Mellinger Minutes: Merrifield’s fun, the Royals’ start, Bill Self’s contract and more
Whit Merrifield said something the other day, and maybe you already saw it. Either way, it’s worth thinking a little about here at the top:
“This is one of the most fun ... actually, this is the most fun clubhouse I’ve been a part of since I’ve been in Kansas City. Guys really cheer for each other, love each other, and that shows during the games when the energy is there. Because you’re genuinely cheering for the guy out there battling for you and the team.”
Vahe’s written some about this, and you should always read Vahe, but I wanted to emphasize a bit of context around those words.
The Royals are a small-market team. That is never going to change unless we find a bunch of beachfront in the Northland or something. The financial structure of baseball means that teams like the Royals will always be at a disadvantage, and that the front offices and owners of teams like the Royals will always be particularly incentivized to maximize every dollar and commodify baseball players.
Nobody does that better than the Rays.
Merrifield did not ask to be drafted by a small-market team. He is a union man and at times has been as outspoken as he could be against tanking and other ways teams have gone about avoiding paying players.
That can wear on a man. Merrifield’s last swing as an amateur won the 2010 College World Series, but this is his sixth big-league season and he’s yet to be on a winning team. The Royals have finished last or second-to-last in the division in each of the last three seasons.
Look at it from that perspective — his perspective — and you can see why he’d be so energized at the moment. The Royals have a new owner who by all accounts has energized and modernized the place. The front office has operated with respect and urgency, supporting minor-leaguers through the pandemic and expanding payroll as others have slashed.
The motivation to do that is to collect good baseball players. That’s simple. But the hope is that the collection of good baseball players is something like a force multiplier throughout the clubhouse.
The hope is that competition brings out the best, and that veterans like Merrifield will be lifted by playing in meaningful games, and that rookies like Kyle Isbel will come along better in a winning environment.
That’s the hope, anyway, and this is weird to say but the Royals have separated themselves from some other teams by existing as a small market club that’s tangibly trying to win ballgames.
Throw in some personalities that don’t directly clash, and yeah, you can see why Merrifield would be having so much fun.
This week’s reading recommendation is Jayson Jenks on the IBM computer genius who computerized the Cowboys and revolutionized the NFL draft, and the eating recommendation is Little Bill’s pimento cheese (especially the jalapeño).
This is the part the timesuck where I usually plug the week’s podcast — and please subscribe on Spotify or Stitcher or wherever you get your shows! — but I’m off the rest of the week. No columns, no podcast. Kids are on spring break so we’re taking off. I’ll be back next week, first working day will be Tuesday.
Talk to you then.
In the meantime, please give me a follow on Twitter and Facebook and, as always, thanks for your help and thanks for reading.
Go Pacers!
Pret-tay, pret-tay, pret-tay good. Two biggest takeaways, and they’re both positive, aside from how terrible the Rangers are, because hoo-boy that’s a bad ballclub.
But you’re asking about the Royals.
The first thing is what a difference Carlos Santana makes in the middle of the lineup. Now, his best days are behind him, and this is about more than one guy but would you believe that the 200 pitches the Royals saw in the season opener are the 11th most of any nine-inning game since 2000?
And remember the Royals actually saw those 200 pitches in eight innings.
Even in the game they lost on Sunday, it just seemed like the Royals had better plate appearances than we’ve seen in a while. Better plans, better approaches, more competitive. This isn’t all about Santana, but four walks in three games is pretty strong. He was down 0-2 and came back to a full count.
I don’t want to make too big a deal of this. Through three games the Royals ranked 27th in pitches per plate appearance. Let’s give this thing some time to breathe. But I think it’s possible that we’ll see the lineup length have a positive cumulative effect as the season goes on.
The second takeaway is that the bullpen has a real chance to be very good. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, because they were great last year, but there are a lot of moving parts and bullpens have a sort of standard amount of year-to-year volatility anyway.
But that group gave up four runs in 16 1/3 innings, striking out 24 and walking eight. The starting pitching stunk on Friday and Sunday, so that’s too many innings to expect from a bullpen, but they responded with depth and effectiveness.
