Mellinger Minutes: Nicky Lopez, Big 12 mistakes, awesome SKC + football superspreaders
The Royals have 41 games left, which is more than a quarter of the season, so as long as we understand where we are here is something that’s true:
The Royals’ best player so far this season is either the guy who’s made seven All-Star teams, signed an $82 million extension before the season, and could be in the Hall of Fame someday … or the guy they sent to Omaha out of spring training.
You know plenty about the first guy. His name is Salvador, and he’s somehow been better than ever after tearing his elbow and turning 30.
The other guy is Nicky Lopez, and it is not an exaggeration to say he’s transformed his career this season.
He has the highest on-base percentage and lowest strikeout rate on the team. He went from the second baseman in Omaha to the shortstop in Kansas City with one phone call, and from noticeably struggling with the position the first month or so to clearly excelling in the months since.
Before the season started, the Royals could not be sure if Lopez would be a big-leaguer.
As it stands right now, Lopez has worked his way to the center of the Royals’ plans.
According to Baseball-Reference, Lopez has been worth 2.7 WAR, a virtual toss-up with Perez’s 2.9 and Whit Merrifield’s 2.2.
FanGraphs leans the other with, with Lopez’s 2.4 ahead of Whit Merrifield (2.2) and Perez (1.4).
Reasonable minds can disagree, is the point. And Lopez grinding his way into that disagreement might be the single most encouraging development in the big leagues this season.
If this is who Lopez is going forward — an everyday middle infielder with speed, consistent on-base, and plus defense at either position — the Royals’ future is tangibly brighter.
It means Merrifield can continue to move around. It means the Royals have one heck of a shortstop insurance plan if Adalberto Mondesi’s injuries continue. It means Bobby Witt Jr. can play third base, which some evaluators think is his best big league fit. It means the lineup is a little longer, the defense a little better, and the roster more athletic.
The Royals have had a lot go against them. The pitching hasn’t been good enough, the injuries have been too often, and the production too inconsistent.
But this is the point of the season when you start to project everything out. You start to notice that Hunter Dozier has a .778 OPS and that Kris Bubic has a 2.51 ERA since the All-Star break and that Daniel Lynch 2.0 has a 1.89 ERA in 19 innings over three starts and all sorts of other trends that may or may not hold up.
This time of year can be tricky. Kyle Davies’ September in 2008 comes to mind.
But we’ve talked a lot about the bad stuff. It’s worth a moment to acknowledge the good stuff, too.
Lopez left training camp headed for the minor leagues, without any guarantees of being in the majors again.
He is now a central part of the Royals’ future. That’s a heck of a transformation.
This week’s eating recommendation is the chile relleno burrito at Manny’s, and the reading recommendation is Amanda Mull on people being a-holes.
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I try to stick with this: anything under 95 degrees and I stay quiet.
So I don’t feel like I need to stay quiet right now.
We’re all friends here, so I can admit that I am petty enough to check the weather back home when I’m on vacation and if it looks miserable … well, I’m not going to say I’m celebrating, but I’m also not going to lie and say I feel sorry for any of you, either.
But, honestly, I’m having a hard time complaining right now.
Even as I just checked my phone and saw the following heat indexes: 107, 106, 103.
Let us be clear: Those are outrageous numbers, and only a diagnosed sociopath would argue otherwise.
I also hate the idea of people who don’t have or can’t afford air conditioning trying to make their way through times like these, or people who have to work outside, particularly active jobs like construction or landscaping.
But if I’m just speaking for me? You guys, I am not going to complain right now. I can go to my gym to workout, and this summer has been sort of embarrassingly awesome. If the worst I get is a few miserable days at Chiefs training camp … this is very out of character for me, but I don’t even have it in me to heckle Carrington.
Has vacation robbed me of my edge?
Yes!
I believe this is the best offensive line Patrick Mahomes has had, and I believe there’s a chance — a CHANCE! — that it’s strong starting with the opener against Myles Garrett and the Browns.
But I also believe that the Chiefs will have four new starters from the Super Bowl, maybe five, and even if it’s “only” four the fifth guy will be playing a different position.
I believe that Joe Thuney is a relatively sure thing, but that Orlando Brown is making a huge shift in blocking scheme/style, and that two rookies starting next to each other can lead to problems.
These guys might be good immediately. That’s possible. It’s a nice mix of experience and youth, of smart guys with a firm commitment to performing well. That’s absolutely on the table.
But with so many new guys, I don’t think it’s logical to believe that what we see in week 1 will be what we see in the playoffs.
That said, you’re smart to point out the schedule, but for me, that’s a feature and not a flaw.
