MLB Pipeline updated their top 100 list and there are now 3 Royals on it:
54. Kendry Chourio
70. Josh Hammond
84. Angeibel Gomez
However, in their story about the updates, I can’t help but notice something:
A year ago, we added a dozen members of the Draft Class of 2025 to the Top 100, the same number that was added in 2024. This time around, we’re being a bit more stingy with spots, putting just 10 from the most recent class on the Top 100, though two of them are debuting higher than anyone from last
year’s Draft crop did.
10. Grady Emerson, SS, Rays (No. 2 overall pick)
11. Roch Cholowsky, SS, White Sox (No. 1)
19. Vahn Lackey, C, Twins (No. 3)
31. Jackson Flora, RHP, Giants (No. 4)
40. Eric Booth Jr., OF, Orioles (No. 7)
41. Drew Burress, OF, A’s (No. 8)
64. Tyler Bell, SS, Rockies (No. 10)
67. Jacob Lombard, SS, Marlins (No. 14)
91. Derek Curiel, OF, Pirates (No. 5)
97. Gio Rojas, LHP, Rangers (No. 16)
So, if the Royals had picked either of the players who went after them (Booth, Burress), they’d have 4 Top 100 prospects today instead of 3. I get that where they end up is much more important than where they are today. But early returns are less than ideal.
Looking at the new Royals Top 30 list, this is where their picks from this year landed:
- Pick 006 (1st) Zion Rose (6th)
- Pick 030 (CB-A) Taylor Rabe (9th)
- Pick 056 (2nd) Jack Slightom (12th)
- Pick 091 (3rd) Maxx Yehl (22nd)
- Pick 119 (4th) Dominic Battista (27th)
- Pick 269 (9th) Camden Johnson (23rd)
I’m definitely no prospect guy. There are people on this site good at that. I’m not. So maybe this is a really stupid read of it all. But it doesn’t look great, using my non-expert eyes.
Rose was picked under slot and ranked accordingly. It’s not like he’s 101st on the new top 100 either, as David Shields and Blake Mitchell ranked higher than him in the Royals system and I doubt Mitchell, in particular, was close to the top 100. But most of that underslot money went to the #89th ranked guy (Slightom). They picked him at 56th, and gave him more than $1M over slot and he only slides in at 12th. Wait, so you picked a guy well below his ranking /and/ had to give him a bunch over slot? Yikes. They had enough left over to give Camden Johnson over slot and he comes in at 23rd. But because they had to give Slightom so much, they didn’t have enough to sign their other potential overslot, 19th-rounder Hudson DeVaughan.
But, hey, that’s just one ranking system. And rankings are finnicky. Let’s see where Baseball America has the Royals in their newest rankings:
(scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll)
- Kansas City Royals Royals Top 30 Prospects
Preseason Ranking: 21
Midseason Ranking: 19Current Top 100 Prospects: RHP Kendry Chourio (No. 33), OF Angeibel Gomez (No. 47), SS Josh Hammond (No. 55)
Key 2026 Graduations: C Carter Jensen, RHP Mason Black, RHP Beck Way, RHP Luinder Avila
2026 Prospects Traded Away: None
Key 2026 Additions: Gomez, OF Zion Rose, RHP Taylor Rabe, RHP Jack Slighton, RHP Maxx Yehl, RHP Lucas Braun, LHP Carter Holton
The Skinny: The Royals have a trio of top 60 prospects for the first time in a while, but the group of players right behind them need to take a step forward.
So you’re saying that having a draft that isn’t highly regarded and then holding onto all of your players at the deadline despite being 20-odd games below .500 is not great for your rankings? The most disheartening thing to me was that they had been creeping up the charts over the last year or so. But it feels like they gave a lot of it back.
Anne Rogers profiles the brightest youngster in the org, Kendry Chourio:
This year, he’s been dominant. Chourio has a 2.06 ERA across two levels, first posting a 1.88 ERA in 11 starts for Single-A before a promotion to High-A in June. In Quad Cities, he has a 2.35 ERA, with 35 strikeouts and just five walks in 30 2/3 innings. MLB Pipeline’s No. 65 prospect, he pitched in the Futures Game during All-Star festivities this year. At a career-high 78 2/3 innings, Chourio hasn’t pitched since July 25, but will get back on the mound as early as this week, part of a long-term workload plan.
