{"id":168263,"date":"2025-07-11T13:05:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-11T13:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/168263\/"},"modified":"2025-07-11T13:05:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-11T13:05:09","slug":"royals-rumblings-news-for-july-11-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/168263\/","title":{"rendered":"Royals Rumblings – News for July 11, 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

There were a couple of stories about Vinnie Pasquantino giving Jac Caglianone an il bacetto in celebration after his home run on Wednesday. Anne Rogers mentions it in her story<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Caglianone\u2019s two-run home run off Pirates starter Bailey Falter cleared not one, not two but three separate walls in center field at Kauffman Stadium for a whopping Statcast-projected 466 feet, bouncing over the QuikTrip banner below the CrownVision scoreboard.<\/p>\n

Caglianone was greeted in the dugout with what has turned into a very Italian home run celebration between him and Vinnie Pasquantino, in which Pasquantino greets Caglianone with an il bacetto \u2014 kisses on both cheeks.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust Italians being Italians,\u201d Caglianone said.<\/p>\n

Pete Grathoff also writes about it<\/a> in The Star. He also wrote about the homer<\/a> that preceded the celebration:<\/p>\n

Caglianone saw where the ball landed.<\/p>\n

\u201cI try not to watch,\u201d he said, \u201cbut I did on that one.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was the longest home run of the season by a Royals player and Caglianone\u2019s fourth of the season since being called up from Triple-A Omaha. Ian Kraft, the Royals\u2019 assistant director of media relations, said it was the 10th-longest home run hit in the majors this season, and the 10th-farthest hit at Kauffman since 2015.<\/p>\n

Jaylon Thompson asked some current Royals<\/a> about their draft memories and advice for prospective draftees:<\/p>\n

The Pioneer League afforded Tolbert an opportunity to develop his skills. There were less glamorous aspects, too, like hotel accommodations at the local Comfort Inn and 15-hour bus rides between cities.<\/p>\n

But Tolbert couldn\u2019t have been happier. He was living out his dream while remaining vigilant, even if the unyielding sacrifices he made along the way weren\u2019t always easy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I got to Idaho and just while we were traveling, I thought it was the best thing in the world,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a grind, and back then, we weren\u2019t making a lot. \u2026 You\u2019ve got to have that belief and take it one day at a time.\u201d<\/p>\n

No Royals will be in the Home Run Derby<\/a>. I guess that\u2019s not surprising, considering the team is 3rd from the bottom in MLB in home runs. Vinnie\u2019s team-leading 15 home runs is good for, checks notes, 37th in the league. Salvy and Bobby\u2019s 13 home runs tie them for 54th along with someone called Zach Neto and a couple ahead of (39 year-) old friend Carlos Santana\u2019s 10.<\/p>\n

Blogs? Craig and David each wrote about the Wednesday night game. <\/p>\n

Brown won the toss<\/a> so his entry goes first:<\/p>\n

I know the early-season Statcast metrics said not to sleep on Perez. Even though he got off to a slow start, he was still hitting the ball hard. There was just some bad luck involved. Still, I couldn\u2019t help but wonder if we were seeing the beginning of Perez\u2019s twilight years. Age, as you know, is undefeated.<\/p>\n

Yet since the start of June, Perez is hitting .271\/.314\/.504 with seven home runs and nine doubles. That was prior to Wednesday\u2019s game. Then, he did this to a baseball in the second inning:<\/p>\n

That means Lesky ($) goes second<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll get to Perez\u2019s heroics and the other absolute tank that was hit last night, but something I was thinking about on the way home from the ballpark is how perception changes things. The Royals have now been exactly two games under .500 six different times. At 2-4 and 3-5, nobody really cared. At 8-10, things were feeling iffy because they were falling. At 12-14, they were on their way back up. At 34-36 the season was over. At 36-38, it was on the way back. At 38-40, it was on the way back down. And now at 46-48, it feels better than any of them because it feels like there\u2019s a chance. The Royals have to take care of business against a good team this weekend to maintain that chance, but it feels like there\u2019s a chance.<\/p>\n

