With the World Series over, it’s time for wheeling and dealing!
Well, ok, they’re not big moves, but necessary and expected ones:
The Royals made the first of many potential significant moves Thursday to address their bullpen for 2027 when Kansas City announced that it declined the $13 million club option on closer Carlos Estévez while exercising a $2.5 million club option on right-hander Tony Gonsolin.
At The Star, Jaylon Thompson profiles 2026 first-round pick Zion Rose:
Rose relies on an unconscious swing at the plate. He isn’t trying to overthink and, in turn, overcomplicate the situation. His plan revolves around sticking to an approach and letting his natural instincts and abilities take over.
“The unconscious behavior is just the muscle memory of what your body has been working on this whole time,” he said. “(It’s) what you have been preparing for. So yeah, that’s the unconscious one. You never want to think while you are in the box — at least about mechanics.”
Pete Grathoff highlights a fan’s silly Halloween idea:
One Royals fan thought it would be fun to dress as catcher Carter Jensen, but with a twist. Remember when Jensen was scratched from the starting lineup early in the season because he overslept?
That’s all for “official” stories for the Royals. How about a little MLB section for the World Series? Then we’ll get to the Royals blogs.
Drew Lerner at Awful Announcing reports that the ratings for the World Series were not the catastrophe some predicted:
When including the preliminary figure from Game 5, the full five-game series averaged 11.83 million viewers across Fox, Fox Deportes, and Univision, which would put the series’ viewership level with Astros-Phillies in 2022 (11.76 million viewers) and Braves-Astros in 2021 (11.74 million viewers), both of which had six games. Viewership will predictably fall short of Dodgers-Yankees in 2024 (15.10 million viewers) and Dodgers-Blue Jays last year (15.49 million viewers), but will easily surpass Rangers-Diamondbacks in 2023 (9.08 million viewers), the least-watched World Series of all time.
Hey, didn’t someone make that prediction last week? Oh, right, it was, checks notes, Drew Lerner at Awful Announcing, as linked to by everyone’s favorite Friday Rumblings host last week. So, wait? We don’t need the Yankees and Dodgers in the World Series to get decent ratings, though it would have been helpful if this went more than 5 games.
Milwaukee Public Schools are closed tomorrow so kids can go to the victory parad— I mean, for safety, of course:
MPS specified that schools will be closed “due to operations and safety impacts from the Brewers parade and celebration.”
Who says judges can’t have fun:
Michael Maxwell, the presiding judge in neighboring Waukesha County, declared Brewers attire will be formally considered “in compliance with professional decorum expected of courtroom staff, litigants and attorneys appearing before the court” through the conclusion of the victory parade.
(NSFW) Brewers manager Pat Murphy had some NSFW advice for Jake Bauers and threw shade specifically at the Yankees, but more generally at large market teams:
“You’re going to be a rich f—er. Just remember when you’re on that horses— Yankees team and you’re all playing for yourselves, just remember this is the way we used to do it.”
(/NSFW)
The Brewers didn’t suffer ill effects from the World Baseball Classic. A trio of their players won the WBC title and World Series title:
Seven months after becoming World Baseball Classic champions with Team Venezuela, Milwaukee’s Jackson Chourio, William Contreras and Antonio Senzatela pulled off a rare double, joining Alex Bregman and Luke Gregerson as the only players to win WBC and World Series titles in the same calendar year. Bregman and Gregerson did so for Team USA and the Astros in 2017.
Also, I linked to a Dan Szymborski (Szymborksi! Szymborski!) article a month ago that said there’s basically no effect across the board, though effects on individual players may vary.
Over at ESPN, Jeff Passan wrote his longform story about the Brewers.
Steve Megargee of the AP wrote about the connection between Bob Uecker and Christian Yelich.
Finally, Jordan Shuterman wrote about the Rays and how “being the best team in the American League simply wasn’t enough”.
Blog Time!
David Lesky continues to flood Inside the Crown ($) with awesome offseason content. He did his “JJ for a Day” three-parter. Yesterday was his “Offensive Free Agent Guide”. Today, it’s time for his Less Offensive Free Agent Guid— oh, wait “Pitching Free Agent Guide”:
Free agency is always a little kinder on the pitching side. I think I mentioned this in a comment yesterday, but teams are just more willing to let pitching go year-to-year and hit free agency than young talent, so there’s a little more out there every year. I think, for example, you can completely build a bullpen through free agency. It’s better if you don’t have to, but you could put together an expensive but not stupid expensive bullpen just from guys on the list above. It’s a little harder with starting pitching, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible to supplement what they already have. Ultimately, if the Royals are going to make good on their stated goal of competing in 2027, some of these guys above are going to need to be with the Royals whenever the season starts. I’ll be fascinated to see which ones they end up signing.
At Royals Keep, Kevin O’Brien looks at whether the Royals should keep Jame McArthur:
Because McArthur missed two full years at the Major League level, he will come cheap in arbitration. According to MLB Trade Rumors, his projected arbitration amount is $800,000, $10,000 less than a year ago. For context, Mears ($2.2 million), Alex Lange ($1.7 million), and Alec Marsh ($1.1 million) were expected to command higher amounts this offseason. McArthur is not only cheaper than those three, but he’s also more likely to be healthier and/or more effective.
