ Mike Ozanian wrote. “We also do not include the value of team-owned regional sports networks. The league's ownership in Major League Baseball Advanced Media (100 percent) and the MLB Network (67 percent) and league's investment portfolio are included in our values. In total, these three assets constitute about $425 million in value for each team.”
Team values
Yankees: $4 billion
Dodgers: $3 billion
Cubs: $2.9 billion
Giants: $2.85 billion
Red Sox: $2.8 billion
Mets: $2.1 billion
Cardinals: $1.9 billion
Angels: $1.8 billion
Phillies: $1.7 billion
Nationals: $1.675 billion
Astros: $1.65 billion
Braves: $1.625 billion
Rangers: $1.6 billion
White Sox: $1.65 billion
Mariners: $1.45 billion
Blue Jays: $1.35 billion
Padres: $1.27 billion
Pirates: $1.26 billion
Tigers: $1.225 billion
Diamondbacks: $1.21 billion
Orioles: $1.2 billion
Twins: $1.15 billion
Rockies: $1.1 billion
Indians: $1.045 billion
Brewers: $1.03 billion
Athletics: $1.02 billion
Royals: $1.015 billion
Reds: $1.01 billion
Marlins: $1 billion
Rays: $900 million
Alex Gordon says hip pain is similar to discomfort that required surgery in 2009
April 12, 2018By Sam McDowell/KC Star
Nine years ago, Alex Gordon opted for surgery. A discomfort in his hip wouldn’t vanish, and so at 25 years old, an entire career in front of him, Gordon chose the long-term route.
This time, he’s hoping a different option will prove just as effective. The Royals placed Gordon on the disabled list on Tuesday with a labral tear in his left hip, an injury he suffered on a slide into second base in Cleveland over the weekend.
Although it’s the opposite hip that required surgery in 2009, the injury is nearly identical, he acknowledged Thursday, his first time speaking with the media since the injury. But rather than going through another operation, Gordon is hopeful a medical injection will solve the discomfort.
“Honestly, kinda the same,” Gordon said when comparing the feeling of the two hip injuries. “But I feel like I’m in a different stage in my career right now where surgery’s kinda the last thing I wanna do right now.”
Gordon, who was hitting .174 (4 for 23) with a double through seven games, felt a twinge as he slid into second base in Sunday’s game against the Indians in Cleveland. He thought perhaps his body had locked up from the cold weather. But when he awoke Monday, the irritation remained.
After diagnosing the injury, the Royals medical staff determined Gordon could rest and return without surgery, an option that many players with labral tears favor.
“Get the shot, hopefully it heels quickly and I can go out there and play without any pain,” Gordon said. “I know a lot of guys do it, so hopefully it responds well.”
After receiving the shot three days ago, Gordon said he already feels “pretty good,” but he’s yet to truly test the hip. He has been prescribed rest.