The Chiefs are a playoff team. That’s a given, barring something truly unforeseen. The important stuff is winning in the playoffs, and the best way to do that includes having as strong an understanding as possible about exactly how you stack up.
I don’t feel comfortable talking about the science here, and just to prove the point I’ll tell you that my first instinct was to say it’s outside so there aren’t any worries but then I googled “covid outbreak sports games” and quickly saw that it’s not that simple.
Honestly, you guys, I’m just so tired of all this.
I’m tired of hearing about new variants, and rising case numbers, and people using willful ignorance and stubborn tinfoil stuff to stay unvaccinated. We all have our own definitions of reasonable concerns, but there’s simply no way that half of the country has reasonable concerns.
I’m tired of it for a lot of reasons, but mostly because we had the opportunity to squash this thing and we’ve missed it. We’ve missed it because we’re too busy huddling up in our own tribes, ignoring clear evidence that of simple steps we can all take.
But none of that answers your question. Let me try to do that now.
The safest thing would be to limit crowd sizes, or play games in empty stadiums again, at least until some combination of case numbers falling and vaccination rates rising.
But I also live in the real world, where you’d have an easier time swimming across the Atlantic with a Ford Focus tied to your left foot.
Nobody wants to go back to those days.
I’d also want to emphasize that it’s unfair to blame football here. This is a society thing. There isn’t a lot of appetite for operating in 2021 the way we operated for most of 2020. I think it’s also fair to credit the NFL for how it handled last season, and to recognize that as tempting as it is to slam the league for greed it’s also true that an NFL game turning into a superspreader would be a disastrous look.
The league has a lot to gain through ticket sales and an improved watchability with full stadiums, but there is an army of folks ready to crush Roger Goodell and anyone else with a shield lapel if a bunch of cases are tied to games.
So, I guess I’m somewhat concerned about cases spreading, but I’m also in this weird space where it’s hard to know how to specifically label my concerns.
I hadn’t thought of that direct comparison, and I’m not sure how to know if it was easier, but yeah.
That was a total dismantlement, done with no regard for the short-term and all regard for the long.The whole thing still comes down to choosing the right players and making the right decisions, but I do believe there’s value in losing, and that consecutive years within a few games of .500 aren’t what any franchise should want.
The Royals are pushing closer to that point, for what it’s worth. To my knowledge, the Royals never approached Alex Gordon about whether he’d waive his 10-5 trade veto. But they dealt Danny Duffy.
The future of the Royals will depend primarily on the continued development and production of guys already on the payroll. The front office must make sound decisions, the players need to develop, and some luck needs to be sprinkled in. That’s how it is for all teams.
But these things are often won on the margins, and these trades can be a way to boost those margins.
Nothing?
That might be the most frustrating part of all this. Big 12 schools cannot change the direction or force of the wind, and the wind in college sports has been steadily blowing in this direction for decades.
Nebraska has not been to a top-tier bowl game in 20 years, which means Oklahoma would be stuck as the league’s only playoff contender, and even that would be made more difficult by a relatively soft conference schedule.
Leagues are getting bigger, not smaller, and the Big 12 having only 10 teams is part of what put the league on death watch ever since Colorado was the first one out and like-for-like replacements never materialized for CU, Nebraska, Mizzou and Texas A&M.
I suppose the home run swing would be to have figured out some way to land Notre Dame, but I don’t know what the Big 12 could have realistically offered or done to make that happen.
The Big 12’s original sin was in instantly giving Texas disproportionate power. If there was a way to get Texas to buy in as an equal partner — the way Michigan and Ohio State generally see themselves in the Big 10, for instance — then maybe things would’ve rolled out differently.
But, again, was that ever realistic?
What if instead of adding the four Texas schools the Big 8 merged with the Big 10 or SEC?
Could that have worked?
I don’t know the answer, but I also don’t know of anyone who was thinking about that 25 years ago.
My sense is that 95 percent of this is baked.
You can help yourself with a big season, but these are long-term decisions. This is a bit of a cherry-picked example, but I think it proves a point:
In 1998, Oklahoma finished 5-6, it’s third consecutive losing season. It had not been to a bowl game in four years and had a worse conference record than Texas Tech and Colorado, among others. Texas A&M beat K-State in the Big 12 championship game.
But at that moment in time, if a round of realignment came up there is not a conference commissioner in the country who would have preferred any of those schools mentioned over Oklahoma.
Because fan base and money and history matter. Those are indications of future marketability, and value for networks.
Not to get too negative here, but that’s part of why I’m so sad about what’s left of the Big 12.
Kansas basketball is one of the four most important programs in the sport. Baylor just won the national championship, and hasn’t had a losing season in 15 years.
That’s two of 16 revenue programs in the league, and of the other 14, which ones get the attention of network executives?
