Gordon is a team HOFer having a productive if not outright good season. Not sure how many teams would bench a guy like that.

Yup

Zimmer just learned you don't throw Nelson Cruz a fastball over the plate.

Speaking of Phillips, he has hit another HR tonight. But I'm not sure if that's impressive or not. They're playing at Reno they're losing 20-8 in the 6th inning, so everyone is hitting. Omaha may have to go to their hurry up offense.

Sounds just like my crappy softball team

the only thing that matters in these lost years is player development. This is why shit like signing Duda and Hamilton is so frustrating.

You have enough actual potential big-leaguers to fill out your starting 8 along with some utility pieces.

Spend money on pitching and pitching only in free agency, with an emphasis on bullpen pieces.

quit spending good money on shit players.

You realize you can develop in the minors right? Club control is of vast importance to the Royals, so it makes sense to keep a guy a year too long at triple A vs bringing him up on a hopeless ballclub (who wont win for 2+ years)

That's one way to look at it, but I'd rather have our young guys get their ML struggles out of the way instead of bringing them up when we are supposed to be good and then we have to send them to AAA because they suck and we need them to produce. How often do we have prospects come up and produce? Only ones I can remember are Whit and Hosmer. Yeah it delays service time, but it also extends the amount of time it will take to become competitive. By the time our prospects come up to the bigs and then start to produce, the guys that are on the ML team are older or gone.

So bring up the young guys to take their lumps and failures, so that in a year or two they should be productive.

Except that you don't really know until they reach the major league level.

I understand the club control concept, and there's a balance to be achieved.

I still don't understand throwing money at Duda and Billy. It's dumb.

Soler just annihilated one into the upper deck in Minnesota. 465 feet. What a bomb.

Meanwhile the Twins are on pace to hit 12 homers tonight. You never would have guessed at the beginning of the season that this team would be the greatest home run hitting team of all time.

EDIT: Make that on pace for 16 homers tonight. I almost wonder if Duffy is tipping his pitches. They're sitting all over everything he throws.

Duffy looking at Ned right now...
https://media.tenor.com/images/eab0c...a72a/tenor.gif

Bubba has really cooled off since his hot start. Over the last week he's 3-22 with 0 walks and 12 strikeouts.

AKA, the real Bubba Starling

He's really struggling to deal with all the sliders teams are feeding him. He has a really hard time with quality sliders.

The defense and plate approach are solid. Just really struggles to do much with a good slider.