The only 18-year-old to pitch for a High-A affiliate this year, Chourio is clearly talented, armed with a 94-98 mph fastball and a curveball, changeup and slider. His pitchability is advanced already and something he’s continuously improving.
“The goal is to not throw hard, it’s to have pitchability,” Chourio said. “With all [my] pitches, to have a motive behind every single one of them. Whether it’s a fastball, making sure the location of the pitch is good. Making sure you get the curveball in the zone, and executing the changeup, throwing it in or out of the zone.”
ICYMI: Royals sign former All-Star pitcher Tony Gonsolin
At The Star, Jaylon Thompson profiles Randy Dobnak. Just a reminder that minor league players make next to nothing and have to moonlight as Uber drivers to pay the bills.
Long before Randy Dobnak became a shooting star in a lost galaxy that is the Kansas City Royals 2026 campaign, he was scrolling through available rides on his local Uber app.
It was a source of income. And for Dobnak, a chance to nurture a lifelong dream that hadn’t begun to bear fruit.
“I’d drive around Pittsburgh for a little bit just to see how it was,” Dobnak said. “Make some extra money because we didn’t make much at all in the minor leagues.”
Here’s a couple of stories from The Athletic ($) that aren’t specifically about the Royals but do talk about Royals players.
Eric Hosmer writes about the “3 best leaders” he played with:
Raul Ibanez, Royals outfielder
…In 2014, he gave a speech to us. We were playing against the White Sox, and we were in the crappy clubhouse they have on the visiting side.
He basically talked to us about what opposing teams thought of us: Did we realize how good we were? Did we realize other teams fear us?
For us to hear that was so important. We were all young on that team, and Raul had just gotten done hitting ninth-inning homers for the Yankees a couple of years before.
It just clicked for all of us: This guy’s a legend so if people really do think of us like that, maybe we’re really good and we should play with some confidence.
I’ll never forget that speech.
Rustin Dodd wrote a really interesting story about the yips.
John Buck, a former major-league catcher, told me an even weirder story. Buck played in the big leagues for 11 seasons. But one year he suffered a concussion, and as he tried to recover, he started overthinking. When he returned to the field, he struggled throwing the ball back to the pitcher, a real-life example of Rube Baker, the young catcher with the yips in the film “Major League II.”
When the game was live, Buck could throw a dime to second base to cut down a base stealer. But when it came to softly tossing the ball back to the pitcher, he felt paralyzed.
“If there was a foul ball and the ball was dead, I was very conscious and I would have to whip that s— back at the pitcher like I was throwing it to second,” Buck told me. “How weird is that?”
This is probably where I’d have written about the Field of Dreams game. Like, for instance, it was a giant Hall of Fame festival with 26 members in attendance:
This was the largest such gathering at a ballpark, not including the annual ceremonies at the Hall of Fame in upstate New York, since the All-Star Game in 2008 that feted the final season at old Yankee Stadium.
Of course, I couldn’t see it as it was on Netflix. But, hey, MLB got an extra couple million bucks for it over showing it on Fox where anyone with a TV could see it.
(There’s also a rumor that the Royals will be playing the Red Sox for the Field of Dreams game next season, but it’s not confirmed.)
Speaking of which, NBC now has the rights to the Wild Card round. On the positive side, two games per day will be broadcast on NBC. On the negative, the other two will either be on NBCSN or Peacock.
Since there’s not much Royals news, how about one more story from around the league, concerning another AL Central team, the Tigers. Ben Clemens asks whether the Tigers would have been better off if they had kept Tarik Skubal, et al:
The Detroit Tigers are one of the hottest teams in baseball. Since the calendar flipped to August, they’ve gone 7-3, scoring more than six runs per game in the process. In a muddled American League, that puts them right in the thick of the AL Central and Wild Card races. That, in turn, means they’re back in the hunt for a World Series ring. This burst of activity has them about as likely to make the playoffs (and win a ring) as they’ve been in the last few months, in fact; they’re back above 30% to reach October after dropping as low as 18% the day they traded Tarik Skubal.
