Required Royals Reading

While I’m glad you visit Kings of Kauffman every day (you have us bookmarked, yes? loaded our RSS feed? follow us on Twitter and Facebook?), the internet makes it easy to catch all sorts of sources and articles about our favorite team. Now and again, I like to pass some along that you may have missed.

This batch of articles focus on the 2011 season, Yuniesky Betancourt, Wil Myers and remembering Paul Splittorff:

Sam Mellinger (who was on the Royalman Report recently) tries his best to temper the outrage over the Betancourt signing. He’s not convinced that it’s a bad signing because this isn’t the same situation that the Royals were in when trading for him in 2009. I’m still skeptical, as are many of us around here.

It’s that time of year where everyone does a yearly review. Rustin Dodd (another Royalman Report guest!) looked back at the five biggest days of the Royals 2011 season.

Nathaniel Stoltz (okay, I’m honestly not just trying to cover our recent guests, but Nathaniel was on the Royalman Report, too) has been running down the top 100 prospects in baseball for FanSided’s minor league blog, Seedlings to Stars. Outfielder Wil Myers is the last Royals prospect ranked, coming in at 16th overall.

Finally, a side note. I’ve recently purchased the MLB.tv offseason package in order to go back through and get a full scorecard for every game of the 2011 season. I started on opening day and got to about the third week of May before I got pulled away and fell behind. While going back through, on of the recent games I watched was a road game against Baltimore on May 25th. It was a 9-2 loss after an eight-run inning by the Orioles off Luke Hochevar.

But the organization suffered a much greater loss, as it was the day that Paul Splittorff lost his battle with cancer. Grubby Glove has been going through the year and remembering those from the baseball world that we lost this year and his coverage of Splittorff’s career and legacy is well done. Rest in peace, Splitt.