Royal Takeaways
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@SoftballDad2011 kc media and fans would never do that to our royals! That’s who we are. Special team!
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I believe that is true.
But I wonder if we as KU fans do just what the Mets fans did?
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@SoftballDad2011 good question!
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@SoftballDad2011 I never have - never will. Others do and that is their right but one must remember they are kids and stuff happens that we as fans can not control.
Can’t wait for tonight!
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Sheahon could learn to hire good coaches and then not fire them before they have had a chance to develop a team. Board rats might be forgetting Yost was almost s-canned before the Royal’s first Series run. Someone at the Royals had a pair, ignored the fan outcry against Yost, told ownership Yost was his guy and risked his own career to keep him. Yost and the Royals turned the corner.
Bad teams have to be bad for awhile, until they figure out how to win.
Never should have fired Gill, Sheahon.
Never should have hired Charlie, Sheahon.
Stick with Beatty, Sheahon, even if it gets you fired.
Getting fired occasionally trying to develop something good is part of the risk of leadership.
Yost risked getting fired trying to turn the Royals into something special. Someone stuck with him. They are special.
It doesn’t always work.
But it never works unless a boss and his subordinate are willing to RISK FOR GREATNESS.
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I agree with your assessment.
I also believe that fan support is largely driven by expectations .
When winning is new, it is easy to feel and show the love.
When you win 83% of your games the bar is raised and the prevailing expectation becomes disappointment if you don’t win the last game of the season…regardless of how many games you won earlier in the season.
While that is normal, I just hope the annual expectations for KU BBall don’t ever cause us to forget how good we have it.
Always ok to hope for more, just don’t let it tarnish the perception of what you already have.
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I agree with your words about management sticking to their guns and letting a coach take the time to build.
But I don’t believe it would ever happen with Gill or Charlie. Both seemed to be working in the wrong direction. Gill, especially, created a horrible team environment. Discipline had completely shattered and when that happens it takes a new staff to get it back.
Hard to grade Beatty yet. He walked into a tough situation. Word is that his biggest strength is recruiting, and football success is largely based on recruiting. I have to admit I haven’t been keeping up with Kansas football this year. From the soundbites I have caught it was very positive. Beatty spoke openly about strategies and how he is building a long-term winning structure.
We have to start somewhere. I just hope if Beatty does start to turn our program around we can keep him here. I don’t know enough about him to get a feeling about that. I’m sure others can weigh in on that to better comment.
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I am not sure pulling Harvey would have won the game. Harvey was pitching great and had a chance to pitch a complete game in the World Series. Perhaps not the best decision but certainly a defensible one.
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@JayHawkFanToo I agree completely. We’d already touched up Familia … two blown saves to that point. It is certainly defensible either way.
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@JayHawkFanToo and @HighEliteMajor
I missed getting my reply to @wissoxfan83 in that post…
…and to that end my point was I didn’t think simply pulling Harvey would have won the game after our success against Familia.
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@SoftballDad2011 Yep, I think you are right on there. KC isn’t the best match for Familia.
Turns out the KC wasn’t a good match up for the Mets, either.
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I’ve been mostly out of the loop on baseball but I did get to see some games while in the US recently, including the Series.
I was always taught that you needed defense up the middle to win big. Think Frank White at second base, Amos Otis in center field in the '80s.
For the Mets, Murphy was a disaster at second base. I saw that and thought “How did these guys win the NL?”
Pitching isn’t everything if the offense manages to at least get the ball in play and the defense breaks down under pressure.
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@ParisHawk and… Don’t forget, the best bull pen in the league!
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Had my doubts about Gill, but he turned the corner to 9-5 at Liberty, same as he turned The corner at Buffalo. It looks more and more like he was the victim of a smear campaign run during one of the lean rebuilding year, rather than a program careening out of control.
Hypothesis: A new regime was desperate to consolidate control over the program in order to dictate who would get the then looming stadium renovation contracts. When the economy and realignment issues derailed stadium renovation, it turned out he was fired for nothing. Tragic.
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@jaybate-1.0 Hmmm … that could also be said about the firing of Mangino just months after our current, astute chancellor was hired.
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I think its notable that Mangino just got canned at ISU and nobody has touched him as a head coaching candidate since he left KU. Add to it his history of incidents involving verbal abuse and just generally not getting along with people, and its easy to see why Mangino would be a tough hire anywhere. Mangino was out of football from 2009 until he was hired at Youngstown State in 2013. That’s a huge layoff. He wasn’t doing TV. He wasn’t doing radio. It’s just that nobody hired him. That speaks volumes about the type of person he is, in my opinion.
