Reasons to Hate the Royals

[Edgy MD]

ROYALDISLOYAL!!!

[Frayed Knot]

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: One of the weird things he told me -- echoed by the only Facebook pal I know who's also a Royals fan -- is that he also identifies as a Cardinals fan. It's like, totally OK in these Flyover Plains states to have 2 favorite teams; although this guy under my tough questioning admitted he pulled for the Royals in 1985.

I could sort of see that being a thing in the pre-inter-league days, being that they're two very separate markets hundreds of miles apart.
But after the '85 WS and then once inter-league started pairing them together 4-6 times/year, it seems to me that that sort of dual loyalty had to start falling apart particularly as the Royals scraping the basement for so long at right about the same time the Cards began making the playoffs virtually every year.

[Ceetar]

I kinda get that though. Pretty far apart, which means you're not butting up against the other fanbase in day to day life. Same state. Not a completely unreasonable drive if you want to catch a different game. Different league.

And then against the 'big east coast city'? really not surprised.

I know there's some fatigue from recent success, but it's how a lot of Mets fans probably feel/felt about the Red Sox. I bet there are many Giants fans that kinda pull for the Angels, and Dodger fans that pull for the As. (no one cares about San Diego)

Frayed Knot wrote: I could sort of see that being a thing in the pre-inter-league days, being that they're two very separate markets hundreds of miles apart. But after the '85 WS and then once inter-league started pairing them together 4-6 times/year, it seems to me that that sort of dual loyalty had to start falling apart particularly as the Royals scraping the basement for so long at right about the same time the Cards began making the playoffs virtually every year.

That's true, but I could still see Cards fans pulling for the Royals despite that. Plus anyone under 35 probably doesn't have much memory/animosity from that series.

[Lefty Specialist]

I deal with a lot of Cards fans and they're rooting for the Mets, because the Mets knocked off the Cubs, who knocked off the Cards. Enemy of my enemy and all that.

[Benjamin Grimm]

I imagine that Cardinal fans have more reason to hate the Cubs than the Mets.

[Edgy MD]

I got some Brewer buds rooting for the Mets for the same reason.

I'm a little unsure how you put aside the accusations of "pond scum" and such, but welcome aboard, Cards fans. Back of bandwagon for you.

[Elster88]

Hosmer has a Mohawk thing

[Guest El Segundo Escupidor]

I wish it didn't mean so much to me, but it means so much to me.

[seawolf17]

Ben Zobrist, apparently.

[Elster88]

Yeah I don't like the mohawked shitdick.

[Zvon]

Okay, I was kinda neutral before. But now I hate em cause they won game one.

[batmagadanleadoff]

Looks like Lunchbucket is on point about the Royals owners, even though Grantland sez the Wilpons are just as bad. Just a different kind of bad. Either way, it's guaranteed that whichever owner gets to lift that WS trophy next week is a scumbag. Good call by DJ on Sluggerrr's Simpsons style crown. too.