Wade Davis is throwing harder than he did last season. Jakob Junis is (so far) backing up a strong spring. Kyle Zimmer looked sharp. Jake Brentz is going to give people fits. Staumont and Holland. On and on. That was encouraging.
But, I mean gosh, if we’re talking about the first series ...
Go tacos!
It is probably true that Michael A. Taylor is going to be a streaky hitter, and that the opening series is an indication that he’s starting on a heater and will slump at some point.
But you have to go all the way back to 2017 to find the last time Taylor had two homers and six hits in any three-game stretch.
All winter, Dayton Moore told us he though Taylor had some ceiling left and I have been skeptical about that — Taylor is 30, with more than 1,800 big-league plate appearances and has been an above-average hitter in just one of his previous six seasons.
But the Royals have their reasons. Taylor is thoroughly gifted physically, smart and has made some changes to his swing and approach to address his weaknesses and amplify his strengths. That profiles as a guy with something to give, and maybe that’s what we’re seeing.
Also, if Taylor has something like a career year I wonder if we’ll see some genius in the way the Royals are handling him. The Royals have always believed they could have a competitive edge in how they treat humans, and you can see how the promise of everyday work and the emphasis on him covering the American League’s biggest outfield could unlock Taylor to be freer at the plate.
These are all guesses. But, man. He looks good so far.
Assume you’re talking about the injuries here, because Mondesi is waaayyy more gifted physically for baseball when compared to Watkins for football*.
* And that is in no way a knock on Watkins physically. Mondesi is just different. I actually think he could’ve been a pro football or basketball player. Maybe even soccer.
But if we’re talking about the most important ability being availability, then yeah, the comparison makes some sense.
Whenever he’s recovered from the oblique injury, Mondesi will take part in his sixth big league season. He has yet to play more than 102 games in any of them, and even if you look at his minor-league career the only times he topped 100 games are 2013 and 2014 — when he was 17 and 18 years old.
Maybe some of this is unfair. Mondesi played 59 of 60 games last season. Can’t blame the shortened season on his oblique.
Luck is undeniably part of injuries, and luck can change on a dime, but Mondesi’s history is full of injuries to his shoulder, groin, back and now oblique.
The one now is particularly concerning. Obliques don’t go away quick, and there are plenty of examples of guys feeling fine, returning, and then re-injuring. There is a line here between being aggressive and prudent.
The last time the Royals saw Mondesi he was destroying the Cactus League: .303/.343/.606 against the best pitching they could find.
The last time the Royals saw Mondesi against big leaguers he was destroying them: .376/.424/.706 with 14 extra base hits and 16 stolen bases in the last 22 games of 2020.
Mondesi is so fast and so good defensively that he can be a valuable big-leaguer on a championship team even if he’s “just” the .741 OPS guy of the last three seasons. He’s still just 25, with three more seasons of club control, so there is no imminent fork in his career path.
But of all the ways Mondesi could have begun an objectively important season for him personally, on the injured list with an injury that tends to linger is one of the worst possibilities.
Well, the Chiefs did offer to make Trent Williams the highest-paid offensive lineman in league history. It’s just that the 49ers took advantage of Williams’ promise to give them the last say, and made him the highest-er paid offensive lineman in league history.
So I don’t think that’s a lack of urgency.
It is true that at the moment the Chiefs’ left tackle would likely be Lucas Niang, Mike Remmers or Martinas Rankin, and that’s no way to protect the best player in the league. But I just can’t find it in me to get freaked out about this until one of two things happen:
- Russell Okung and Alejandro Villanueva sign somewhere else.
- Training camp starts and the Chiefs still don’t have better options.
This is a critical offseason for the Chiefs’ front office. You could probably say that about all offseasons, but they need some production from the draft and they need to address some specific areas — left tackle is the most important and obvious, but also another receiver, perhaps a linebacker, and some defensive backs.
Brett Veach and his group have shown themselves to be aggressive and logical. It’s just impossible to believe they aren’t working toward this.
This is not me saying relax, Veach-and-the-boys got this.
This is me saying the football game isn’t over early in the third quarter.