Royals Data Dugout ($, I think) talk about Cam Devanney<\/a>:<\/p>\n

After slashing .272\/.366\/.565 in 69 games at Triple-A Omaha with an 11.8% walk rate and 18 homers, Devanney more than earned a shot to add some life to KC\u2019s lineup with plenty of pop and a dash of defensive versatility to boot. While his primary responsibility is manning shortstop, he\u2019s played a handful of games at second and third in 2025.<\/p>\n

But the appeal is the power, evidenced by an outlandish .293 ISO in 288 plate appearances with the Storm Chasers. While the bat didn\u2019t find a spark in Spring Training, as Devanney slashed .194\/.324\/.226 without a dinger in Big League camp, he did show off his ability to work a walk with six free passes in 37 trips to the dish.<\/p>\n

Blog Roundup:<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have one of my traditional OTs today. I\u2019m still playing catch-up from vacation and still feel like I\u2019m on Pacific Time. That said, I (re-)ran across a mention of the Tri-Cornered Baseball Game<\/a> and I don\u2019t think it\u2019s been mentioned before on this site. So, yes, we\u2019re going to have the rare \u201cBaseball OT\u201d today.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m just going to start with the Wikipedia description from the link above:<\/p>\n

The Tri-Cornered Baseball Game was a three-way exhibition baseball game held at the Polo Grounds on June 26, 1944, among the Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants and New York Yankees. The game, a World War II fundraiser, was played with a round-robin format in which each team batted and fielded during six innings and rested for the other three. The Dodgers won by scoring five runs in their times at bat; the Yankees scored one run, while the Giants were unable to score. <\/p>\n

Over at SABR<\/a>, Trachel Hamelers and Mike Huber went into more detail:<\/p>\n

On June 25, the day before the game, the New York Times wrote, \u201cAs major league baseball starts its tenth week of its campaign, Greater New York\u2019s three local clubs will pause in their serious pursuit of pennants for the more serious pursuit of war bond dollars.\u201d2 Another story told fans, \u201cThe jig-saw puzzle of working out this procedure baffled the best minds of the game until they called upon a mathematics professor at Columbia University, Paul A. Smith. Without scratching his head more than a few hundred times the professor came up with the following layout, which calls for eighteen half-innings to be played, thus\u201d:<\/p>\n

So you get the basic idea, right? Three teams played a 9-inning game. Since only two teams could play at a time, the other team rested for the inning. The teams rotated who played and who rested. The box score<\/a> is a sight to behold.<\/p>\n

There were some pre-game festivities and it was all to raise money for war bonds. <\/p>\n

I think I came across this article again<\/a> from MLB. This might be my favorite bit from the whole endeavor:<\/p>\n

The Giants were the home team for the bizarre contest on June 26, 1944, leaving the Dodgers and Yankees to share the visitors\u2019 dugout. That meant that two future Hall of Fame skippers, Joe McCarthy of the Yankees and Leo Durocher of the Dodgers, found themselves strategizing against each other from the same bench. (The Giants, too, were managed by a future Cooperstown inductee, Mel Ott, who was also their right fielder at the time.) <\/p>\n

We\u2019re going back to the SNES version of SimCity. So far, we\u2019ve used the Village (2017.11.03 – introduction<\/a>), Metropolis (2021.04.09 – more details<\/a>), Capital (2023.07.07<\/a>), and Town (2024.02.16<\/a>) themes. Two to go – this one and the ultimate of Megalopolis. Today, it\u2019s the \u201cCity\u201d Theme:<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There were a couple of stories about Vinnie Pasquantino giving Jac Caglianone an il bacetto in celebration after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168264,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2387],"tags":[5,250,181,2143,936,2123,55,2596,2595,4,169,254,252,3560,3559],"class_list":{"0":"post-168263","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-kansas-city-royals","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-for","10":"tag-front-page","11":"tag-july","12":"tag-kansas","13":"tag-kansas-city","14":"tag-kansas-city-royals","15":"tag-kansascity","16":"tag-kansascityroyals","17":"tag-mlb","18":"tag-news","19":"tag-review","20":"tag-royals","21":"tag-royals-news-notes-links","22":"tag-rumblings"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/114834750148155334","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168263\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}