Meanwhile, Gill was immediately hired after leaving KU.
I don’t think that means Gill is a better football coach than Mangino. That is still debatable. I do think it means that if you’re a college, it may be easier to deal with Gill than Mangino as a coach.
I do think @jaybate-1.0 has an interesting point with Yost. Yost was on the brink of getting fired at the end of the 2012 season. Fans were calling for his head, but instead the Royals gave him an extension. Since that extension, the Royals have the best record in the American League. Oddly enough, Yost has a losing record with the Royals for his career (currently 468-469 not including playoffs). He was legitimately bad his first three years, but has been just as good his last three. Had KC not been patient, they would probably still be a mediocre club, either about to fire another manager, or still figuring out what direction they wanted to go in.
KU football is the same in many ways. There’s some history, but the last several years have been poor. Like the Royals of the late 80s and early 90s, KU has gone for the quick fix, just like the Royals when they were signing free agents and trying to piece together another quick playoff run. That lack of focus led to KC drifting for 20 more years, as KC went through 8 managers between Howser and Yost. No Royals manager led the team for more than 4 full seasons. It was a revolving door that had many reboots, but never a clear direction.
As I have said many times, Beatty deserves a full term - 4 years - to see if he can get this turned around. I’d be willing to give him a fifth year if he’s making any positive progress, even if he hasn’t made it to a bowl by then. If this Royals squad has shown anything, it’s that you have to stick to a plan, even if many people don’t believe your plan is working, or even that it is any good. Had the Royals abandoned the plan after 2012, they probably would have been hailed throughout baseball, but they would not be World Champions right now.
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@HighEliteMajor BGL is not reason Mangino the reason Mangino got fired. Mangino never got along with Perkins (this isn’t a secret) and Perkins had to be talked into not firing Mangino after 2006. Their hatred of each other preceded BGL arriving in Lawrence by years. BGL is also not the one who started the investigation, the whistle was blown on Mangino by his own players after the Arist Wright tirade and that’s also when Mangino completely lost the locker room. Go back to the fall of 2009 and look fir players going out of their way to stand up for Mangino because it did not happen. Players who didn’t outright slam Mangino only talked about the situation when asked directly about it and didn’t defend Mangino with any conviction whatsoever.
Turner Gill was the wrong coach at wrong for KU. Perkins botched the Mangino so horribly that KU could only go to the extreme player friendly coach for their next hire without ridicule from the media and that wasn’t what KU needed. KU needed someone to bring in someone to restore order to a fractured locker room and Gill was not that man. Turner Gill is a coach whose style fits with a program that has a lot of stability and self discipline already instilled. KU didn’t have that at that time. Indo believe goven the full 5 years, Gill would have KU in a place to be competitive because he’s always been competitive as a head coach outside of his time here. He won a conference title at Buffalo which was a program that hadn’t won more than 2 games in a season since moving to the FBS prior to Gill. He’s won or shared a conference title and been in the FCS playoffs every year at Liberty. The man is a good coach who happened into a bad situation that was a horrible fit for him here at KU. Rich Rodriguez went through the same thing when he left WVU for Michigan. A good coach who was a terrible fit for a program that has since landed on his feet. Charlie Weis has done far more damage to KU than Turner Gill ever did.
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@Crimsonorblue22 That’s the great part of being from small town America ( the mid west) )knowing that you lose with character. tip your cap, & enjoy victory with an element of humility & reverence. These young men trailed in the ninth inning in 2 of these series wins & in the 8th inning of another. they did hammer Familia pretty hard a couple of times, but they continually kept the ball in play & pressured every defense in every post season game, coming from behind time after time after time. The ROYALS scored 50 plus runs after the 8th inning in the post season and their opponents tallied 11. The caliber of ball they played, they may well have beaten anyone this year. In this post steroid era they play a brand of fundamental ball that the HR hitting mashers were just not able to compete with. & are making the metrics guys shake theirheads in dis belief. This simply is the year to call the ROYALS of Kansas City as the Comeback City ROYALS.
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It’s obviously a question that never can be answered, but with a well rested bullpen, he could have brought in any reliever even if it was just to get one out. I’ve seen lots of managers waste bullpens this way, but it would have been appropriate in that situation.