Depends on the team, and this isn’t me trying to not answer the question.
Because if you’re the 2013 Chiefs, and you’re drafting from a 2-14 team and have one winning season in the last six you’re targeting the best talent you can find, regardless of position.
If you’re the 2018 Chiefs, and you have a winning culture established, you’re doing most of the same with some exceptions — you’re not taking a quarterback in the first round again, for instance.
If you’re the 2021 Chiefs, and you’ve had the best team in football the last three seasons, that scope narrows further — you’re targeting an offensive tackle or edge rusher early, but could probably be talked into the right receiver or defensive back.
The degree of difficult rises as the team improves, both because your draft position pushes back and you can’t rely as comfortably on adding talent regardless of position.
This year, it makes sense to me that the most thorough front offices with the most continuity and relationships will have an advantage in the draft.
That’s because scouting is all virtual now. Zoom calls aren’t nothing, but they’re also a weak replacement for having a guy in your building for a day and reading body language and other cues.
Film has always been the most important stuff, but teams have to scout personalities as well, and to do that they’re going to have to rely more than ever on college and high school coaches.
That can be dangerous, because no college coach is going to trash talk a top prospect to NFL teams. There are a lot of blurry lines to be navigated here, so teams are going to have to do extra steps — go back through old notes to see who’s been the most honest in the past, or cross reference opinions from opposing college coaches or teammates.
All drafts rely on a certain level of luck. It’s undoubtedly true that teams overestimate their own ability to identify talent better than their rivals.
There will probably be more luck involved this year than most.
This is a reference to MLB’s decision to move the All-Star Game and draft from Atlanta in response to a new Georgia law seen by civil rights groups as targeted to restrict voting rights for minorities.
There have been further calls to boycott Georgia businesses like Coca-Cola, Delta and Home Depot, even as those businesses have criticized the legislation.
You know I hate talking politics. I hope you are even less interested in my politics than I am of yours. So you’re not going to get the sports columnist in Kansas City opining on a voting rights law in Georgia, but you are going to get something of an analogy here.
Because you’ve probably heard men say from time to time that one of the most important things for leagues and teams to do is to hide the fact that this is all big business and that the fans are the mark.
Humans have paid other humans to play baseball for more than 100 years, which means that humans have been saying that money is ruining baseball for more than 100 years.
Well, the same can be said about politics and sports. Because sports have always been used for political means. People have always tried to use sports to make political points. Sports have always been targets and, just like with the money, one of the most important things for leagues and teams to do is to keep fans from thinking about that part of it.
I am convinced that if you studied any business of note for long enough you could find a reason to boycott them, and this is an important point because I believe MLB would have preferred to do nothing.
To make this point, a line from the excellent Evan Drellich’s piece in The Athletic is instructive:
“... people with knowledge of Manfred’s thinking said that the sport is not newly attempting to take political stands. Rather, Manfred realized that no matter what decision he made, to stay in Georgia or go, he would effectively be making a political statement.”
That’s the world we live in now, for better or worse. If you choose to, you can find political statements in literally anything, from where you eat lunch to what stores you shop to what TV shows you watch and what sports you care about.
It’s exhausting, and I don’t mean this as a criticism to anyone using their voice or energy to make the world a better place.
I’m an open book. I’ve always tried to talk to you guys here the same way I do my friends in real life (with less cussing). That means I’ll say that minorities (and especially Black people) deserve equal treatment by courts and cops in a way they don’‘t currently receive, and it means I’ll say that without any evidence of fraud we should be making it easier for people to vote and not harder.
But, to me those aren’t really political issues. Or shouldn’t be. Politics is tax policy. But whatever. We’re getting on a tangent.
The point I was trying to make is that pulling every possible thread on who to boycott takes up more energy than I have in a day.
So what I’m saying here is that people should be encouraged to vote, and also feel free to drink whatever they want, even if Coke products and their competitors are terrible for your teeth and health.
Brett, thank you for the opportunity one more time to drop all shame straight to the floor and beg the Peanut to create The Mellinger:
Three wings, BLT, and Tank 7 for $17 (or whatever a fair price might be).