Maybe Oklahoma State football?
It’s just a lot of C-minuses, and anyone taking on those eight schools would be operating with the philosophy that four nickels are better than a quarter.
I’m just sad about all of this, and I’m angry about all of it.
College sports had a lot to do with me falling in love with sports.
And I don’t know if this makes me the old man yelling at the clouds about how great the horse and buggy was, but college sports spend a lot of time sucking now.
Cookie-cutter administrators have spent a lot of time telling us that athletes wanting a small portion of their worth were just greedy, and they’ve done it while operating their own business with a shameless level of greed that’s pushing the whole enterprise to the brink.
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about this, and it’s strangely the most encouraging — least discouraging? — part of this.
Because there is every chance that in five or 10 years we’re going to see all of those conference realignment stuff as adorable and out of touch, not unlike wondering if the car wreck you just got in spilled your coffee.
The pace of change in college sports is dizzying, and could only be picking up.
The SEC could be in the beginning stages of breaking completely apart from the NCAA, and operating as it’s own and autonomous conglomerate, setting up its own rules and TV contracts that would leave all other conferences as something like the junior varsity.
Or maybe instead of Texas and LSU and Alabama teaming with Vanderbilt and South Carolina and Mississippi State we see a new reality where the ties are by sport — the biggest 25 or 40 or 50 or whatever football programs set their own rules and appoint their own governing bodies, and the same happens with basketball and softball and swimming and track and baseball.
In that world, it doesn’t matter if you spend the next few years in the SEC or the Big 12 or the Sun Belt.
The SEC is working directly against that right now, but we all know this stuff is dictated by TV money so think about it from a TV network’s point of view:
The SEC is great, but wouldn’t you get bigger audiences if your football package included Ohio State, Michigan, USC and Clemson?
Instead of the current conference setup, what if you had a 30-team basketball league in which North Carolina and Duke and Villanova headlined one conference and Kansas and Kentucky and UCLA headlined the other?
What’s interesting is that the NCAA might be signaling that it sees this coming, and it’s unclear how much of a fight the Indianapolis suits would put up.
Mark Emmert is already and publicly talking about a smaller NCAA in the future. That’s long overdue, because how much does Kentucky basketball have in common with Dartmouth or Pomona or Washburn?
Maybe the way it shakes out is that the nationally attractive programs set up their own rules and leaders, and the NCAA sticks around primarily to hold championships and oversee everyone else?
There would be a lot of schools who’d take opulent training facilities into the lower division, but when’s the last time college sports wasn’t the proud home of shameless financial waste?
So, I don’t know.
We’re all guessing.
But my guess is that anyone under the age of 10 is going to someday require a thorough explanation to even begin to understand what college sports are like right now.
I understand where you’re coming from, and if someone asked that question I would find it performative but not out of line.
My view is that you’re overstating the level of control a coach has over his assistants, and that there is still a lot to be learned about exactly what went on that night — a lot that simply is not going to be learned in a group press conference setting.
My fear is that we’ll never know. NFL facilities are something like security fortresses, with cameras everywhere (though, notably, not in individual offices) and ways to track who goes through which doors and when but there’s a lot of reputations in the balance here, and when that happens, the truth doesn’t always emerge unscathed.
I’m in pretty much the same spot now that I always have been: I want all the evidence and the clearest form of truth to be public, but only in the pursuit of and not the expense of justice.
What I don’t think we need right now is the worst assumptions without evidence.
There may be a time to crush Steve Spagnuolo or Andy Reid or anyone else with righteous impunity. And if that time comes I’ll be first in line.
But I also think addiction is complicated and an illness. I believe that addicts are often experts at keeping secrets, and moving in the dark.
This makes me think of the Arby’s commercial, so it’s a no from me, dog.
Well, the first thing you learn in journalism is that you can’t make the front page from the trainer’s room, and that’s obviously a lie but my hope is that my reputation is one of stubborn dependability except for when I’m on vacation, at which point my boss is getting the new-phone-who-dis treatment.
I know there are times I don’t live up to this, on both sides, but I’m sort of weirdly obsessed with this idea that when I’m working I’m 100 percent focused on doing it as well as I can, and then when I’m with my family I’m 100 percent focused on doing that as well as I can, too.
I’m still learning.
But I hope to earn your trust.
Here I am, about to give you two different answers to this question, and neither is what you’re looking for.
First: hard agree. Even with Busio off to bigger places, this is the best Sporting has ever been. They are versatile, talented, and together. They can adjust to different styles, and different moments.
The playoff expectations will be high, and anything less than a strong run will generate fair criticism.
The second answer you’re not looking for is going to drift a little distance away from your point.