That feels weird! Less than two weeks ago, the Tigers traded their best player, perhaps the best pitcher in baseball, for three prospects. They followed that up by trading Casey Mize, who had briefly inherited the title of top Tigers pitcher. It was a classic deadline sale – not a thread-the-needle plan with some additions and some subtractions, but a declaration that the plan was to get ‘em next year, and the years after that…
…Next, I got even more theoretical. I took some distributional studies that got left on the cutting room floor when I updated prospect valuations and worked out, more or less, the odds that prospects of the caliber traded for Skubal and Mize would turn into average regulars or better, plus the average WAR per year delivered in those outcomes. I also looked at the last six years of Tigers teams to figure out how many extra wins adding players like that to replace weak links would be worth (limiting those weak links to the rotation and the outfield, to match the prospects). I worked out that the guys traded to the Tigers project to boost their average projected wins by around 1.2 per year.
At this point, I’ll stop and point out that I’m doing a lot of approximating, so the error bars are large here. But with that caveat, we can do the math. Say that the Tigers bounce around between 78 and 90 projected wins for the next six years, and take the average of those World Series-odds-per-win sensitivities. Multiply that by the 1.2 wins per year I think the extra prospects are “worth.” Multiply that by six years of team control. You get an added 3.3 percentage points of World Series odds, comfortably more than the boost they’d receive from having Skubal and Mize the rest of the way this year. That might understate it, too. If the Tigers didn’t sell, they likely would have bought, but probably only on the margin, considering where they were in the standings and their underperformance over the first four months of the season. The risk of going all-in would have been too high. While we don’t know the counterfactual there, it’s reasonable to think that it would’ve made their future teams even a little worse, for small present benefit, amplifying the effect I’ve already measured here.
It’s weird to think that the high-level prospects only increase their chances by 1.2 wins per year. Then again, new players don’t just take an empty spot on the field, they replace an existing player who might be good or bad. I’m not entirely sure I buy it – as Clemens says, he does “a lot of approximating”. I only gave you the beginning and the end above – go read the rest, if you’re curious. It’s an interesting thought exercise.
But, hey, we’re reached the “Onion is clowning your team” stage of a lost season:
Blog Time!
Craig Brown takes us through Wednesday’s game via his scorecard:
My scorecard of choice when I’m at the ballpark is the Eephus League Halfliner. I use a Blackwing 602 pencil. I told you…I’m deadly serious about keeping score. I never use a pen. My penmanship is terrible, so I’m often dissatisfied with how something goes on the paper so I use the eraser for a re-do quite often. I also make plenty of mistakes.
For tonight’s exercise, I’m scoring on an iPad using a file from Lou Spirito’s THIRTY81 Project. I’m enough of a sicko that I’ll keep score at home sometimes and I use his printed PDFs when I do. This is my first time scoring on an iPad, so we’ll see how it goes! There is a high level of confidence that it will not replace my pencil and paper.
I used to take score at every game I went to. However, once MLB went to its draconian bag policies in most stadiums, I gave it up because it became such a hassle 🙁
At Royals Keep, Cory Moen looks at “Royals Prospects Who Could Make Their Debut In August Or September”. He suggests Lucas Braun, Gavin Cross, and Hunter Patteson, adding “Other MLB debuts that are possible include IF Jacob Berry, catchers Luca Tresh and Elih Marrero, and RHP Ben Sears.” Wait? Gavin Cross is already 25?
Blog Roundup:
- Mike Gillespie at Royals Keep: Three More Questions The Royals Can Answer Down The Stretch
- Darin Watson at U.L.’s Toothpick: This Date In Royals History–1976 Edition: August 13 – Of all the ways to lose a game…
- Caleb Moody at KOK: Royals losing Salvador Perez to injury would be more detrimental than some might want to admit
- Jacob Milham at KOK: Royals Minor League Update: Breaking down KC’s busy week of prospect promotions
Unfortunately, no long, crazy OT today. I’m already over 2500 words. Also, I just can’t quite nail down a couple of OTs that I’ve been working on. They’re each just missing something, so they’ll have to wait a couple of weeks. Also, I’m out next week.
But I do have a couple of updates on old OTs. And we’re also doing an (abbreviated) old-school Song of the Day!
