Inside the Crown

While we’re generally pretty in tune with contract rules for big league players, one area that gets forgotten is that minor leaguers aren’t just stuck where they are forever, either. Players who are signed at age 18 or younger need to be added to their organization’s 40-man roster within five years, or else they’re eligible to be selected in the next Rule 5 draft. Players who signed at 19 or older must be protected within four seasons to avoid becoming eligible.

I want to start by saying that I wanted to write about a couple of interesting games to start this series, even though they ended in Royals’ losses. I just didn’t have it in me. The plague has apparently taken over the Lesky house. I thought I was feeling better, only to realize it was false hope. I’m actually feeling better now, but I missed two legitimately great games to discuss.

The Weekend in Review is free for everyone every week during the season. If you’d like to get every newsletter, read all the analysis, comment on everything and be eligible for giveaways, become a paid subscriber today! If you went to any of the three games over the weekend, you deserve a prize. It’s not because the games were bad (well, Friday’s was), but because it was only about a billion degrees for all three games.

Just after 10 am yesterday morning, the press release came through with the headline: JAC CAGLIANONE AND NOAH CAMERON NAMED AMERICAN LEAGUE PLAYER, PITCHER OF THE MONTH FOR AUGUST About 11 hours later, I was wondering if Carter Jensen was already on watch to win the September version of the award. At that point, he was putting the finishing touches on a 3-for-4 game with a double, triple and home run.

Seven pitches into the game, it looked like the Royals were in trouble. Six pitches into the bottom of the first, it looked like they were back on the right track. Seven batters into the bottom of the first, it looked like they’d found their August magic after a couple of flat games that put any tiny hope of a miracle run to rest. But by the sixth inning, the game felt like one we'd seen so many times before they found some winning ways during the last calendar month.

The Weekend in Review is free for everyone every week during the season. If you’d like to get every newsletter, read all the analysis, comment on everything and be eligible for giveaways, become a paid subscriber today! Many teams have a mantra that if they just win series, everything will fall into place. And that’s a great thought until you get to a point where winning a series may not quite be enough.

When the Royals won the first of their nine straight games, they improved to 23 games below .500. So it’s natural to see the end of a nine-game winning streak and wonder if the fever dream is over. This year, teams have lost long winning streaks only to struggle a few times. The Rays have had two nine-game winning streaks this year and lost three in a row immediately following. After the first one, they had a five-game losing streak not long after. They’re 5-8 since the second one.

Let’s start with the obligatory: How many times have the Royals won in a row? Okay, now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about just how the Royals won their ninth straight game. The fact that I’m even writing that sentence is still blowing my mind, but here we are, and the Royals haven’t lost since Saturday, August 15. Even that day, they could have won, but Reid Detmers was outstanding, and they lost 1-0.

The Weekend in Review is free for everyone every week during the season. If you’d like to get every newsletter, read all the analysis, comment on everything and be eligible for giveaways, become a paid subscriber today! What if the Royals never lose again? I don’t just mean this year, but for all of eternity. That would be pretty cool. Okay, fine, it won’t go that way, but what a homestand and what a weekend.

Not all 6-2 games are created equal. By score, it seems like an easy win. This one was anything but a walk in the park to complete a four-game sweep of the A’s, but it also never felt like there was any real danger that the Royals might lose this game. If you told me the Royals would only get four innings from their starter and would correspondingly need five innings from the bullpen, I’d have assumed they missed out on the chance to sweep.