Bob Fescoe spent last week in Surprise, Arizona interviewing Kansas City Royals players and coaches for his morning show on Kansas City’s 610 Sports Radio.

When he was not on the air, he was taking in the sites of early Spring Training and snapping pics that he would later tweet out to his followers.

With Bob’s permission, we share those pics with you below:

Billy Butler BP

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Billy Butler takes BP with Frenchy and Hosmer looking on

Bill Ivie is the editor here at I-70 Baseball
Follow him on Twitter here.

KANSAS CITY, MO (September 16, 2012) – On Monday, September 17, fans will have the chance to help provide baseball equipment for Kansas City’s disadvantaged youth at a special Gloves For Kids event presented by the Royals and Ryan Lefebvre’s Footprints Foundation.  Additional support is provided by Rawlings, Rally House and 610 Sports Radio.  The event will be held at Rally House-Kansas City North, located at 8650 N. Boardwalk Ave. in Kansas City, Mo., from 6-8 p.m.

Select Royals players will sign autographs for fans who donate at least $25 toward new baseball gloves and other baseball/softball equipment for underprivileged youth in both the Kansas City area as well as the native countries of some of the event participants, including the Dominican Republic and Venezuela.

Royals players scheduled to appear include:

Pitcher Louis Coleman                                    Second Baseman Johnny Giavotella
Pitcher Tim Collins                                          Pitcher Jeremy Guthrie
Pitcher Danny Duffy                                        Pitcher Kelvin Herrera
Shortstop Alcides Escobar                             Catcher Salvador Perez
Second Baseman Chris Getz                         Manager Ned Yost

Session participants will be announced at Rally House at 5 p.m.  One group of players will sign from 6-7 p.m. with the other group to follow from 7-8 p.m.  Please note that a $25 donation is required for each session, and fans will be allowed to have one item autographed by each Royals player participating in that session.  Sales for both sessions will begin at 5 p.m., and each session will be capped at 150 people.  For details, visit www.royals.com/glovesforkids.

The event will also include a Royals Charities silent auction featuring unique Royals memorabilia, including autographed items from players including Billy Butler, Mike Moustakas and George Brett, which will run until 7:45 p.m.  In addition, Bob Fescoe, host of “Fescoe in the Morning” on 610 Sports Radio, the home of the Royals, will be reporting live from Rally House from 5-7 p.m.

Created in 2001 by Lefebvre’s Footprints Foundation, the Gloves For Kids event has raised more than $85,000 to provide new baseball gloves and related equipment for Kansas City area youth.

I know this makes me far from unique, but as a young man growing up in Kansas City that dreamed of being a journalist, I became quite enamored with Joe Posnanski. Posnanski, of course, was a star columnist at the Kansas City Star along with Jason Whitlock. Both went on to bigger and better things in far different ways, and both were incredible columnists. While Whitlock had a way of dividing a city on seemingly any topic, Posnanski was much more subtle. He could write something you already knew, something you were already thinking, and make you care about it more than you ever had. Whitlock could make you feel things about him….Posnanski made you feel things about you.

Okay, if you’re still with me I’m sure you’re wondering what this has to do with our Kansas City Royals. Well, seemingly because the current English language cannot fully express his literary genius, Posnanski has on his blog started JoeWords. This is awesome, and I encourage you to read it, but for the purposes of this article I just want to focus on one of them:

Clemenate (KLEM-a-nayt), verb, to hate an athlete in an entirely healthy, fun sports way (rather than hating them in a crazed, stalking, loaded gun, insane sort of way). Ex. Jonathan Sanchez is making himself far too easy to clemenate this season.

This week saw a flurry of commentary about Sanchez. 610 Sports ran a gag trying to get him blocked from Twitter, Ryan Lefebvre and Rex Hudler bother questioned how much Sanchez loved baseball, and Bob Dutton wrote a scathing piece about the Royals refusal to consider shipping Sanchez out. However, the one that really caught my eye came from Minda Haas. Minda is an outstanding photographer and a good friend of I70 baseball, and this week she wrote this.

Minda is right in many regards, most notably that baseball players are people too and their life need not revolve around baseball for them to be successful. I also agree that personal attacks against baseball players based on their performance are unwarranted, and I think this is what Posnanski was trying to capture when he created the word clemenate.

I don’t hate Jonathan Sanchez, but I clemenate him with ounce of my baseball loving soul. I clemenate his attitude, because it’s hard to watch him play the game and think he cares even a little. I clemenate his methods, because watching him pitch, even when he’s getting people out, is equal parts maddening and sleep inducing. Mostly though I clemenate what he has done to this Royals season.

The Royals are 3-7 in his ten starts this season and he’s given them an average of 4 2/3 innings per start. Every time it seems like the Royals are about to get on a hot streak, Sanchez kills all momentum an uninspiring walk-filled performance. Young teams are streaky, and this Royals team has lived up to that billing, but it’s tough to streak too far in the right direction when you know you’re sending Sanchez to the mound every 5 days.

