At The Star, Sam McDowell looked at some of what went wrong this season
:They will not become a playoff team merely by getting healthier. (And shouldn’t this season prove there is no guarantee they will get healthier anyway?) The Royals were indeed decimated by injuries, to be clear, but they decimated their own season long before the injuries took the wheel. They were 22-37 through May, back when everyone they expected to be part of the lineup was still part of it, other than Jonathan India…
Think
of this: In games in which Witt, Pasquantino and Garcia all appeared, the Royals went 30-44. Two numbers should stand out there. They only had 74 games with all three players healthy — and they won just 40.5% of them…
There are three perceived locks for next year’s rotation — Michael Wacha, Noah Cameron and Seth Lugo. When they were on the mound, the Royals were 36-59 this season.
Pete Grathoff wrote about how Denny Matthews almost wasn’t the voice of the Royals:
“I was still a little bit intimidated by Mr. K, but he … said you’re going to have other opportunities, and you’re going to have decisions to make as you work your way through this business, and he said, you have to weigh them carefully, and then you’ll make a decision,” Matthews recalled.
“He said, ‘We like the way you do the games, and you can stay here as long as you want.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, this is just after my third year, so that’s pretty strong.’ And again, there was no reason for me to move because I was very comfortable. I love the city, I love the organization and everybody in it. And if you’re unhappy in your job, you’re probably looking to move. I’ve never been unhappy in my job. Period. So here we are, 58 years later. But I had no idea. Chicago, St. Louis, oh boy, let’s go. That’s my dream job. Still is. I could still do it.”
While it’s technically a blog, I think I’ll add Joel Goldberg’s blog entry to the “official” section of today’s Rumblings. He reflects on the finished season:
My son Mason may have described it best. He spent his first season working on the Royals television home production crew and told me he was sad it was over. He compared it to the last day of school when you realize you’re not going to see that same group of people all together for a while…
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve also learned that my post-season evaluation goes beyond the actual job. Taking better care of myself physically and mentally is critical to the stamina that baseball season demands, and that becomes even more important as I shift gears into speaking. My natural tendency is to fill the void left by baseball with another schedule, another goal, and another list of things I want to accomplish.
Tired of complaing about the Royals? Now you can do something about it! Join the Royals analytics staff (2 positions open):
Job Summary: The Kansas City Royals are seeking a highly motivated and creative analyst to join the organization. Working under the direction of the Director of Research & Development, Christine Harris, the analyst will be fully integrated into the Major League clubhouse to provide resources, answers, and ideas to the Major League Pitching group. The successful candidate will combine analytical expertise and clear communication skills to translate baseball data into insights that give The Royals an edge when our pitchers step onto the mound.
Darragh McDonald at MLBTR looks at players with club options for next year:
Kansas City Royals
- Carlos Estévez, RHP: $13MM club option ($2MM buyout)
2026 was a nightmare season for Estevez. He made one bad appearance to start the year, allowing six earned runs in a third of an inning. He spent the rest of the season on the injured list, meaning he finished the campaign with an awful ERA of 162.00. He underwent shoulder surgery last month and has an unclear timeline. Even before this injury-marred year, there were concerns. While he posted a 2.45 ERA in 2025, his strikeout rate was way down at 20.1%. It’s an easy call for the Royals to let Estevez walk.
- Tony Gonsolin, RHP: $2.5MM club option (no buyout)
Gonsolin has been in the injury wilderness for a while. Due to various woes, including Tommy John surgery, he only made eight appearances over the 2024-26 seasons. That includes one outing for the Royals late this year. Gonsolin was a steady rotation member for the Dodgers once upon a time, with a 2.51 ERA in 572 2/3 innings from 2019 to 2022. The option price is modest but it’s hard to know what to make of Gonsolin after so much time off. It’s a reasonable gamble if the Royals think he’ll be healthy next year.
How about some news around the league?
Braves/Phillies Game 3 finished after I finished writing this. So we’ll just mark it as “LATE” and you can check out the score on your own.
After rumors of MLB investigating a potential Grand Teton game leaked out, Manfred says it’s not happening.