World Series Rooting Guide: Picking a Team Based on What You Value in Life

It takes about eight months to get from the start of spring training to the start of the World Series. That’s a long time; I know a couple of med schools in the Caymans that’ll certify you as a cardiologist in eight months. But at the end of it, because 28 teams and their fans are left out, most baseball fans come to the end of the road without a rooting interest. The good news is that, as always, everything will be just fine as long as everyone out there does exactly what I tell them to. Here’s a list of rooting options, based on what different people might consider important in life. Personal Grooming: Mets Let’s get the easy one out of the way early. I’m usually not a huge fan of white guys who have long hair into their late twenties, particularly when they wear a hat of some kind to work. But Jacob deGrom has such glorious hair that he’s the exception to that rule. Noah Syndergaard’s flow is also pretty good, even if he’s getting way more into the “Thor” aesthetic than is probably healthy. And you could argue that the Mets have both the handsomest player of the 2000s (David Wright) and of the 2010s (Yoenis Cespedes, who has exquisitely sculpted eyebrows).1 “Look good, play good” seems to be the rallying cry for the Mets this year. The Royals have Johnny Cueto’s dreadlocks and a few good, well-groomed beards — particularly Eric Hosmer’s — but they lose points for Alex Gordon and Mike Moustakas, who went full Napoli after it stopped being cool. Then there’s Edinson Volquez. As a young man, Volquez wore beautiful Cueto–ish hair, but he flew too close to the sun and apparently burned it all off. Poor guy. Old-Timey Baseball: Royals From an aesthetic point of view, I really don’t like where baseball is going. Strikeouts and home runs are individually exciting, but on the aggregate they make for a lot of standing around. I like baseball better when the ball is put in play a lot: It gets more people involved and rewards athleticism, even if it’s not the mathematically optimal strategy anymore. This is why the Royals are oodles of fun. Their batters had the lowest walk rate in baseball, and the lowest strikeout rate by far. Despite having two unbearably slow starting position players, the Royals are suicidally aggressive on the bases, which leads to exciting moments such as Lorenzo Cain scoring from first on a single to win the pennant, or anytime Jarrod Dyson or Terrance Gore pinch runs. Mascots With Disturbing, Messed-Up Heads: Draw In one corner, Mr. Met, with his creepy Mr. McGibblets eyes and disproportionately large head. In the other corner, Sluggerrr, who’s a lion. In itself, that is fair enough: The lion is the king of the jungle … king … Royals — you get the idea. Except, Sluggerrr’s crown isn’t on his head, it’s in his head, growing out of his cranium like some fucked-up homage to the Three Score and Ten in Hyperion. If mascots are made to be marketed to children, these mascots must have been designed by people who don’t like children very much, or at least love to cause them pain. Social Justice: Royals, Begrudgingly You could go either way with this one. If you want a good summary of the sins of either of the two owners who could lift the Commissioner’s Trophy, read what Jeb Lund wrote for Rolling Stone about the 15 worst owners in sports; Mets owners Fred and Jeff Wilpon and Royals owner David Glass are on there. I really view this as a choice between two kinds of rottenness. There’s the wide-reaching big-E Evil in Glass, who made his billions running Walmart and is more or less the kind of person you’d expect to put a cartoon smiley face on such an enterprise. On the other hand, you’ve got the Wilpons, who fell for a pyramid scheme and responded by cutting spending back to Tampa Bay–ish levels. They then demonstrated that their flair for administrative and financial incompetence is matched only by their gift for irony by opening a one-of-a-kind Amway storefront at Citi Field. Worse, Jeff Wilpon allegedly had a female team executive fired for having a baby out of wedlock, which is a fascinating sentence to type in the 2000s. The Wilpons are probably not as bad for humanity as Glass is, but their missteps just feel more conscious and personal. Like, you’d want Glass to paint the outside of your house with a roller, but you’d get the Wilpons to do a meticulous still life. If you were fond of whatever color human misery is. The tiebreaker is that it’s hard to look at the amazing month of Mets second baseman Daniel Murphy and not have it feel tainted by his unfortunate preseason comments about Billy Bean’s “lifestyle.” And although this piece is mostly a series of jokes about deGrom’s hair and Sluggerrr’s terrifying head tumor, I’d like to take a moment to consider an extremely serious topic: What should a fan do when his or her favorite team is populated by people who do or say bad things? The obvious solution is for people who say hurtful and ignorant things, or who commit acts of heinous economic injustice, not to be involved in baseball, but that doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen anytime soon, and it leaves us without an answer that satisfies me completely. One option is to ignore