Terrerobytes: The middle of the last weekend of the regular season

I’ve been sitting on a pile of worthwhile reads, and it dawned on me that many will become less relevant starting Monday.

Usually I write an intro of some length to give it some meat, but instead, here’s Yolmer Sanchez beating Jason Benetti into the ground in FIFA ‘17. His cackle is my new ringtone.

If you want something to read with it, Rick Renteria attributes Sanchez’s breakout season to being able to capitalize more frequently in hitters’ counts, which have also been more frequent.

Terrerobytes

• I’m convinced Omar Narvaez is the most underappreciated hitter in baseball — Chicago Magazine

Whet Moser is fascinated by Omar Narvaez’s combination of a highly specific skill set and deficit of tools elsewhere.

Omar Narvaez is a hitting machine. He’s not a good hitting machine, relative to his major-league peers, but he’s a machine that does a certain number of things beautifully—seeing the ball, making contact, hitting to all fields—and certain other things not at all. The sum total of all this is an almost perfectly league-average hitter and an OK starting catcher, but the joy of it is that, looking behind the sum total, he’s anything but average.

• Rick Renteria would be OK with bringing back current, young White Sox catchers — CSN Chicago

Narvaez and Kevan Smith aren’t a particularly scintillating pair of catchers, but hoping for growth is probably better than what’s out there in free agency.

• ‘Hawk’ calls final road series for White Sox -- MLB.com
• Baseball will miss Harrelson’s big personality, Paciorek says -- Chicago Sun-Times

These next two games will be Hawk Harrelson’s last two regularly scheduled games behind the microphone, although he’ll still be around for 20 or so home dates in 2018, which should make the occasional Hawk and Wimpy reunion possible.

• Detroit Tigers should at least talk to Ozzie Guillen about manager job — Detroit Free Press

The Detroit media — or at least Anthony Fenech — wants a piece of the Ozzie Guillen media experience in Detroit. It’d be a helluva divisional plot twist.

• Mets plan to move on from Terry Collins with one of these familiar faces -- New York Post
• ‘Seriously?’: Terry Collins gets defensive about Mets disaster — New York Post

The Mets and Mets fans love Robin Ventura. The two times the White Sox played the Mets at Citi Field, he drew a large crowd for autographs and large rounds of applause for various video highlights from his Mets career. White Sox fans loved him, too, though, and that just made everything more difficult.

Nevertheless, he’s now been mentioned multiple times on the Mets’ preliminary manager lists, along with Joe McEwing, another former Met.

• Catch ‘em while you can: Royals’ stars have one more stand in KC -- Kansas City Star
• Whatever happens next, Eric Hosmer grew up in Kansas City. And that means everything. — Kansas City Star
• Entering possible Royal finale, Moustakas clasps franchise and city ‘near and dear’ — Kansas City Star

With Eric Hosmer, Lorenzo Cain, Mike Moustakas and Alcides Escobar among the Royals heading into free agency, it’s the end of an era in Kansas City. The Royals might have the toughest offseason in baseball, but fans and media are trying not to get ahead of themselves during the last homestand.

There is no right or wrong way to approach this. The bond between this team and this city’s fans has always felt a little different. Some of that is by circumstance, some a direct credit to the players, some a direct credit to the fans.

It will never be like that again, it can’t be, and nobody can blame you if you’re checked out on this team and season.

But it will never be like this again, either. After this week, these men will almost certainly never again play together for the Royals. The ending isn’t what they hoped. But the best times were better than anyone could’ve expected.