Astros manager Joe Espada’s contract ran out last night. He’d like to return, but the Astros have not indicated his status as they sink back into the 20th century. (NOTE: This is not a commentary on him but on how their owner has started inserting himself into baseball decisions more and more)
Sigh. The Cubs won again in court, strong-arming yet another Wrigley rooftop owner. I’m sure they’ll be bought out shortly.
Blog time!
A number of major Royals blogs looked back at the season.
David Lesky ($) put the end-of-year presser in perspective with previous years:
You might remember that at the 2023 press conference, we learned that the Royals planned to sign multiple relievers and two starters. They did just that. The bullpen additions didn’t work out great, with Will Smith and Chris Stratton struggling, though John Schreiber did work out for a while. The starting pitching additions were pretty spectacular, at least in 2024 when it comes to Seth Lugo and for the last three years when it comes to Michael Wacha.
This year, I thought the answers were a little less definitive, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t plenty to take away from the comments, which came mostly from JJ Picollo, with some from Matt Quatraro. There was a lot of talk about processes, about winning in 2027 and beyond, and about some staff changes that we’ve discussed in this space quite a few times. Let’s just take it in order.
Craig Brown also added his annotations to the press conference:
Picollo opened the presser noting that not only would Zumwalt not be returning to the dugout, but almost the entire major league medical staff—Head Athletic Trainer Kyle Turner, Assistant Athletic Trainer Chris DeLucia and Major League Rehab Coordinator Jeff Blum—would be leaving the club. Also moving to a minor league role is Melissa Lambert who was Director of Behaviorial Science.
This feels pretty seismic. Turner had been with the Royals for 17 years. DeLucia was with the team for 20 years and Blum was here for 19 years. The trio had all been in their current positions for five seasons. Lambert is returning to a focus on the minor leagues after four seasons in her role in the dugout. She’s been with the team since 2020.
So did Preston Farr at Eight One Six:
Much like they did with Rooker and O’Hearn, the Royals have gotten back to whiffing on player evaluation. They shipped off Jonathan Bowlan for Matt Strahm just to watch Bowlan become a key piece of the Phillies bullpen. They sent Evan Sisk to acquire Bailey Falter. Sisk pitched to a 3.04 ERA for the Pirates this season across 44.2 IP. Two relievers worth an fWAR or so aren’t franchise altering players, but they’d surely have helped this team more this season than either player they were traded for.
Trade deadlines have shifted back to snoozefests in true Dayton Moore fashion. When the Royals should be capitalizing on any value possible, they instead cling to any chance at 81-81 they can get. It’s just an extension of the player loyalty that’s become two sides of a coin for the Royals. On one-hand, it helps to attract a certain type of free agent. On the other hand, it gives you the current version of Seth Lugo. Picollo has preached loyalty when choosing not to trade aging veterans like Seth Lugo or Michael Wacha. That loyalty led to a Lugo extension that has become one of the worst moves in the entire J.J. Picollo era.
Last, but not least, Kevin O’Brien at Royals Keep:
According to Picollo, the move wasn’t due to Zumwalt’s performance, but to the team’s confidence in assistant hitting coaches Dawson and Thames moving forward. Both coaches replaced Keoni DeRenne and Joe Dillon last offseason, and the Royals offense improved from ranking 24th in wRC+ in 2025 (93) to 19th this season (98).
Rumors suggested Dawson and Thames took on greater responsibilities during the season, likely in preparation for Zumwalt’s eventual move back to Minor League player development. Zumwalt found success in this role with former colleague Drew Saylor, but Saylor struggled solo in the Director position after Zumwalt moved up to the Majors. The position has remained vacant for the past year, suggesting the Royals may have been eyeing Zumwalt to return regardless of how the team fared offensively.
Picollo praised Zumwalt’s work and noted that his tenure as hitting coach was never meant to be long-term.