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I am not sure that comparing Mangino going un-hired and Gill getting that “plum” job at Liberty are the same. I am sure Mangino could have gotten a job similar to the Liberty position, but…why? He was still getting paid handsomely by KU and a position like the Liberty HC position is not exactly a resume builder, in fact, I seriously doubt Gill will ever get consideration from any Power Conference or even mid-major conference after his stint at Liberty.
Gill was a marginal coach even at Buffalo. Read Jason Whitlock’s article on the way Gill got his only decent season at Buffalo…pretty much smoke and mirrors; it did get him the job at KU and a hefty windfall. I met Gill a couple of times and he seemed like a real nice man and fist class individual, but IMHO, not major program coaching material. He interviewed with many programs prior to KU, and you can speculate why, but even his Alma Mater Nebraska passed on him. Obviously I am not a fan of Gill the coach but very much respect Gill the person.
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@JayHawkFanToo Smoke and mirrors are how you win with inferior talent. That’s not something special to Gill at Buffalo. The facts are this Buffalo joined the FBS level in 1999 and went 10-69 in the 7 years prior to Turner Gill. That’s 1.4 wins per season in 7 years. Turner Gill won 20 games in 4 seasons there which is 5 wins per season on average. Did he make Buffalo elite? No, but he won twice as many games in 4 years than Buffalo had won in the 7 years prior. That’s a big improvement no matter how you dissect it because W’s are what matter at the end of the day regardless of how they were attained. KU is right now is probably going to be 12-60 in the 6 years post Mangino, 2 wins per season on average. You’re telling me you wouldn’t take a coach who could average 5 wins per season right now at KU (Mangino barely averaged 6 for reference). I could not care less if KU wins games by smoke and mirrors or by lining up and kicking the other teams a$$. Al Davis said it best, “Just win baby!”
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To be fair, TC brought in Familia in tough spots with runners already on base. Other than the Gordong he gave up, he pretty much did his job and induced weak ground balls. Now Murphy on the other hand…
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@wissoxfan83
Yes, we’ll never know.
I just got sick of the east coast media jumping to the conclusion and reporting that the Mets gave the game away when they sent Harvey out for the 9th…
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@Eric
The Royals put a lot of balls in play in games one, four and five when Familia was out there.
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@SoftballDad2011 me too!
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@SoftballDad2011 Can’t really say what would’ve happened but it might have been different if Familia was given a clean 8th. He did only give up 2 singles and if it wasn’t for Clippard’s 2 walks and Murphy’s Buckner moment, Royals may not even score that inning. The 2 runs scored in Game 5 were on Harvey as well. As an armchair manager, I send Harvey back out for the 9th, the problem was not taking him out after a man got on base.
I agree with you the Mets did not give the game(s) away. It isn’t even like the Royals played perfect defense. Hosmer had a couple crucial errors so do the Royals get to take those back? Or Rios having a brain fart and forgetting how many outs there were?
It is pretty sad how quickly the NY media turned on their own players so quickly…
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@Eric Agreed.
How about when Hosmer made the error in game 5 on a high degree of difficulty play and America was lectured on how the gold glover should have played that.
And then Murphy is coddled because there was a lot of side spin on his oops and a much slower made to order dp ball!
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@SoftballDad2011 Was that the one that Hosmer tried to back hand catch it?
I remember the media did the same thing with Correa’s error too. Blame it on the tough hop… Couldn’t possibly be because Correa took his eyes off the ball right media?
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@Eric Hoz is the best scooper but he should have gotten in front of that one!
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Hoz committed the cardinal sin of trying to make a nice play instead of just getting in front of it and making sure the ball stayed on the infield. If he blocks that ball with his body, he still has a chance for the out at first (probably doesn’t get it, but maybe) and there’s no way the runner goes home. By letting the ball get by, he gave them a run.
The difference is that the Royals were good enough to overcome their mistakes. The Mets were not. In the only game the Mets won, it turned on the play where Morales gets the comebacker to the mound and, rather than either starting the double play by throwing to second or at least recording one out at first. Instead, he let the bases get loaded and the Mets had a big inning.
When the Mets made mistakes, the Royals capitalized every single time. When the Royals made mistakes, the Mets capitalized sometimes, but the Royals overcame those mistakes. That’s why they won. Every team makes mistakes, but the champions overcome those mistakes.
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@justanotherfan and the best bull pen! Love this TEAM!
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@JuliannaZobrist: BLAISE ROYAL ZOBRIST, waited for her daddy to win the World Series & came the day her mommy’s single #Alive dropped! https://t.co/40TlljkkT4