The world would be a better place with The Mellinger. Actually, that’s a hell of a tagline: Your day will be better with The Mellinger in it!
Put that on a dang t-shirt.
But while we’re here, if the Peanut is going to continue to shun me, the menu item I’d want actually would not be a sandwich. It would be something like this:
Tater tots (crispy because I’m not a monster), covered with white queso, choice of meat (but please consider barbacoa!), jalapeños, cheddar jack, diced bacon, chopped green onion, and sour cream but only on the side.
Give the people $1 off a local draft for each of those bad boys ordered and now we’re starting to change lives.
I’ve probably written and said enough already about the failure between Sinclair, Bally’s Sports KC and the Royals but one way you know you’re doing it wrong as a business is if you find yourself working against consumer trends, making it harder for the fans you need to connect with to find you, AND your message to a sizable chunk of your consumer base is to either break the law or disrupt their habits.
With the notable exception of the whole play-your-first-season-in-charge-without-fans-through-a-pandemic thing, this is the first major and public drama that Sherman has faced.
This is speculation, but I think the Royals will have a workable solution by the start of next season. It won’t be perfect, and it won’t come fast enough for many, but the current situation is unsustainable.
And everything I just said is applicable to Sporting Kansas City, too.
As for the lifetime contract, I suppose we need to talk about that ...
Yeah, my view isn’t too far from that.
I believe that KU never should have given Jeff Long the clause in his contract that gave him extra job security and money in the event of major sanctions against the basketball program, and I believe that Jeff Long never should have accepted a contract with those terms.
Because from the very beginning it squashed trust between the university’s biggest moneymaker and the man who was presumably overseeing it. You shouldn’t have a situation where the AD can be seen as incentivized for one of his programs to get hit.
Self never said much about that publicly, at least not that I heard, but there is no way to believe he didn’t have an opinion there.
Here, with this contract, he’s sort of getting out in front of it, and establishing contractual power over his next boss. If he felt diminished with the clause in Long’s contract, this is a heck of a way to reverse that with the next AD.
It’s a heck of a power move by Self, and another middle finger from Kansas toward the NCAA, and one that has me considering a question I’d never considered before:
If a coach gets show-caused, does that apply to his current employer?
I really don’t know, and that’s largely because coaches who get show-caused are fired. Please don’t read this as me saying Self is about to get show-caused — I have no idea, but five Level I charges mean it’s at least possible — I’m just using this as an example for how rare this is.
Last week, some of you were wondering whether Self’s time at KU had grown stale.
This week, KU is making the grandest statement possible that Self will be around as long as he wants.
That’s an objectively good thing for KU, by the way. Self is an amazing basketball coach, and unless the infractions case ends with nuclear punishments he is almost certainly the best man to lead the program into the future.
I’m just not sure what the university gained by guaranteeing him job security no matter the case’s conclusion.
It’s pretty wild. K-State and Mizzou essentially completed one of those challenge trades that pro teams sometimes pull off — Mark Smith for DaJuan Gordon.
Smith will finish his college basketball career playing in three different Power 5 conferences.
There are exceptions, of course, and college basketball has been trending toward more and more transfers for years. But I think that’s been exaggerated this season at least in part because of Covid-19.
Because think about this. Schools have been able to do less in-person recruiting than ever the last 13 months or so. That means the coaches and recruits don’t know each as well, which means that players and programs are worse fits than in years past.
Then, on top of all that, college basketball was less fun than ever this season. No crowds, no on-campus adulation, it’s really stripped down to dorm-gym-Zoom. Wouldn’t it be natural to want out of that situation? Or at least easy to see the negatives in that situation more than the positives?
These are all educated guesses here, but if I’m right about this it means the number of transfers could stay artificially high for another few years until players find their right spot or run out of transfers.
Now, you mention the AAU stuff, and there probably is some of that in here, too. It’s so easy to change AAU teams and even high schools. If that creates habits in guys to jump, then it makes sense that those habits would carry on in college.
But for me, it’s hypocritical to criticize that — and to be clear, I don’t think this is what Mike is saying in the question — while excusing coaches jumping from job to job to further their own careers.