everything that happens off the field. Most Mets fans are Mets fans not because they believe their team to be morally good, but because of geographic factors. A team’s performance or character does not reflect the moral righteousness of its fans, after all, and we’d be better off if more people realized that. But how could you celebrate someone who not only thinks you or someone you care about is somehow inferior, but thinks it strongly enough to say so to a reporter? Yet, it’s kind of self-defeating to reject something from which you derive great enjoyment because some people involved in making it do or say bad things. Life is a series of compromises in which we support or participate in certain institutions in spite of their imperfections, and if we care enough about those institutions, we can demand they change for the better. That’s how I wound up, ironically, taking the same “hate the sin, love the sinner” stance on Murphy that Murphy has on gay people. I don’t feel great about it, nor do I begrudge anyone who disagrees with my view one way or the other. It’s a complicated issue, but I can’t take a hard line when I know that the person who lifts the Commissioner’s Trophy in the next week or so will be a man who makes me feel physically ill. Stuff and Velocity: Mets It seems odd that the Royals could lose this one. Yordano Ventura finished second among qualified starters in fastball velocity each of his two seasons in the big leagues, after all, and Volquez has discovered the ability to periodically throw a baseball on a circuitous arc to the plate at 98 mph. That’s to say nothing of Kelvin Herrera and Wade Davis coming out of the bullpen. But if you look at the velocity leaderboard, you’ll get to two Mets — deGrom and Matt Harvey — between Ventura and Volquez. And if you lower the innings threshold, you’ll discover that Syndergaard missed qualifying for the ERA title by 12 innings and throws even harder than Ventura. And then there’s the Warthen Slider. To understand what Mets pitching coach Dan Warthen does to his charges’ arsenals, you have to remember the part in The Muppet Movie where Fozzie parks his Studebaker outside the church where Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem are practicing. While Fozzie and Kermit are asleep, the band does up Fozzie’s car in a ridiculous rainbows-and-bubbles motif to the tune of the best musical number in the whole movie. Leaving your pitcher alone with Warthen is like leaving your car alone with Dr. Teeth: You’ll wake up, and what was once innocuous will have a bodacious paint scheme and a fast-spinning, hard-dropping low-90s breaking ball. Accessories: Mets This is also easy. Wright’s orange undershirt has long been one of my favorite aesthetic choices in baseball, and Cespedes has made his neon, Allen Iverson–style compression sleeve a signature part of his look while not giving a damn whether it matches his uniform.2 Not that that color matches any uniform currently in use in North American professional sports. Uniforms: Royals This is probably the most important thing to consider. The Mets’ home alternate jersey — the bright blue with orange lettering — is my favorite jersey in the game, but they messed it up with the inexplicable decision to pair a solid top with pinstriped pants. The Royals, meanwhile, have a uniform set that is both conservative and eye-popping. The home jerseys seem unnaturally bright on TV, the way a Cardinals-Dodgers game does. The blue accents match well with the colors of the home ballpark, and for both uniforms, the relatively clean design makes it stand out more when Gordon decides to cover himself in pine tar and roll around in the dirt. Everything is heightened by the Royals’ uniforms. Violence: Royals More specifically, Ventura. The Mets can be feisty when they want to be, but cooler heads often prevail. After all, an opponent broke Ruben Tejada’s leg with a dirty slide in the NLDS, and the Mets didn’t even throw at anyone in retaliation. That’s composure under fire. On the other hand, getting Ventura to lose his cool has become a standard part of opponent strategy, because it works. Ventura got into it with the Blue Jays’ first-base coach, of all people, in Game 6 of the ALCS. This rarely escalates to full-blown punching, however, because if you want to fight Ventura, who is small and mouthy, you have to get through Salvador Perez, who is large and strong, first. Salvador Perez’s Health: It Doesn’t Matter, As Long As the Series Ends in Four Games This is what I value. Perez seems like a nice dude, and he’s a fun player to watch, but he takes an unbelievable beating behind the plate. Part of that is due to his size: Anything as large as Perez that is close to the batter’s box will soak up a lot of foul balls. But he’s also caught 2,441 regular-season innings in the past two years (second-place Kurt Suzuki is more than 300 away), and he’s about to go all the way to the end of the playoffs for the second straight season. This postseason, he’s taken a few brutal balls off the mask and been hit by two pitches as a batter, one of which was enough to get Ned Yost to take him out of a must-win playoff game, which would’ve been unthinkable a year ago. Nobody needs a vacation as badly as Perez does.