The bottom line is, Sanchez must go…quickly. We’ve seen far too many young stars grow disenchanted with the Royals version of “trying” to win. You can not in good faith tell Eric Hosmer or Mike Moustakas that we’re trying to win when you continue to send Sanchez to the mound.

ROYALS AND ENTERCOM-KANSAS CITY ANNOUNCE 15 GAMES OF 2012 SPRING TRAINING BROADCAST SCHEDULE

KANSAS CITY, MO (February 15, 2012) — The Kansas City Royals and Entercom-Kansas City today announced the first 15 broadcasts of the 2012 Royals Spring Training Radio schedule that will air on 610 Sports Radio (KCSP-AM).  All Spring Training contests will be webcast on royals.com, including the games not on 610 Sports Radio.  The Royals and 610 Sports Radio will add five more broadcasts once the NCAA Tournament schedule is released due to 610’s commitment to University of Kansas basketball as well.

The 2012 spring radio broadcast schedule is as follows:

                                *All Times Central – Game Times Subject to Change

For the 44th year, Royals Hall of Famer Denny Matthews will call Spring Training play-by-play action and he’ll be joined by Ryan Lefebvre, newcomer Steve Physioc and Steve Stewart.  The spring schedule for Bob Davis will be determined by University of Kansas basketball.  Stewart will anchor the exhibition webcasts.

Carlos Zambrano.

There are very few names that will launch most any baseball writer into a tirade quicker than that one. Zambrano is the type of player that is seldom loved in our end of the spectrum that is baseball but when he is, that writers will quickly come to his defense. More often than not, writers are quick to point out all of the wonderful flaws that surround the pitcher known simply as “Z”.

As a writer myself and a lover of baseball, I dislike the term “off-season”. There truly is no off-season in baseball, it simply becomes a time of year when Major League Baseball is not operating games with the thirty clubs that we all follow so closely. It is this time of year, the administrative time of year, that games shift to winter ball and our focus turns to our team’s adjustments being made for the following season.

Today we have learned, thanks to an interview with Mark Carman at 610 Sports, that Dayton Moore has identified a possible fit in Kansas City for the game’s most interesting character, Carlos Zambrano. From that interview:

We would have to be interested. We would have to explore it because that’s what you should do. You should explore every opportunity. Carlos Zambrano is a heckuva competitor. Carlos Zambrano has had a lot of success in the major leagues. Carlos Zambrano is actually a very pleasant, easy going, classy person off the field. Sometimes, as with all of us the competitiveness takes over and brings out qualities in us that we are not proud of. Obviously the Cubs grew tired of some of his outbursts but I believe in our coaching staff and we’ll always take a chance and a risk on certain players. We’ll see how that particular situation unfolds.

Let me try to break the mold of the two types of writers I just described and let’s take a look at the two sides of Carlos Zambrano. First, we will drop by our friends at Baseball-Reference for some pure statistical analysis:

If you took a look at that chart and did not know who it belonged to, you would be in full support of Dayton Moore pursuing this opportunity. He is a top of the rotation type starter that can dominate when he is on his game.

The true test, however, is Zambrano off the field. Face it, the Royals are a very young franchise right now. Guys like Jeff Francoeur not only add production, but leadership to the clubhouse. Frenchy is the type of guy you want around the young players, showing them the ropes and teaching them life outside of, and around, the game.

Like him or not, Zambrano has had some meltdowns. He walked out on his team last season. He gets visibly upset on the field and has been known to fight with his teammates, even in the dugout during a game.

The player that takes the mound would be a game changer for the Royals.

The player that has had so many public problems would be a distraction to a young team.

Those two points are hard to put on a scale and weigh out. Dayton Moore has that choice before him right now. Is the risk of the possible chemistry problem worth the reward of what the player can provide on the field?

What works in the Royals favor is the situation in Chicago itself. The Cubs are going to cut bait with Zambrano, so if they can find a trade partner to send them a bag of balls and pick up $1 million of the horrible contract he is under, they will take it. It puts Moore in a good position to move a low level prospect and barely pick up any salary in order to acquire a potential front of the line starter. Again, the Royals General Manager had this to say:

He has a no-trade clause for 29 other teams so he is going to have to be comfortable wherever he goes and there is a lot of money attached to his deal. There is a vesting option that is a part of that worth $18 or 19 million going forward. We certainly wouldn’t want to put ourselves in a position where we have to honor a contract of that nature.

I don’t envy GMDM on this one. It is not as clear cut as you would like it to be.

The quotes utilized in this article were provided by MLBTradeRumors.com and have been credited to CSNChicago.com’s Dave Kaplan.

Bill Ivie is the editor here at I-70 Baseball as well as the Assignment Editor for BaseballDigest.com.
He is the host of I-70 Radio, hosted every week on BlogTalkRadio.com.
Follow him on Twitter here.