Whoopsie! Ballplayers are just like the rest of us. Anne Rogers wrote about Carter Jensen’s scratch before yesterday’s game:
“Carter had an oversight,” manager Matt Quatraro said. “Overslept. Wasn’t here on time, and we made the decision to scratch him from the lineup. … He’s a stand-up guy, a really hard worker, a great kid. He feels terrible. He’s accountable to it. It’s not something that has been a pattern or any of that kind of stuff. Nobody feels worse than he does, and I think he’ll admit to that.
And we’ll move on…”
“No running from it,” Jensen said. “Just didn’t wake up to my alarm. Slept through it. Don’t really have an excuse, nor should I. It sucks. Happens. I felt like I let my teammates down, coaches down. Just learn from it and know it won’t happen again.”
Slightly awkward after he was profiled by Jaylon Thompson in The Star yesterday:
“It’s just like the eagerness to learn,” reliever John Schreiber said. “You know, it’s awesome for him to have Salvy as a mentor (to) teach him the way, how to go about it up here. (Especially), when it comes to recovery, training, preparation and all that kind of stuff.
“So it’s been awesome seeing the work he’s put in. You know, studying everybody here from the pitching staff and seeing what works with them individually. Just getting to know the new guys and all that good stuff. He’s been on the right path, and it’s pretty cool to see him thrive at such a young age.”
There were some notes going back to Wednesday’s game.
Pete Grathoff had this stat:
OptaStats shared this nugget: “The Royals are the only MLB team in the modern era to have their bullpen allow 8+ walks and 8+ runs in 4.0 innings or less and yet still win the game.”
At the Athletic ($), Dan Hayes noted this:
During an ugly, rainy 13-9 loss to the Kansas City Royals on Wednesday night, the Twins, Major League Baseball’s most aggressive Automated Ball-Strike challenge system team, set season highs for challenges requested (nine), overturned calls (eight) and combined challenges in a game (11).
There was a Sonic Slam.
And there was this nice story:
If you have a subscription to Kansas City Business Journal ($), Thomas Friestad gives an update on where things are with the stadium.
Blogs!
David Lesky ($) wrote about Wednesday’s game:
Okay, now the pitching. Noah Cameron was good. There were some concerns after a rough spring and the fact that he absolutely outperformed his peripherals last year. They’re all valid concerns. But he came out and looked a lot like he did in 2025. He was in the zone a good amount, got a little chase, but not much and got just enough swings and misses. Now, he did get hit a bit hard in his last inning of work, but overall, you’re not going to complain one bit about five innings of one run ball from your number five starter.
The four-seamer is still going to be an issue for me with Cameron if he can’t get whiffs on it. He threw 37 of them, which may have been impacted by the weather. He landed eight for called strikes and got swings on 18 others. The problem is that the Twins only came up empty on two of those 18 swings. And it was hit pretty hard with an average exit velocity of 96.8 MPH. But, again, it’s tough to evaluate because the weather was weird. His spin was way down. He averaged 2,288 rpms on it last year, and it was just 1,915 last night. That’s the weather. He was also having trouble spinning his curve and slider with those rpms down 216 and 877, respectively. So I think it’s fair to assume he didn’t feel great with the conditions. It’s just very difficult to evaluate this one.
Let’s focus on the fun parts first. The offense! Coming into Wednesday’s tilt against the Minnesota Twins, the Royals had scored a grand total of nine runs over their first four games. They more that doubled their output on the young season in a soggy, soupy night at The K where everyone got in on the action, highlighted by the collective production from the outfield. Forget about the much-maligned trio from 2025. It’s a new year, baby.
Jac Caglianone, Isaac Collins and Kyle Isbel, hitting seven, eight and nine in the order, combined to go 8-11, reaching base 11 times. They scored eight of the Royals 13 runs on the night. That’s some top-shelf production. Caglianone, in particular, seemed locked in to the extreme. Each one of his base knocks leaving the bat north of 100 mph.
At Royals Keep, Kevin O’Brien previews Columbia:
The pitching staff may be the strength of this Fireflies team, especially the rotation. Three of our Top-20 prospects will be featured in the Fireflies rotation, including Kendry Chourio (No. 4), Blake Wolters (No. 17), and Michael Lombardi (No. 18).
Chourio is the most high-profile of this bunch, as he struck out 63 batters in 51.1 IP across the DSL, Complex, and Carolina Leagues. He faced more challenges in Columbia, posting a 5.16 ERA and 3.66 FIP with the Fireflies in 22.2 IP. That said, he didn’t have issues striking batters out, as evidenced by his 25% K% in Low-A. He also limited free runners on the basepaths, as demonstrated by his 20.8% K-BB%.
The 18-year-old righty also impressed in the Spring Breakout, impressing scouts with a fastball that touched 98 MPH. He still has to work on his pitch location and shape a bit, which explains why he is starting in Low-A. He could make a move to High-A by midseason if he fixes those issues.