Blog Wrapup:
- Darin Watson at U.L.’s Toothpick: This Date In Royals History–1976 Edition: October 1 – It’s probably not how they thought it would happen, but the Royals are AL West champions
- Matthew Swigonski at KOK: Vinnie Pasquantino’s strong finish gives the Royals a reason to dream big
I’m going to try something different today. I liked the idea when I came up with it, but it’s been sitting in my queue for a couple of months as I’ve struggled with how to refine it. If it works out, I have another idea that is similar-ish and I’ll trot it out sometime next year. But if you don’t like it, well, it’s the offseason and you’re not going to see me the next two weeks and your refund check is in the mail.
Today’s topic is “shoes”. I’m a very light sneakerhead, with a heavy emphasis on the “light” part. I typically have 6 pairs of shoes at any given time, depending on how you’re counting: the current pair, the next pair I’m breaking in, the old pair for lawn work, a nice pair, sandals, and rain boots. Do the rain boots count? I don’t think they should. I also usually have 2-4 pairs in reserve in my closet, which are in line to become “the next pair”.
Why do I have “shoes in reserve”, as my wife calls them? Well, it’s hard for me to find shoes. What sizes are easy to find? Up to 12. Grumble: it used to be up to 13. Second grumble: somewhere in the last 5-10 years, Nike started vanity sizing so that everything went down about a half size. My feet that used to fit in a 13 now require a 14. Sure, feet flatten with age, and it’s not uncommon to gain a size. However, I don’t think I’m there yet. A pair of old 13s at my parents’ house still fit me decades later and I can wear 13s in some other brands. Regardless, since 13s /and/ 14s are hard to find now, it doesn’t matter.
NOTE: I think I’ve also complained here that the same thing happened to t-shirts: some old 2008 XLs are now larger than some 2026 2XLs and almost all 2008 XLs are larger than any 2026 XLs. But I digress.
Growing up, clothes were generally cheap for me. I’ve always been a t-shirt and jeans guy. Really, though, growing up in Houston, I was a t-shirt and shorts guy. One year in high school, a girl counted the number of days I wore long pants – it was less than 20. I thought it was because I was a curiosity; my wife thinks it might have been something more and I was cutely naive as I’ve always been. The long and short (that’s two bad puns already) of it is – because my clothes were cheap and I am not fashionable, my parents indulged me ever so slightly on shoes.
A couple of words of warning about today’s post. First off, there are going to be a lot of pictures and social media posts. It’s going to be a lot easier to show than to tell for this OT. I’m going to try and use as many embedded pictures from our standard Getty/USA Today archives, but some pictures were only available on social media. Also, there’s not a lot of shoe talk in “mainstream” news sources, Wikipedia, or the like. I’m relying a lot on blogs and fansites, so these sources aren’t quite as vetted as my usual standard. Finally, a lot of these shoes are pre-internet or early internet so there just aren’t many sources to link to.
You’ve been warned. Let’s dive in!
The first “big name” sneakers I remember wearing were the Air Tech Challenge III. I didn’t know their name at the time. But I knew they were the awesome neon shoes that Andre Agassi wore. Look at those beauties! They just scream early 90s. We had just moved to Houston, I was starting middle school, and wanted something to help fit in. Spoiler: I was a big nerd then just like I am today and nothing was going to help that. However, the shoes didn’t hurt and they were comfy. I liked them so much I got a second pair the next year when I wore out/outgrew these. This was a shoe faux pas, apparently. Whatever – I liked them. We’ll talk more about Nike and re-releases later, but it looks like the last time these were available was 2015.
This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive history of shoes, just of my shoes. But if we can take a detour through some sneaker history, so much the better. Near as I can tell, Converse was the first major athletic shoe company, with the Chuck Taylor All-Stars dominating in the 60s and 70s. Chucks never fit me – I needed more ankle support – but there’s no denying their iconic shoe status. However: “Converse lost its athletic shoe monopoly from the 1970s onward, as new competitors, including Puma, Adidas, and Nike, grew in popularity.” FYI: Converse is now owned by Nike.
In the 80s and 90s, Nike and Reebok battled for the crown: “By mid-decade, Reebok’s sales were about $1 billion, and it overtook Nike, Inc. as the largest athletic shoe manufacturer in the US before losing the top position in 1988”.
