Gregorian Chants: on Danny Duffy, stocks, condiment crashes and sportswriter dilemmas

In scan mode while wondering who’ll stop the rain …

▪ In a sense, it’s a moot point for now with Chris Young and Kris Medlen injured and Danny Duffy and Dillon Gee in the Royals’ rotation by necessity.

And Duffy’s sterling three-inning performance on a limited pitch count on Sunday is only tentative evidence of anything.

But as well as Duffy has adjusted to the bullpen, where he doesn’t have to think of holding anything back and had surrendered just one run in his last 10 outings, the stubborn and lonely view here is that the optimal place for him — and the Royals — remains in the rotation.

So why make this time a mere stopgap?

Unless an entire team that went to the last two World Series is going to stay cold at the plate all season and its defensive excellence has just evaporated, never to return, the most glaring concern the Royal have is the rotation.

As much as Duffy suffered from inconsistency last season, his potential upside as a starter is tremendous. That was in neon in 2014, when he was among the best lefty starters in the game (2.55 ERA in 25 starts) before being injured.

He’d be in a greater position to influence the trajectory of the season in the rotation than in the bullpen.

And this is the time for the Royals to stretch him out and try to maximize what he can do for a team in need.

Manager Ned Yost is hesitant to comment on this. Even after Duffy struck out five, gave up one hit and walked two in three shutout innings on Sunday, Yost said he’s thinking only “day-to-day” on where he’s going with Duffy and the Royals’ starting pitching.

But why not cultivate this now?

The worst that could happen is determining that Duffy just isn’t going to contribute enough as a starter and sending him back to the ’pen for the stretch run.

After the game Sunday, Duffy said he “lost my legs a little bit” in the third. “But that’s to be expected,” he added. “The more and more I throw, the more and more I’ll be able to get deeper in the game.”

But Duffy, ever a team player, wasn’t advocating for a change.

Asked whether he’d rather be a starter than a reliever, he said: “You know, I’d just rather be a Royal at this point. I’m happy in any role that they put me in. I’m very comfortable as a reliever, but I know I can get the job done as a starter.”

Maybe it wouldn’t work out. But this is an opportunity to know instead of wonder.

▪ Enjoyed speaking the other day with John Schuerholz, who was in on the ground floor of building the Royals before becoming their general manager and moving to Atlanta to work wonders with the Braves. Loved his tale of strutting around in the first Royals uniforms, which like just about anything else triggered a “Seinfeld” image in my mind. In this case, sorry John, it made me think of Kramer modeling.

▪ Couldn’t quite fit this in that column, but it’s stuck with me: Schuerholz noted he’s served on boards of various companies and how important annual reports are. In what he called “the fishbowl” of baseball, the work is “measure and analyzed” on a daily basis as if it’s stock. “A lot of evaluations are made with passion and emotion and expectation and not a lot of realism around those things,” he said.

▪ That tends to warp perception of the bigger picture, and it’s something to keep in mind as you live and die with every Royals game and slump and glitch when fluctuation is inherent in all of this.

▪ Speaking of stock and ups and downs, saw “Money Monster” late Saturday night. Highly recommend. Also endorse pre-game meal of Coal Vines’ spicy meatball pizza.

▪ Learned something new at the Royals game Friday night. What seemed the distinct scent of skunk wafted through the press box and lingered a good long while. After tweeting about the oddity, got some enlightening responses. Most succinctly: “It’s called pot, Vahe.”

▪ Kendrys Morales’ game-winning home run in the 13th on Sunday was cool and all, but it was tough to top the drama of the Ketchup-, Mustard- and Relish-costumed runners all going splat in their race.

▪ The condemned condiments resembled one of the great Olympic moments I was privileged to see: Australia’s Steven Bradbury, stuck in last place in a short-track speedskating race in the 2002 Salt Lake Games, winning gold because everyone in front of him fell.

Many ridiculed Bradbury and the moment, but part of the story was how much he had suffered for his sport until then — including thinking he might die when another skater’s blade gashed open his leg in 1994 and caused him to lose what Bradbury called four liters of blood.

▪ Billy Witz of The New York Times wrote last week about the dilemma he faced when he went into the stands at Yankee Stadium as part of a story he was working on and suddenly found himself picking up Lorenzo Cain’s third home run of the night after it caromed around and landed at his feet.

▪ Sportswriters don’t often encounter such situations, but I can say I made the most stupid possible decision when a ball came my way in the Kaufmann Stadium press box during the 2014 World Series.

In the few seconds tracking the ball’s trajectory, my mind flickered to a) the one time I’d gotten my hands on a foul ball … and dropped it, and b) the fact I had just gotten a backup computer that evening because the “A” key on my other one had gone AWOL.

Somehow this added up to thinking the best thing to do would be to … bat the ball down, to both protect the computer and thus not take any chance on dropping the ball since I had never tried to catch it. Have regretted it ever since.

▪ That said … I feel slightly vindicated any time I’ve seen poor Blair Kerkhoff in the last month or so. He’s got pins in two of his fingers from surgery after an errant Colorado pass he caught on press row in Des Moines during the NCAA Tournament.

This story was originally published May 16, 2016 at 3:24 PM with the headline "Gregorian Chants: on Danny Duffy, stocks, condiment crashes and sportswriter dilemmas."