I don’t know exactly what the solution is. College basketball is an objectively superior product when there’s more roster stability, but what are the best and fairest ways to achieve that?
I have no idea.
I guess I need to embrace my representation of Team Cold, but I always want to emphasize at least one point, which is that I am not a monster and therefore do not prefer 0 degrees to 80.
My discomfort starts around 85, grows at 90, and turns me into something like a whiny and inconsolable jerk at 100. I would prefer 0 to 100, and I’m not sure I’m exaggerating when I say I’d prefer 0 to 100 even if you told me the pipes in my house would burst.
But I bring this all up because there are a million things I’m looking forward to this spring and summer. The impromptu games in the yard or driveway, days at the lake, trying new stuff (and old stuff) on the grill, the pool, family trips, patio beers, Royals and Sporting games, this fishing trip that got COVID’d last year ... I’m even weird enough that I enjoy mowing the lawn.
So I’m not expecting to suffer.
Except when it’s 98 and humid. Then you can expect me to be insufferable.
This is a deep question, and the answer is almost certainly a 5,000-word version of I’m sure it would in some ways.
How could it not?
That said, it drives me bananas when someone reacts to domestic violence or equal pay issues or anything like that with, “Well, as the father of girls I believe women should be treated fairly.”
Because shouldn’t we all believe that?
My boys are very boy. Before we had kids, I thought the nature-nurture stuff was largely about nurture. I thought boys generally behaved in a certain way because that’s what we expect. I thought the same about girls.
I am here to tell you we’ve tried to be conscious of that stuff, to expose them to everything, and their favorite thing to watch on TV is animated cars crashing into each other. The only “girl” toy I’ve ever seen them play with is a Barbie bus, and that’s because it was literally the only thing with wheels at a girl friend’s house.
They love football, and spend a shockingly large amount of time wrestling. The other day, I was walking through the living room and our preschooler screamed PUNCH YOU IN THE PEANUT as his fist jabbed me below the belt. I couldn’t even be mad.
I’m not saying that nurture has nothing to do with that stuff. Kids are sort of like clay, and we can guide them on a path. I just think girls and boys — generally speaking — are different kinds of clay.
There’s a point in here somewhere that’s relevant to what you’re asking. Your worldview is shaped by what’s important to your kids, same as mine is shaped by mine. I know a lot about crocodiles and dinosaurs and which toy cars will hold up. I know which Nerf guns are crap, and that there is actually a visor attachment you can put on a kid’s football helmet if he’s obsessed with both footballs and visors.
If we had daughters instead of sons, I’m sure the idea of presenting them with strong female role models would be important.
But you know what? That’s important to my wife and I now. I’m hyperaware that raising boys can turn into a bad stereotype of a frat house. So I make sure we watch some of the women’s World Cup, same as we do the men’s.
They’re really into books and sports, so we have books about Alex Morgan and Serena Williams just like we have about LeBron James and Patrick Mahomes. I want them to know our Vice President is a woman.
But would I feel something different watching a women’s game if we had girls? Probably.
Now, your question is going one step more. Your question is about whether it would change the way I do my job. And I don’t think so.
We can get into a chicken-and-egg thing here, but I don’t sense a big demand for columns about any of the women’s programs at any of our universities. The NWSL reboot is interesting, and I’ve written and pod’d on that and expect to do more this summer.
The guidance on what I write about has to be to at least start with the topics the most people are interested in.
I’d love to have more balance in what I do, but it’s hard to justify going away from the Royals or Chiefs, you know?
I make this call every now and then, but here’s a good moment to do it again: if you know a great story, please let me know. I can write about the Chiefs’ pass rush or the Royals working counts, but I’d love to be able to break that up with a story about some badass high school girl or a working mom doing something extraordinary.
You know where to find me.
This week, I’m particularly grateful for this family road trip. I’m well aware that we’re in the sweet spot of kids old enough to do long drives, but still young enough to say things like “Please wake me up in the morning because I don’t want to be late for Texas,” and also not so old that they roll their eyes about spending time with us or are on teams we can’t miss practice with.