In 1989, Rebook released the Reebok Pump and they were one of the major shoes of the early 90s: ”In February 1991, Dee Brown inflated his Reebok Pumps in front of a national audience before scoring a title-winning dunk during the 1991 NBA Slam Dunk Contest”. Shaq’s explosion onto the NBA scene further popularized the brand before it got stale later in the decade. I don’t remember which Pumps I had – it might have even been the Omni Lites in the picture above. I’m not familiar with “That Good Dubai”, which described itself as a society/culture magazine and now appears defunct. But they had a nice retrospective on the Pump back in 2014.
We live in the insane age of Shohei Ohtani. I can’t imagine how giddy that adolescent me would be if I told him there would be another Babe Ruth in our lifetime: a player good enough to win MVPs for hitting while also being a great pitcher when healthy. Heck, adult me is pretty giddy about that. Though much less so now that he’s with the Dodgers juggernaut.
Then again, growing up, there were a number of players who were in both the MLB and the NFL, which seems unfathomable today. Of course, everyone remembers the iconic Bo Jackson, his career(s) cut short by injury. Not many remember DJ Dozier or Chad Hutchinson. Brian Jordan played a lot more baseball than football. And then there was Deion Sanders.
I didn’t really care for Deion the player, but his Air Diamond Turf was my second favorite shoe of all time. Ignore the cleats in the picture above. Nike made a wildly popular cross-trainer version, too. I loved the shape of those 90s cross-trainers, though they have mostly fallen out of fashion. Low tops didn’t have enough support for me, high tops were too heavy, but the 3/4 or mid-tops were just right. Not only were they comfortable, but they were also stylish with a little gold mesh “window” on the side that looked cool. I liked the red and black colorway shown there. Later, I would also get the “emerald” colorway, which looked even better, replacing the red accents with absolutely gorgeous emerald green ones. They even re-released them last year, but now cost more than $200 on the secondary market.
I looked through our entire picture archive and couldn’t find a clear picture of the Air Max Penny 1. Thankfully, Sneaker Freaker has a full writeup, including a discussion on the Lil’ Penny ad campaign. I had those exact ones featured at the top of the page and they were gorgeous. A great balance of black and white, just enough blue accent to give it color, a beautiful jeweled swoosh, the giant air max air pocket, a little air “porthole” on the bottom, and a new logo. Those were some great shoes and I had forgotten all about them until I went digging through old shoe sites to try and remember which shoes I had owned.
In the picture above, but Shaq and Penny were in the process of being dispatched by my beloved Houston Rockets in the 1995 NBA Finals. NBA Hall of Famer Hakeem Olajuwon did not have a high-profile shoe for his fans. In fact, he went the other direction, as chronicled in this 2015 article from The Guardian: “How Hakeem Olajuwon tried and failed to stop the 90s sneaker killings”. Hakeem released a $40 shoe from Spalding because “a mother with four children can’t afford to spend $400 on shoes that will wear out in a couple of months”. Unfortunately, without a massive advertising push from the likes of Nike or Reebok, it bombed. In Houston, they were harder to come by: I only saw them out in the wild once or twice and never got them, sadly. Olajuwon would later buy up a mansion in southeast Houston and turn it into a high-end boutique store, featuring a high-end luxury shoe. However, the mansion is now gone, and I can’t find anything about DR34M brand. (NOTE: Frustratingly, I ran across a bunch of garbage stories with unverifiable information about Hakeem’s shoes that appeared to be written by AI. Finally, I stumbled upon Spalding as the manufacturer and I started making headway on this part of the story.)
I don’t remember a lot about my shoes of the late 90s and early 00s, when I went off to school and had to buy shoes with my own money. One memory I had from that time was the Eastbay catalog. This 2019 walk down memory lane from Dan Woike of the Los Angeles Times gives you a sense of what it was like if you weren’t around or it wasn’t your scene:
Lakers forward Lance Stephenson, a former Brooklyn streetball legend, studied the Eastbay texts just as Tucker did, marking up his favorite pairs in pen even if he knew he’d never get his hands on them. Now a nine-year veteran who has earned more than $30 million, designer shoes and limited releases spill out of Stephenson’s locker.
