Does a subheader go here? No, I guess that’s up above.

At The Star, Jaylon Thompson profiled Royals first-round draft pick Sean Gamble:

Several years before he became the Kansas City Royals’ 2025 first-round draft pick, Sean Gamble left home to pursue his dreams.

At 14 years old.

“I wanted to be great and I think there is a lot of sacrifice that goes into greatness,” Gamble said during his introductory news conference. “And my family understood that.”

Pete Grathoff wrote about an exchange between Royals HOFer George Brett and Chiefs future HOFer Travis Kelce.

At MLB.com, Anne Rogers didn’t have a new feature-length story. But she did contribute to a listicle about “1 big question facing each team down the stretch”:

Royals: Can Cole Ragans return and be impactful?
There will continue to be talk about the Royals offense this season, but what can’t be said enough is how badly they need their ace. Ragans has been sidelined since June 11 with a left rotator cuff strain, but he is on track with his throwing progression and could be throwing a bullpen by next week. With three starters on the IL, Seth Lugo, Michael Wacha and Noah Cameron have done an excellent job anchoring the staff, but Ragans’ ceiling is unlike any other. To get him back – and see the 2024 version of him – could provide as big of a boost as any to this team. — Anne Rogers

And she pointed us in the direction of another beat writer, in this case AJ Cassavell of the Padres, writing a feature about a former Royal:

Royals announcer Joel Goldberg blogs occasionally. I liked his brief entry about Mike Yastrzemski from this week:

“You got to put your guard down. You got to come in and be yourself right away,” Yastrzemski told my broadcast partner Jeff Montgomery and me in an interview for our pregame show.

He suggested putting his phone down and playing cards or video games with his new teammates could create immediate chemistry.

“You have to learn somebody else’s world when you’re stepping into it. I think that just shows that you’re committed to their success… I’m going to be pulling for that guy next to me and almost celebrating his successes more than I do mine.”

Magic Eight Ball, will I learn to spell to spell Yastrzemski without looking before he leaves the team? Outlook not so good.

At Fangraphs, David Laurila talked to big leaguers about who they play catch with:

Michael Wacha, Kansas City Royals right-hander:

“I try to grab another starting pitcher most of the time, because those bullpen arms could be a little too nasty to play catch with. I’d rather keep my thumbs in a good spot. So yeah, I try to stay away from some of those backend bullpen guys who are full throttle at all times.

“I actually play catch with our bullpen catchers a lot. Over the past probably five or six years I’ve primarily done that. I like having a consistent guy to kind of be my eyes on the other kind of side of the ball, to make sure everything is looking the same on a day-to-day basis. That type of deal.

Jake Mintz at Yahoo Sports lists his top 50 free agents for 2025-26. The only Royal is Mike Yastrzemski in the mid 30s. The team you see this year is similar to what we will see next year.

David Lesky also wrote about Wednesday’s game at Inside the Crown ($):

The last time the Royals lost the last game of a series, the NBA finals had only been over for a week. The last time the Royals lost the last game of a series, Mike Yastrzemski was a member of the San Francisco Giants. The last time the Royals lost the last game of a series, Jonathan India was the team’s leadoff hitter. Okay, so it’s not that long ago, but little did we know that when the Royals lost to the Dodgers 5-1 on June 29, it would be the last time until at least August 10 that the Royals would lose a series finale. They’ve now won 10 in a row with their 7-3 win over the Red Sox last night. Overall, they’re 25-12 in the final game of a series.

Royals Data Dugout ($) also wrote about their series finale.

At Into the Fountains, Craig Brown wrote about it, too.

In dropping India to seventh, Quatraro also stressed that the move balanced the bottom of the Royals order, which had been left-handed hitting dominant over the last couple of weeks. So, a purely strategic move. Got it?

Sure, sure. Strategy. Except I cannot help but think that Quatraro saw this as an opportunity to push India down in the order. This is part of why Quatraro is a good manager. He’s making a move that needs to be made because one of his players is not performing, but on the public side, he makes it sound like it’s about just getting another guy maximum at bats. Players appreciate that.