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Last week, we fell down an internet rabbit hole, trying to figure out the stats for the water rides at Schlitterbahn New Braunfels. At the end, I wrote: “Not perfect, but not bad. I think I’ll try to email Six Flags and see how I did (if they respond).” I did email them last week, and they have yet to respond. Bummer. I’m sure there’s some crazy old guy who knows all this stuff because he was there when it happened. Sadly, the email never made it to his desk.
* * * * *
I’ve done a couple of OTs about buying tickets for the LA28 Olympics.
If you’re bored of this (I can believe it), just skip ahead to SotD. I’m an awful judge of what people want to read about. I can see how this is as exciting as reading about someone else’s Fantasy Football league or someone’s weekly sports betting wins and losses. However, for me, personally – it’s been a fun mental exercise and a bit of an emotional ride, so I’ve just been letting it out in Rumblings.
When last we left ticketing, the Visa presale had just wrapped up ahead of the Phase 2 drop (Drop 2? I’m not entirely sure what the official terminology is). In Phase 1, there was a locals presale and then no ticket restock ahead of the proper Phase 1. Conventional wisdom was that Phase 2 would be the same with no restock following the Visa presale.
If you remember (you probably don’t and have long since lost interest), I estimated that 30-40% of the tickets were gone in Phase 1 and another smaller (10-20%) disappeared in the Visa Presale. There was also a small drop for former Olympic athletes, but I have to think that’s a very small number of tickets. That said, I think we’re well past half the tickets gone, and the drops are going to get smaller and smaller with what’s available.
I have been on the LA28 mailing list since January 2023 and have yet to be selected for any lottery. C’mon, guys!
In Phase 1, my wife got the last possible spot. Not much was left, and we only picked one set of tickets. This time, she was selected for the first slot at 10am PT on August 10th. If there was a restock, I’d have a chance at some great and/or cheap tickets. If not, we’d probably just wait until next time.
With that in mind, I went back to work on the spreadsheet. We still have nothing for Sunday, Monday, or Wednesday, and there are a couple of other gaps on the schedule. I made large lists of events to consider, but we already had most of our big anchor events. In retrospect, I didn’t narrow things down enough.
On Monday, I took everything I had learned from the last drops and logged in as fast as I could. I still had to wait 20 minutes in the second queue, but I was in faster than most. Then the big moment: they had restocked!
But things were going fast. I checked Opening Ceremony first as that’s the only real “dream” item left. There were tickets, but they started at over $1000. I just can’t do that. After striking out on the baseball finals last time, I checked those. There were sub-$300 tickets and I tried to add them. No luck. Someone else (many someones?) was quicker and sniped them before I did. The next highest category went fast, while I was still deciding how high I was willing to go. At that point, the cheapest ticket was $500+. I had to let that dream die.
My wife was hoping for women’s gymnastics. Since I spent my first precious moments searching for Opening Ceremonies and the baseball finals, any gymnastics finals seats were “long” gone. Maybe there were $1000+ seats, but that’s as good as “gone” in my book. The prelims were into the $400+ range. If I had to do it over again, I would have gone there first and probably could have snagged some for half that or even less, and it would have been our anchor event on Sunday.
Wednesday the 19th is a wild card in our schedule. I had been holding it open for the baseball finals, but that’s looking increasingly unlikely. Maybe we’ll just fly out a day earlier than planned and save some money. Well, there was one “backup” event that my wife was really wanting and I was also excited for. When I saw reasonable tickets available, I quickly added them to my cart. I guess we’re not flying out early. We’re going to end our Olympic experience at the Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area, watching the Women’s Street Skateboard Finals. That’s going to be awesome!
Once tickets are added to your cart, you have 30 minutes to check out. We’ve had the pre-Opening Ceremony Wednesday (12th) and Thursday (13th) planned for a while and have 3 of the 4 tickets already. The last thing I was missing was Wednesday morning Water Polo in Long Beach. There were some of those elusive $28 tickets. Yes, please.
I started looking at some more $28 tickets. However, I noticed I only had about 3 minutes left in my cart. What? I had added tickets less than 5 minutes before. I should still have 25 minutes. Apparently it glitched – maybe it was when I tried to add the baseball tickets. This meant I had to quickly check out or risk losing the skateboarding and cheap water polo tickets. I put in the payment information just in the nick of time.
