The Monday Ramble

It's a bit of a delayed ramble this week as this was supposed to hit your inboxes on Sunday. There was a bit of a snafu that will be clear as you reach the bottom of this entry.

Today's edition features a trade, a roster move, a free agent signing and a new home for the newsletter. Let's get started.

The Royals swung a trade on Thursday, sending reliever A.J. Causey, in camp for the first time as a non-roster invitee, to the Sacramento A’s for right-hander Mitch Spence.

Spence was a Rule 5 pick in December of 2023 and spent all season on the A’s roster in ’24, posting a 4.58 ERA while making 24 starts and 35 appearances overall and throwing 151.1 innings.

He opened last season on the big league roster, but was optioned to Triple-A at the All-Star Break, where he spent most of the second half of the year. He had been designated for assignment with Sacramento, meaning the Royals swooped in with a trade before Spence could hit the open market. When something like that happens, it tells me that the acquiring team has long had eyes for that particular player.

Sticking with the apparent pitching theme of 2026, Spence gets more than his share of chase. In the two seasons he’s been in the majors, he’s averaged a chase rate just north of 31 percent. That’s in the 83rd percentile. The whiff and strikeouts could be a little higher, but it’s all about that chase.

The chase comes from a slider and a curve that both features above-average horizontal break. But when he’s in the zone with the slider, opposing hitters can make some good contact. His curveball—which he throws just under 20 percent of the time—is his best offering.

The Royals have had success getting new pitchers to tweak their sliders, so there’s some area of opportunity there. Although, I wonder if they will have him lean a bit more into his curve as both left and right-handed batters hit below .200 on the pitch.

Arsenal aside, the other thing that makes him attractive to the Royals are options. Spence can be sent to the minors. He joins newcomers such as Alex Lange, Eli Morgan, Mason Black and Jose Cuas, along with Steven Cruz, Luinder Avila and James McArthur, among the pitchers who can shuttle between Kansas City and Omaha this summer.

To get Spence on the 40-man roster, the Royals placed pitcher Alec Marsh on the 60-day IL as recovers from right labrum repair he had in October. He is expcected to miss the season.

Marsh last threw a competitive pitch in 2024, when he was worth 1.4 fWAR while posting a 4.53 ERA and 4.34 FIP in 129 innings for the Royals. He missed all of last season with shoulder impingement issues, so hopefully this surgery will provide the fix.

Missing two seasons in a row is a tough break for a guy. Hope we see him in camp in 2027.

Continuing with today's pitching theme, the Royals signed former All-Star John Means to a two-year minor league deal.

Means is a local product. He was born in Olathe and went to high school at Gardner Edgerton.

The righty posted a 3.1 fWAR rookie campaign in 2019 for the Baltimore Orioles, finishing second in the Rookie of the Year voting. Two years later, he threw a no-hitter.

Then came the injuries.

He had his first Tommy John surgery in 2022, after making just two starts for the Orioles. He got through his rehab to return in September of 2023, but needed a second Tommy John surgery in June of 2024. While continuing to rehab from that injury in preparation for the 2026 season, he ruptured his Achilles last December.

That's why this is a two-year deal. Means will spend year one rehabbing yet another long-term injury. Hopefully, he will be healthy for year two. You can't help but root for the guy.

Means was never a hard throwing pitcher and did not strike out a ton of hitters. Nor did he get a ton of chase. What Means always did well was control the zone. He walked just 4.4 percent of all batters faced in 2021, which ranked him in the 96th percentile of all pitchers. Hitters have generally had a difficult time squaring him up, though. He's also been an extreme fly ball pitcher throughout his major league career. The local angle and Kauffman Stadium would've made Means a perfect fit back when the walls were a little deeper. Now, it's just about getting healthy and working his way back to the mound.

If you are a Strat-O-Matic fan, their latest historical release may be relevant to your interests: The 1985 season.

I’ve become something of a Strat collector, especially when it comes to seasons where the Royals did well. I own the 1977, 1980 and of course the 2014 and 2015 seasons. I don’t play as much as I would like, but sometimes carve out a bit to have a go. I have mentioned my 1980 single-elimination bracket I set up, seeding teams by overall record to crown the true champion. I won’t bore you with details here, but I’ve rolled quite a few upsets in the early rounds.

I will most definitely be purchasing the 1985 season, even if the price of the cards and the shipping is borderline insane these days. Some addictions must be tolerated and encouraged.

You may notice something different about your email today. The first Sunday Ramble of Spring Training features a new platform: Ghost.

I mentioned at the beginning of the offseason that I was kicking around the idea of moving off Substack. Now I’ve gone and done it.

My hope is that the transition will be seamless. Although, I’m a bit befuddled when it comes to interwebbing or whatever this technology thing is all about, I can usually navigate with a few bumps or bruises. I also feel capable of doing some serious damage. Example: I’m trying to figure out how to have the main page be the direct intothefountains dot com address instead of the dot ghost that they use at the end. It’s not going well. Alas. I’ll figure it out. Maybe. I'm also extremely nervous about sending out this debut Ghost edition. Fingers crossed it finds your inboxes.

When I started my newsletter on Substack, I was intrigued by the fact that I could flip a switch that would allow readers to purchase a subscription. I never turned it on for a couple of reasons. One, I did not want to feel obligated to post regularly. Sometimes, the inspiration well runs dry. If I charged people to read this site, I couldn’t just go walkabout for a week or two. Two, I didn’t want Substack to take their 10 percent slice. I find it abhorrent that Substack is just fine with platforming—and making money off of—Nazis, white supremacists and antisemites. I was happy to be an internet squatter and leach off their bandwidth while providing them limited value by my presence.

However, in exploring new homes, I found that none of them would allow me to hang my shingle for free. It costs money to be on Ghost.

What I have done today is flip that switch allowing readers to contribute to help me defray some of the cost that comes from being on this platform. While I’ve been kicking around the idea of providing special or unique content to those who elect to pay, I have not come up with anything at this time. Anything I do for that would mean more hours at the keyboard and right now I just don’t have the time or the energy to commit to more writing. So if you feel like you would like to support me and this endeavor, I appreciate your patronage. All posts will stay open and free to all for the time being. Ultimately, I’d like to keep several posts a week for free and then maybe provide one or two exclusive posts to paying subscribers as a thank you. If you choose to contribute, I have just two choices at the moment: $5 a month or $50 a year. Let me know if you think I should expand the options.

Again, all posts remain free for everyone to read.

Thanks for putting up with my long-winded explanation about where this newsletter is going. Thanks for subscribing, whether it’s free or paid. And thank you for your reading and commenting. I’ve delighted we have been able to carve out our little corner of the internet to talk Royals and baseball and plan to keep doing it for the foreseeable future.