http://grantland.com/the-triangle/2015-mlb-playoffs-world-series-rooting-guide-mets-royals/

[Guest LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr]

Um... 'cause they're cheating cheaters, maybe?

Perez didn’t speak to reporters after the game and manager Ned Yost correctly pointed out that there is nothing wrong with the catcher — or any position player — having the substance, believed to be pine tar, there. “It’s not illegal,” Yost said. “I don’t know what it was. It was brown. It’s not illegal for a catcher to have it on his shinguard. It’s illegal for a pitcher.”

[Edgy MD]

Yeah, I don't know why Terry gave them an explicit pass on this. I guess because he thought it would only result in a distraction. Or there's some sort of unwritten rule that says, "We all know pitchers all over the league and on every team use the stuff, but we all agree not to call each other on it, unless they stockpile it on their person."

Obviously (1) pitchers don't have shinguards, and (2) catchers transfer baseballs, and whatever is on them, to the pitcher.

[Guest LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr]

It certainly wasn't incidental; rewatching the game today, I noticed that he seemed to go to the guard with that hand a few times in the middle-late innings.

[Frayed Knot]

Edgy MD wrote: Or there's some sort of unwritten rule that says, "We all know pitchers all over the league and on every team use the stuff, but we all agree not to call each other on it, unless they stockpile it on their person."

This. Last guy I remember getting called on it was Michael Pineda and even then only because he had half the La Brea tar pits on his neck.
Hitters don't even object to it unless completely over the top because it helps pitchers maintain control of the rockets they're throwing, particularly on cold days.

[dgwphotography]

They've shown themselves to be whiney britches who can dish it out, but can't take it. F*ck them.

[soupcan]

The New York Times wrote: The Royals also expressed their displeasure with Syndergaard by refusing to credit him with a well-pitched game. He allowed three runs and seven hits while striking out six in six innings. Moustakas said Syndergaard had simply been “O.K.,” before adding that the rookie right-hander was “pretty good.” Hosmer added that if Syndergaard had not had the benefit of an offensive outburst by the Mets, he most likely would have taken a loss. “We did a good job of getting to him, but his offense did a good job of bailing him out,” Hosmer said. “They found some momentum to pick him up there in the late innings.”

Yeah, they did a 'good job of getting to him' while he was retiring 12 of them in a row.

Whiny bitches. And Hey Moustakis - you kiss your mother with that mouth?

[bmfc1]

WAA! WAA! WAA!
http://www.kansascity.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/vahe-gregorian/article42048891.html

Jeff Passan wrote in Yahoo!: "the Royals believe they're the alphas, and they don't like the feeling of being bullied when they're typically the aggressor." Maybe Thor got them off their game for more than just one night.

[soupcan]

Dud the Mets whine this much when Kent broke Tejada's leg? I don't think so.

And Syndegaard's pitch didn't even hit him.

[Guest themetfairy]

If they were that freaked out by the pitch then they wouldn't have gone on to score three runs in two innings.

The Royals are either looking for a rallying cry or for MLB to tie Thor's hands in Game 7. This is a strategic attempt to influence the game by playing the victim.

[Elster88]

Reasons to hate the Royals:

Because they're a bunch of pussies who can't handle a little chin music.

And filthy hypocrites because they did the same thing to Murphy early in the series.

And stupid because apparently some of them don't remember

[Fman99]

bmfc1 wrote: WAA! WAA! WAA! http://www.kansascity.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/vahe-gregorian/article42048891.html Jeff Passan wrote in Yahoo!: "the Royals believe they're the alphas, and they don't like the feeling of being bullied when they're typically the aggressor." Maybe Thor got them off their game for more than just one night.

What a bunch of Sallies. Just shut up, state o' Kansas. There hasn't been so many tears in that state since John Brown's days.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

Mike MousWAAAkas can eat my asshole

[Guest LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr]

The really hilarious thing about last night's bitching is, their guy Ventura is typically something of a little-dog-who-thinks-he's-a-big-dog, headhunting whenever he pleases.

[Guest Rotblatt]

Elster88 wrote: Reasons to hate the Royals: Because they're a bunch of pussies who can't handle a little chin music. And filthy hypocrites because they did the same thing to Murphy early in the series. And stupid because apparently some of them don't remember

Yes, yes, and yes.

[dgwphotography]

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr wrote: The really hilarious thing about last night's bitching is, their guy Ventura is typically something of a little-dog-who-thinks-he's-a-big-dog, headhunting whenever he pleases.

Of course he does. He doesn't have to stand at the plate with a bat in his hands like they do in the real league.

[bmfc1]

Because they couldn't keep it in their pants, so to speak, and act classy by staying inside their dugout before the final out was made.

[Edgy MD]

2015.

[Guest cooby classic]

Before the World Series, I had never heard of even ONE of the Royals. I had complete apathy for them then, and I have complete apathy for them now.

Though I still hope that horse's ass fell on his face when he straddled over the dugout fence. Whoever he was. See, I forget their names already. The big dopey looking pitcher with dreads.