The Royals Reporter, Kevin O’Brien, wrote more about Jonathan India:

It was expected that India would see some regression in home runs in the move from the homer-friendly GAB to Kauffman. However, even though the K is a tough place to hit homers, it traditionally has been friendly to hitters who can hit it in the gaps or down the line due to its spacious dimensions.

According to 3-year Statcast Park Factors, the Royals rank 10th in Park Factor with a 101 mark and rank 4th in doubles (114) and third in triples (188). Thus, with his decent pull rate (61st percentile), one would think that India would have collected more doubles and triples in the move to the K.

That hasn’t happened.

Last week, I hinted at something for this week’s OT, but I’m going to push that off for another week or two. I want to get my feet under me with the new content management system before I try to drop 5000+ words into it.

Instead, this week, I’ll give my first impressions of the new content management system while also trying things out.

ICYMI, here’s a couple of handy links about the changes:

As you may have observed, I can be a little grumpy and averse to change. I’m still happy to make “What’s a Fanpost” jokes. Or ask where our comment history went. Or bring up all the failed promises that quietly went by the wayside. Or, just generally, jokes about Coral. I particularly don’t like when people make promises that I suspect they know they can’t keep but know they can just wait out opposition to it. And I’m not too keen on the two-faced “Who Moved my Cheese” flavor of change that’s mostly insipid and backed by insulting threats.

But I like to think I give things a fair shot, too. And, on the whole, this change has been mostly positive. It’s been significantly less disruptive than the change to Coral. Though, of course, that was a major overhaul of the commenting system while this was only minor commenting changes, significant login changes, and major content management changes.

The comment changes appear almost universally positive. I can’t speak for anyone else, but things just load faster for me. Aside from that, things were mostly left alone with only a few little tweaks. Scott be praised, we can attempt to right margin things again. You can search for your name. These are all positives.

The whitespace… well, I don’t like it at all. I get why sites do it. They’re trying to optimize for mobile so desktops get left behind. I have to scroll more to see less. I’m in the ever dwindling minority of users who visit the site from my computer as opposed to my phone. I get why it’s done from a business decision, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

For the logins, as an author (nominally), I have a login for the back end and one for the front end. That’s reasonable. Beyond that, I haven’t had any major issues. I know others have lost their logins but it was fairly seamless for me. I wasn’t able to post, at first, but Max had me up and running with more than enough time to post this. Heck, I’m getting done at 9 at night – that’s practically a record for me.

For the third major component, there’s the content management system. Honestly, I’m generally good with the upgrades. It’s getting more intuitive the more I work with it. There’s little quirky things like how quotes are a little more cumbersome to do but links are a little easier. It’s the standard type of stuff with learning any new technology – it’s not inherently bad, it’s just having to make new “muscle memory”. Large swaths of the internet use WordPress – it’s pretty vanilla and feels like an upgrade over Chorus, which was getting long in the tooth.

Finally, the downtime wasn’t bad. I know they expected to be done between 5pm and 9am. But I’m sure that was an optimistic estimate. Having been on the other side of the keyboard for migrations, I’ve seen firsthand how these things can go wrong. You can only test so many corner cases or scale it up so much in your testbed. There’s no way to perfectly prepare for a major migration. In the end, we were down for most of a day and that’s not too bad. Not great but not bad either.

On the whole, hey, this one seems like a good upgrade. And how often can you say that about anything nowadays with the increasing, um, crapification of the internet.

For Song of the Day, going to keep things simple once again. We’ve been hitting the SNES Final Fantasies over the last month so I’ll finish that trio off with Final Fantasy IV. I’m currently playing through this game for the umpteenth time on the Switch 2, using the Switch’s version of Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster.

Over the past year, I’ve started to make little lists for games we’ve revisited repeatedly.

Looks like today’s song will be #5. It’s the boss music, aka “Battle 2”.