“I would circle all the shoes I liked but I never got them,” Stephenson said. “I was a sneakerhead; I always liked sneakers. When that book would come out and you could see all the sneakers before they even come out, it was like you were seeing [the future].
When I started working in IT, I started with casual dress shoes. But I soon realized that The Shawshank Redemption had it right: “Neither did I… I mean, seriously, how often do you really look at a mans shoes?” Then I started looking for comfortable shoes. If I was going to be driving to customer sites and walking around all day, I needed to be comfortable. That’s when I started cheating with my work shoes: they could be athletic shoes, so long as they were mostly black. If I could splash on some subtle color, so much the better. In 2009, I found the perfect shoe.
The Nike Air Griffey Max 1 is one of the best shoes of all time. It’s extremely comfortable and durable. It’s been re-released in a multitude of color, ranging from the two original Mariners colorways to a Los Angeles sunset-inspired colorway to an HBCU colorway to his all-white Hall of Fame induction colorway. A Cincinnati Reds colorway is set to re-release next week. But the one that worked for my work was the 2010 Triple Black colorway. I bought one pair and beat them up for a couple of years before getting another on sale and doing it all over again. If they want to re-release them again, I’ll go buy them again (if I can find them – but complaining about intentional scarcity in modern shoe releases is a rant for another day). I went this same route with the Kyrie 4 Blackout colorway in 2018. I also really liked those shoes – they were less comfy than the Griffeys, but also lighter.
Honestly, I don’t like the Air Jordan 1. I can’t deny its place in history or its iconic look. But it’s made with a lot of old tech, before the sneaker wars really pushed technology forward in the early-mid 90s. Give me an 11 or an 8 (Aqua!) or a 13. Maybe that’s why I landed on the Jordan 6 Rings shoes sometime in the mid 2010s: “The Jordan 6 Rings (aka Jordan Six Rings, Or Montells) is a combination of the seven Air Jordan shoes that Michael Jordan wore during his 6 championship seasons. That includes the Air Jordan 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13 and 14.”
It’s hard to know what will be an “iconic”shoe going forward and I’ve been shopping more in the bargain bin, of late. Really, it’s not even the bargain bin so much as what Nike, Adidas, Reebok, et al., have available in size 14 in mid/high top at their outlet stores. We have a half dozen Nike Factory stores around the Houston area. However, my favorite is the Clearance store in Pasadena – this is where the excess shoes from all the other Factory stores go to die. If you go when the store opens, you’ll have to fight through sneakerheads and scalpers, grabbing armfuls of rare finds to resell or add to the collection. Me, I’m just looking for something that fits and, often, I have to ask an employee to go into the back and just bring out whatever they have in 14 that’s mid or high top. It’s a relaxing experience for me and something I like to do on my birthday.
Here’s what I’ve been wearing the last few years:
I liked the look and feel of these Giannis Zoom Freak 4s, but they didn’t have enough ankle support and I wore through the bottom of the shoes. My best-fitting shoe of the last few years is the LeBron Witness VII. They take a little time to break in, but, once you do, they’re comfy and breathe well. They’re just a good, all-purpose shoe and they can be found for around $50 on a good day, so long as you’re not picky about colorways. My current dress shoe is the previous version, the Witness 6, with the “Black Volt” colorway. It’s not as comfortable as the VIIs (yes, they are named the “6” and “VII”), but they’re the perfect color balance for my dress shoes: mostly black but with a splash of color. Looping back around to where we all started, the “next shoe” that I’m starting to break in is a pair of KD17s in a promotional colorway called “Game Royal”. It’s awfully blue and it taking a little bit to get comfortable in, but I think it’ll be a good shoe and it was reasonably priced at the Outlet store.
If you want to read more, this was a nice, long walk down memory lane.
The Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake is just about a month away. I might have scored tickets to one of the Zelda 40th anniversary concerts this week, too.
How about the Kakariko Village theme?