He also previewed Quad Cities.
I have a trio of older stories (from the last week or so) that I don’t think were linked to. These were from blogs that post on a bit of an irregular schedule, but I want to give them a nod:
- Patrick Glancy at Powder Blue Nostalgia: 2026 MLB Predictions
- Hunter Samuels at Swinging Bunts: Let’s Predict Royals Baseball
- Jeff Wayman from The Diamond Chronicles: Royals GBU – The good, bad, and ugly from the first series of 2026
Blog Roundup:
- Darin Watson at U.L.’s Toothpick: This Date In Royals History–1976 Edition: April 2 – The Royals beat the White Sox in spring training, and a blockbuster trade shakes up the AL West
- Caleb Moody at KOK: Latest Royals call-up’s quest to repeat surprise success already off to great start
- Also, Caleb Moody at KOK: Royals fans already clamoring for team to put an end to failed bullpen experiment
I was going to start my Asia Baseball Previews this week.
But, I think we’re going to do something a little different this week. I’ve been having fun reading about the Artemis II mission.
We have a lot of things that divide us as humans and as Americans. Heck, there are even bits of this mission that are divisive. But this is also something that can give us a common purpose. As was stated by one of the astronauts last night: “Humanity has once again shown what we are capable of”.
It’s staggering to think that human beings are back on their way towards the moon. We haven’t left Earth orbit in more than 50 years, basically two generations. One of my favorite tourist things I have done while living here is to go to Johnson Space Center during the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 back in 1969. They had Mission Control set up to look just as it did during that historic moment.
I think today is a good time for one of those resource link dumps.
Want to know where the Integrity capsule is now? The easiest way is: https://www.nasa.gov/trackartemis. It redirects to this site, which shows us where the spaceship is right now. I was writing this part up about 7pm last night, just after the TLI (trans-lunar injection) burn. It went from a few hundred miles above Earth down to about 150 miles and then back out towards the moon. Within a half hour, they were a couple thousand miles away with a couple hundred thousand to go, racing at nearly 20K MPH. By 9pm, they had dropped below 10K MPH and were more than 20K miles away. By the time you’re reading this in the morning, it will probably be over 50K miles down and less than 200K to go.
I’m enjoying the NASA feed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NASA. After the TLI last night, they had a press conference with a couple of dozen questions. I saw Eric Berger, the former Houston Chronicle science editor, best weather blogger in the region, and current ars technica writer. The questions were varied and included things like how the systems were performing, details about the day six eclipse, the toilet malfunction, including jokes about “number one” and “number two”. After that was done, the feed returned to the view from Integrity with radio chatter from CAPCOM. Later on in the evening, there was an interview with the astronauts (it’s interesting to think about the delay during the questions): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myscgUlbua4
The best place to to start is NASA’s front page: https://www.nasa.gov/. It has all sorts of links like “Meet the Astronauts” and news feed: https://www.nasa.gov/artemis-ii-news-and-updates/. They also have multimedia resources (i.e. image galleries): https://www.nasa.gov/artemis-ii-multimedia/. I like this Mission Agenda – it’s a concise list of what’s going to happen each day of the missions: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/nasas-artemis-ii-moon-mission-daily-agenda/. They also have links to social medial like Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NASAArtemis/ and Twitter: https://x.com/nasa.
If you feel NASA updates too infrequently, I’ve started also following Space.com’s news feed about Artemis II: https://www.space.com/news/live/artemis-2-nasa-moon-mission-launch-updates-april-2-2026
Naturally, Artemis II has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_II. I had to go back and correct some of what I typed earlier. For instance, I figured out that “Orion” was the type of capsule, whereas “Integrity” was the specific one being used for Artemis II. Of course, there are other wiki links to the entire Artemis program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Artemis_missions
Here’s some other random links:
- This NASA link shows which antenna arrays are communicating with the crew at any given time: https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/dsn-now/dsn.html
- If the NASA Daily Agenda is too long, Forbes has a nice little timeline with “8 key moments”: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2026/04/02/nasas-artemis-2-timeline-8-key-moments-to-watch-live/
- Time Magazine has a nice little primer on the mission: https://time.com/article/2026/04/01/artemis-ii-moon-launch-what-to-know/
- Not familiar with ISSINFO.net, but they have a nice tracker map, too, that feels cleaner than NASA’s: https://issinfo.net/artemis.html
- I believe this is fan-made, but it’s a cool timeline tracker for the mission: https://www.sunnywingsvirtual.com/artemis2/
- Finally, some space toilet humor from Defector’s Barry Petchesky: https://defector.com/artemis-boldly-goes-where-no-toilet-has-gone-before
I couldn’t decide which Artemis II launch video to pick, so I went with NASA’s brief one that allows for you to scroll around it and look at it in 3D.