While McArthur posted high ERAs in 2023 and 2024 with the Royals, his FIP numbers suggested he’s a much better pitcher. The now-30-year-old righty probably isn’t a fit for closing situations anymore, but his stuff, ability to generate CSW (31.9% career CSW%), and groundball-inducing style make him an ideal low- to medium-leverage arm who can eat the middle innings. Even in a small sample, McArthur showed decent stuff last year, with his curveball rated as a pretty plus pitch based on TJ Stuff+ and grade numbers.
We’ve reached the offseason and not as many people are reading. So it’s time for me to point out that in our link post, I’m linking to Royals Keep’s link post linking back to Royals Review. Royals Linkception!
Brian Burrows at KOK: 6 Royals prospects who could be protected no matter what happens with Rule 5 Draft
Matthew Swigonski at KOK: Grading every Royals infielder reveals who stood out in 2026
It’s not going to be a long OT, but I feel like I should do something Halloween-related.
I can’t exactly do tiers of Halloween specials like I’ve done with Christmas specials (and again and again). There’s It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. That’s it. That’s the list. Because of this, we watch The Nightmare Before Christmas most Halloween seasons, even though it’s more of a Christmas movie than a Halloween movie.
Of course, there are tons of horror movies… but I’m not really into horror movies. However, I did review the Scream series a couple of Halloweens ago.
Last year, I wrote about candy. Maybe it’s time to revisit that for a second. I didn’t write about a specific type of candy or candy tiers or anything like that. It was more a rambling screed in a couple of different directions.
I still feel the same way about the four major candy holidays, though, as I noted last year, my consumption has gone down with age. I also haven’t been able to discover the missing flavors I was chasing.
The real downer here is that candy prices keep going up. And we keep getting the same dumb excuses, just like last year:
Notice how all of those stories also talk about how candy is “outpacing inflation”, as above? That’s weird – it’s almost as if there’s a new cover story every year. I’m sure it’s not the expensive acquisitions, failed buyouts, and stock buybacks that need to be paid for by the consumer in an ever less competitive marketplace.
That’s whether you’re getting your information from Delaware Online:
The cost of a bulk bag of 100 pieces of candy has gone from $9.91 in 2021 to $16.96, a 71% increase over five years. The national rate of inflation over those five years was 22%.
The biggest increases have taken place over the last three years, with an increase of $2.45 from 2023 to 2024, $2.34 from 2024 to 2025 and 57 cents from 2025 to 2026. Combined, that’s a $5.36 increase over the last three years.
Or ABC7 in New York:
According to an analysis by the ABC7 Data Team, candy prices are up about 7.7% from a year ago, compared with a 1.8% increase in grocery prices overall. The analysis found candy prices have risen at more than four times the rate of overall grocery inflation.
NPR’s Marketplace brings all the numbers:
Overall, the price of candy and chewing gum has risen by more than 47% since 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index. Marketplace looked at price changes for popular chocolates and candy between 2020 and 2026 using the Wayback Machine, finding that some products rose even more, with prices increasing between 60% and 100%…
A bag of party-size Hershey’s Kisses weighed 35.8 ounces in 2020 and retailed for $8.98 at Walmart. Now, the party size weighs 30 ounces and costs $14.92. That’s a 66% price increase. But if you look at the cost per ounce, the price actually doubled, rising from 25 cents an ounce to 50 cents an ounce. The largest bag of Brach’s Classic Candy Corn shrunk from 44 ounces in 2020 to 34 ounces in 2026. But the price per ounce doubled from 11 cents to 22 cents.
They talk about some of the cocoa and sugar shortages we looked at last year. They don’t talk about the consolidation in the industry that we also mentioned.
Even as prices go up and people are facing hard financial situations:
It’s not just that candy costs more—economic think tank Groundwork Collaborative, in association with the Century Foundation, found candy prices are up 15% on average over last year. For many shoppers, Costaglia said, they simply “don’t have the financial means to buy it this year.”
…Forbes seems almost happy to report that companies will still make tons of money from us:
Halloween is still going to be a big celebration this year, with NRF predicting a total of $13.5 billion in spending—candy making up about 30% of the spending total at $4.1 billion, up 5% from last year but far below the overall 15% uptick in prices.
So there’s that. In other words, same story as last year. Prices continue to go up for consumers and businesses continue to take an ever bigger cut. Yay?
In light of (Sir) Patrick Stewart’s passing earlier this week, I thought I should feature a game that he was in. Obviously, he was more known as a star of stage and screen, but for Friday Rumblings, video games are our sandbox. I don’t think he was in any Star Trek games that were well received. However, the pair of X-Men Legends games were highly rated, back in the sixth generation of consoles.
Per wiki:
It was basically Final Fantasy with X-Men. Over time, however, it really started to evolve. As development moved along, we added more and more elements of action and combat to it… -— Co-project lead Patrick Lipo on the development of the gam
I remember playing some co-op games with friends on the GameCube and it was quite fun.
Here’s a chapter of the game with some voice acting from Stewart:
