One, two, three, four, five… SIX WINS IN A ROW!
Anne Rogers penned a touching Mother’s Day story about Daniel Lynch, thinking back on his mother now that he’s recently become a parent:
Jolie Saunders Lynch died on Sept. 7, 2012, at 43 years old after a battle with melanoma. Lynch was a few months away from turning 16, the oldest of the three Lynch kids. Jolie had received her diagnosis six months prior.
“It’s amazing to me knowing the situation she was in now — the diagnosis was not good,” Lynch said. “And she was so unselfish in that way, where she never seemed down. She never seemed like she was letting us know anything was really wrong. I thought everything was normal.”
“I think that’s one of the biggest things I’ve learned. There’s no purpose in being miserable in advance of something. She knew what the deal was, and it was a very difficult decision, just in talking with my dad, of, ‘Do we tell the kids?’ And I think she was adamant, ‘No. I want them to live.’ She wanted us to live our lives. I think that’s the most unselfish thing she could have done.”
At The Star, Jaylon Thompson profiles Jac Caglianone:
Three months before the 2021 draft, Caglianone blew out his arm in an all-star game. He needed Tommy John surgery and his aspirations of playing professional baseball were officially on hold.
Caglianone was devastated. His father, Jeff, tried his best to console his son. After setting records as a pitcher and hitter, Jac Caglianone was now dealing with a major setback. And a chance to reset.
“It was tough on him,” Jeff said. “Jac has got a lot of friends in baseball and guys that he was ecstatic for that got drafted in the first round. And I’m sure he would’ve liked to be one of them as well. He didn’t let it dampen what his goals were.”
Vahe Gregorian talks about how the Royals don’t have to rush their pitching prospects due to the rotation’s great performance at the MLB level:
Being able to take “all the proper steps,” as Picollo put it, is a long way from the prevailing mindset just a few years ago…
“We’ve all been there,” Picollo said, speaking to the ways it could go. “‘We have a hole here. That’s our best guy. He may not be ready. But we’ve got to bring him up, because we’re supposed to win here every night.’”
Pete Grathoff writes about Mark Canha, who goes by BigLeagueFoodie on Instagram:
“The food world is just such an interesting world to me,” Canha said, “because you can be surprised by people’s creativity or you can also be like, ‘OK, I’ve kind of been there, done that.’ But it’s like endless exploration. There’s always new restaurants and places popping up.”
Canha was acquired in a trade with the Brewers a week before the season started, so he has only begun his explorations around Kansas City. But he shared a couple of his favorites on Instagram…
“I didn’t have lobster toast on my bingo card for amazing things I would eat in Kansas City but here we are!” Canha wrote. “Lobster Salad with a creamy/chili oil dressing atop Japanese milk bread!”
From August 31 to September 15, 1977, the Kansas City Royals won 16 games in a row.
From July 7 to July 28, 1978, the Royals won 16 of 18.
Tomorrow, with a win over the Red Sox, the Royals will have won 16 of 18 for the third time ever, and the first time in 47 years.
— Rany Jazayerli (@jazayerli) May 8, 2025
The previous 15-2 stretches were:
1977
1978
1989
2013All winning seasons, two of them were playoff years. 1989 would have been under the current format.
— David Lesky (@DBLesky) May 8, 2025
At The Athletic ($), Keith Law does a mock draft:
23. Kansas City – Kruz Schoolcraft
School: Sunset HS (Portland, Ore.), Bats: L, Throws: L
I’ve heard this might be Schoolcraft’s floor. I’d bet on the Royals going the high-school route even after the success of their top pick from last year’s draft, Jac Caglianone (he’s hitting .314/.395/.543 in Double A and playing right field). If they do go high school, the mix would probably include guys like Neyens, Hall, Josh Hammond, all high-upside athletes.
Blog time?
David Lesky ($) wrote about the White Sox game on Wednesday:
This is a spot where if you’re an optimist, you see positive regression opportunity. If you’re a pessimist, you see a team that doesn’t hit well. If you’re somewhere in the middle, you’re like me, though I probably lean more toward the optimist here because numbers even out in baseball over the course of a long season. And even when they’re hitting better since the start of this stretch, they’re hitting just .231/.275/.358 with runners in scoring position. There’s no good explanation for a team hitting .283/.334/.447 to be that much worse in run-scoring situations. If you want to say I’m crazy for saying it’ll turn, I’ll allow it, but getting on base and providing opportunities isn’t the problem. Cashing in has been a problem, but I don’t feel like it will be all season.
Everything else falls into the Blog Roundup:
- Michael Farina at FTF: White Sox Schooled, Shutout and Swept out of KC; Royals Win 10-0
- Darin Watson at U.L.’s Toothpick: This Date In Royals History—1985 Edition: May 8 – The Royals survive Baltimore’s ninth-inning rally to snap their losing streak
- Patrick Glancy at Powder Blue Nostalgia: Are You Ready For Some…Baseball?
- Caleb Moody at KOK: Matt Quatraro proven right as Bobby Witt Jr. looks like best version of himself again
- Jacob Milham at KOK (slideshow warning): 3 KC Royals offseason mistakes that look more glaring everyday
How about a little spin around the MLB?
After being swept by the Royals yesterday, the White Sox matched their worst franchise start in history:
The Sox were swept in the four-game series. And in the process, they fell to 10-28 to match the worst start in franchise history through 38 games. They share the distinction with the 2024 and 2018 clubs. Last year’s team went on to set the modern major-league record with 121 defeats.
However, they have good news! It appears the new pope is a White Sox fan:
Not so fast, perhaps. Pope Leo XIV was born in Dolton, a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, making it far more likely, geographically at least, that he would be a White Sox fan. That thesis was supported by an interview WGN News did with the pope’s brother, who said Pope Leo “was always a Sox fan.” Their mother, whose family was from the North Side, was a Cubs fan and their dad was a Cardinals fan, according to the brother, so there were a few clashing sets of fandom in the household.
Wait? Dad is a Cards fan, Mom is a Cubs fan, and he’s a Sox fan??
I love “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”. I also love that he wants to rebrand a minor league team:
“And that is where we come in,” he continued, “because I have a very special offer. We are willing to use all of our resources and stupidity to give one Minor League Baseball team a total rebrand. We will give you a new team name. A new mascot. We will even throw you a theme night. It will be personalized and it will be bespoke.”…
“We will do this in the spirit of your team, city and league in which you belong,” he concluded, though with the caveat that “You can’t ask us any questions, give us any notes and you have to do what we come up with.”
Finally, Chet Lemon passed away at age 70.
Earlier this year, we discussed the famous Drake-Chenault radio program, The History of Rock and Roll. I closed out that entry this way:
It’s one of my fond memories of Dad – not one the important ones – but one of those silly ones that makes you smile. I’m starting to digitize some of my old cassettes from when I was younger. I listened to a Z-Rock affiliate in Houston and diligently recorded the Z-Rock 50 on Sunday nights (maybe we’ll talk about that another day). I even found some mix tapes that my Grandpa showed me how to make when I was really young. Maybe this goes back even more generations in my family.
The “Maybe we’ll talk about that another day” part of that paragraph is today. I’m going to lean more into the technical than the nostalgic this time. I have a box of cassettes sitting around that I’d like to digitize. There are a handful of actual albums on cassette, but I’ve already replaced those with CDs (and digitized them). Some are from the aforementioned Z-Rock, some are from other stations, and others are just random junk. For instance, one Halloween, Trent Reznor remixed an hour of Nine Inch Nails for a local Top 40 station.
The mix tapes are of, well, mixed quality. Some were right off the radio in the “ooh, I like that song, hit record” variety. For others, I would tape a couple of hours off the radio, listen through the source audio, and pick a few songs to keep. Then I’d take my dual tape deck and record what I wanted from the source tape to my new mix tape. Of course, each generation of copying led to a degradation of sound. And it’s not like my cheap stereo had a great antenna and awesome sound to begin with.
I was also cheap. Ok, that’s a little unfair on me. This was in middle school and high school – I didn’t have much money. I mainly bought the lower-quality 90-minute cassettes instead of the better 60-minute ones. All this is to say, I’m taping off the radio with some cheap gear that’s now more than 30 years old. It’s not of great quality. Then again, people still voluntarily get vinyl when superior digital copies exist.
As I went about digitizing these tapes, I thought I’d make a quick (for me) how-to guide, in case anyone else wanted to do this.
* * * * *
If you’ve ever started down this road, you’ve likely heard of Reshow. It’s generally agreed upon as the easiest and cheapest method and the only major downside is that the sound quality could be a bit better. There’s also some chatter about QA problems – you might get a dud but they’re supposedly quick to replace one if you have issues.
It looks like an old Walkman (kids, ask your parents) and costs about $40. Older versions came with a copy of Audacity (more on that in a bit). Newer ones require no software at all.
I had the older version that used Audacity and it was a breeze. Load the software, connect the Reshow to your computer with the included USB cable, select the correct input device, and push play. Then come back in 30 or 45 minutes and click stop. It’s that easy.
If you want something fast, cheap, and easy that does a decent enough job- just stop here. I probably should have just stopped here.
* * * * *
We have to take a moment to talk about Audacity. This amazing freeware audio editor will celebrate its 25th anniversary later this month. It can look a little dated, but it’s also insanely feature-rich. However, it can also be as easy as you want it to be. As above, you can pick an input, hit record, export to MP3, and be done.
However, after recording from the Reshow, I noticed my sound quality was uneven. The sound from the right headphone was much louder than the left – almost double. I also played around with noise reduction to see if I could clean up some of the static. Before recording again, I dug up an old tape head cleaner, but it did very little.
The balancing was easy, but it took a decent bit of time. The sound quality cleanup was tougher. When I was done, it sounded more, I dunno, muddled and muted. If anyone has any advice on this sort of cleaning, I’d love some advice. However, I’m also willing to accept that the sources aren’t that great and there’s only so much I can do.
* * * * *
I started digging in deeper, and the next step was to go get an old cassette tape deck. This is the thing about technology moving ever onward – the older stuff can be better in a lot of ways. For instance, when everyone still was making tape decks in the 1990s, there were high quality ones to be had. However, now, hardly anyone makes them so you’re stuck with whatever mediocrity is cranked out.
I know it sounds a little “old man yells at cloud”, but, in a lot of ways, stuff was just made better and less disposable back then. I found a decent tape deck on eBay from a seller who refurbishes the guts and tests them thoroughly, per his feedback. I
For about $100, including shipping, I picked up an Onkyo TA-6210. Back in the day, there were 2-head versus 3-head players. The 3-head players give better sound but it’s hard to find one for under $200 off the secondary market and I had reached my limit of what I was wanting to spend.
I also needed a cable to connect the tape deck to my computer. If you have an audio in and a desktop soundcard, that would be ideal – but I just have a laptop so I went with a $20 audio capture card. I loaded up Audacity, set the input to the new audio capture card and was off and running again.
The sound was still a little weak on one side, but not as pronounced as with the Reshow. I’m guessing my old childhood tape deck recorded unbalanced with one side stronger than the other. Not much I can do about that now except rebalance. However, the white noise was much better – I wasn’t getting nearly as much static. That alone made this all worth it as it should make the post-processing a lot easier.
* * * * *
Since then, I’ve been going through my cassettes while doing work. There’s a way to set up Audacity to use cassette deck as input and I can use my headphones as the output. I still have an older pair of Bose QuietComfort 35s. Bose sound quality is usually ranked in the middle of the pack, but their comfort and noise cancelling still get top marks. I don’t spend a lot on gadgets, but these were indispensable when I was working in cubicle hell and worth every penny.
I just finished with one set of 10 tapes and it’s time to clean them up and convert them to MP3s. Being as Audacity has been around a while, there are a lot of guides on how to optimize it. For instance, I ran across this guide to clean up uneven tracks. You basically right click on the track, select “split stereo track”, equalize each, and then recombine. My first attempt was to center them around -5dB (Effect -> Volume and Compression -> Amplify to have -5dB as center for both or 0db or whatever), but I’ll test at other levels.
After that, I will need to clean up the quality as much as I can. As before, if anyone has advice on processing to clean up white noise or static, I’m all ears.
Then it’s just a quick export to MP3. I think I’m going to leave them in cassette halves rather than chopping them up into songs, but I’ll make some cover art so I can see which tracks are on the album.
We’re going to continue this little journey next week, but for now we’re onto the Song of the Day from one of those cassettes. This was a lesser-known song from Aerosmith’s renaissance in the 1990s. It’s not nearly as draggy at their popular ballads on Get a Grip as it clocks in at half the time. It was originally supposed to be on Pump but instead slipped to The Beavis and Butthead Experience and was later included in the Big Ones greatest hits album.