Here’s what our schedule looks like now (have bolded; parens are TBD):
- TUE JUL 11 FLY IN – NO EVENTS
- WED JUL 12 Long Beach prelims: AM Water Polo, PM Handball
- THU JUL 13 Carson: AM Field Hockey prelim; PM Rugby quarters
- FRI JUL 14 AM Rest; (Opening Ceremony/Party)
- SAT JUL 15 DTLA: AM Men’s Gymnastics prelim; PM Track medal: w 100, m 10000, w shot put; lots of qualifying PM
- SUN JUL 16 TBD: (Potential Rest Day?)
- MON JUL 17 TBD: (Rest Day/Any other events?)
- TUE JUL 18 (AM ???); PM Baseball Semis at Dodger Stadium
- WED JUL 19 (AM ???); PM Women’s Street Skateboard Finals
- THU JUL 20 FLY OUT
Once I checked out, the system kicked me out, and I had to go back into the queue. That 20 minutes cost me chances at a lot of what I had been considering. There were still a lot of awesome tickets left. But I’m down to just a couple of days’ worth of schedule: Sunday and Monday. However, I was too slow and indecisive and I watched tickets evaporate. If I could go back in time, I know a couple of things I’d jump on, particularly as this is probably the best drop time we’ll get in these ticket sales. But I can’t. Besides, we’ve already had much better luck than I could have hoped for. We’re still under budget and with a lot of events we’re happy with. Even if we don’t add any more tickets before the games begin, I’m more than happy. The efficiency part of my engineering brain is annoyed that I was inefficient. But there’s no way I could possibly be disappointed with what we have.
If you’re curious what the ticket market looked like as each day passed and why lottery slot was really important. Here’s a couple of Reddit threads from Monday night, Tuesday, and Wednesday. You can see how tickets are bought up and sports become unavailable. Or pick a sport with lots of inexpensive tickets to start and how they just become more expensive by the day.
In theory, this is the last ticket Phase of 2026. No one is really sure if there’s going to be one more lottery Phase in 2027. If not, the last large tranche of tickets will probably be part of a first come/first served free-for-all, possibly with dynamic pricing. Also, the resale market opens in 2027.
As I mentioned above, we’re going to do an old school (albeit slightly abbreviated) Song of the Day!
I was never good at skateboarding. I was a tall, lanky, and awkward kid – that is not the body type for skateboarding safely. But today’s SotD game is from a legendary name in the sport and an iconic series in video game history. Today’s featured game is Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater for the PlayStation.
As I get older, I absolutely love the “You look like an old ‘Tony Hawk’” phenomenon that follows the skateboarding legend around. Also, I love the fact that his son married Kurt Cobain’s daughter and a kid who can’t possibly live up to that legacy as the coolest human being to ever walk the earth. Then again: who knows? Maybe he’ll be so awesome as to save the entire planet Wyld Stallyns-style. We could use that.
Much like my forays into real-life skateboarding, I was never great at this series. But I could appreciate the novel approach to gameplay that Neversoft built the franchise on. I also feel like it’s been a little lost to time, though it did get a remake a few years ago.
I know I’m featuring a video from the first game, but the second and third are two of the most critically acclaimed games of all time (quotes from Wiki):
- “According to Metacritic, it holds a score of 98/100, making it one of the highest rated video games of all time across all consoles and platforms. Pro Skater 2 along with Soulcalibur, and Grand Theft Auto IV are ranked second behind The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. ”
- “Similarly, the PS2 version of Pro Skater 3 earned a rare perfect 10 score from GameSpot, one of only eleven games to ever receive said score. It was also awarded the best sports game award at E3 2001. IGN rated the game 9.7/10, stating that the game “should go down in history as one of the best twitch-fests on PS2”. The game is currently the top rated PS2 game on the review aggregate website Metacritic, with an average score of 97/100, tying with Grand Theft Auto III.“
Here’s an entire full game playthrough. For those unfamiliar, it’s got that polygonal fifth-generation look that, well, has aged the worst of any generation in the history of video games. But the gameplay underneath was something revolutionary.