Sporting has had one (1) losing season in the last 10. I get that the sports are different and the leagues are different and this is like comparing apples to lounge chairs, but the Royals are talking a lot about sustainability and consistency and my brains connects those dots.
I just wonder if the Royals would benefit from some sort of study about how Sporting has done it.
Again: I’m not delusional. There is hardly anything that’s directly and cleanly analogous between MLS and MLB.
But isn’t that part of the point?
If you remove yourself from the minutiae maybe some overarching philosophies will emerge. Peter Vermes studies NFL teams, including how depth charts and rosters are built and how personnel decisions are made — particularly with timing.
Maybe there’s something to be gained from studying why Sporting traded Dom Dwyer, for instance, and the schematic changes that led to the decision.
The Royals are led by smart and open-minded people. They recently overhauled their player development strategy, and are flexible in how they draft and build rosters. I think they’d be open to it and, heck, maybe they’ve already done it.
But it just strikes me that Vermes has a lot to offer.
It’s the Mahomes thing and, you guys, it’s not even close.
Well, now that I say that I realize you could make a good case for the Royals because 2008 was dark.
But it’s just that for a while it felt like not drafting a quarterback had become some obnoxious part of Kansas City’s civic identity, like we were the last place holding out on getting the internet because we thought it was a fad.
And, to go one step further, it felt like if we ever saw a day that the Chiefs actually DID draft a quarterback in the first round that surely that quarterback would not only stink but STINK OUT LOUD to such a degree that nobody would talk about Tim Couch or Akili Smith or Ryan Leaf or anyone else, because all they’d talk about when it came to quarterback busts would be the 5-foot-4, slow footed, kind-of-dumb guy who s-talked barbecue at his introductory press conference.
I know I take these things more literally than I should, but the NFL has enough parity that you can imagine just about any team having a run of success, and soccer is booming in popularity, and nobody should be surprised by anything in college sports.
The Royals stuff would’ve felt like a reach — Trey Hillman was the manager, and the Royals were still an American League team running Ross Gload out at first base every day — but by then they had some interesting things going on in the minor leagues, at least.
But, you guys, seriously.
I would have made an outrageous bet on the Mahomes thing, and would have been comfortable with any and all stakes, up to and including if I win the bet you pay me $1 and if you win the bet I have to spend a night in a lion’s cage sleeping with a pillow made of raw steak.
Like, when I think back on the 2014 and 2015 Royals, I remember it as a magical time in Kansas City, as much fun as I’ve ever had professionally, and the result of some luck and a lot of good decisions and heart.
But there are still moments even now when I just shake my head and wonder what kind of weird long con joke this is that a guy with that haircut and that voice came to Kansas City and was the best player in the world from the moment he took his first snap as a starter.
Seriously. Just can’t believe it. Feels like the football gods had a few too many or something.
No Tweets, Lots Of Meats: Mellinger’s guide to time off.
So, first, let me say that I know people generally do not want to hear about other people’s vacations. We’ll ask friends about it — which you’re doing here, and I recognize and appreciate — but that’s done more as a favor to let someone talk.
The one exception might be if something really bad happened. I mean, who doesn’t love hearing a self-deprecating story about a flat tire or a fumbled hotel reservation or ill-timed diarrhea?
Is that too honest?
I regret that I don’t have a story like that for you.
The closest we came was the tire pressure light coming on as we were leaving for the most remote of the stops we made. But all that happened was we found a tire shop that patched us up for $15 in a half hour.
I know these things can go either way, but it was so cool to have the time with just us — the core four — and out of routines. Some of this is corny parent stuff, but it’s cool to see them adjust, grow, try new things. You never know when they’ll surprise you, right?
The first part of the trip was basically my attempt to recreate my childhood for them. My dad worked a lot, and my mom’s parents lived in Chicago, so we’d go up there all the time and hit the museums and mow down deep dish and ride the L. I wondered if they’d get bored with the museums, or tired from the walking, but we didn’t have any of that.
Our kids are very different. Part of that is the 7-year-old is a thinker, and generally cautious. The 5-year-old is a party guy, just looking for a good time and damn the consequences. But when we went to the top of the Hancock, it was the 7-year-old who wanted to do the Tilt thing — basically, they hit a button and you lean out like 45 degrees over the edge of the building.
Stuff like that is the good stuff in life, you know? Vacations allow you to sort of clear the clutter from your brain, and in the best of times the extra time with your family combined with the clearer focus can really unlock some truths.
Maybe next year I’ll have a Griswold story for you.
This week, I’m particularly grateful for, well … it’s the answer to Miriam’s question above.
But I am happy to be back. It’s good to be home, to see the dog again, to get back into a routine and feeling useful again.
This story was originally published August 10, 2021 at 5:00 AM.