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Kansas City Chiefs vs. Cincinnati Bengals Prediction, Pick Against the Spread, and Latest Odds

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Kansas City Chiefs vs. Cincinnati Bengals Prediction

The Cincinnati Bengals vs. the Kansas City Chiefs will clash from Arrow Head Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri, on Sunday night for a much-anticipated matchup. Everything is on the line tonight, and we should get a great game between the best teams in the AFC. The Bengals know a thing or two about these games, as they won the AFC a season ago when they beat the Chiefs on the road to get to the Super Bowl.

As we all know, the Rams would beat the Bengals in the Super Bowl, but the positive from last year was that the Bengals got experience in big-time games to prepare them for games like tonight. The main reason for the Bengals' success is the most remarkable man in the game Joe Burrow. Burrow took a franchise at the bottom of the league, making them one of the best in football in just three short seasons. The star-signal caller has continued to deliver despite being doubted consistently, and he will have an opportunity to do that again today and take his team to back-to-back Super Bowls.

The man who will try and stop that will be No. 15, Patrick Mahomes. Mahomes will win the league MVP this season, for a good reason. Mahomes is the best quarterback in football, and he will take his team into their fifth straight AFC championship at home tonight. Mahomes has a Super Bowl ring to his credit, with two total appearances. He will look to make it a third appearance tonight with a victory. The storyline in this game is the injury that Mahomes is dealing with. Mahomes was knocked out for a portion of the game last week when the Chiefs defeated Jacksonville, but Mahomes claims that he is ready to go and did practice during the week.

I am backing the Chiefs tonight. We did lock this in earlier in the week and got a much better line, but I believe that they win this game regardless. Mahomes is Mahomes, no matter what, and I expect him to dominate this game tonight. I am shocked at how much the public loves the Bengals, and we all know what happens to public dogs. I can not pass up on this opportunity to back Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs on their home field tonight. I expect a great game, but Kc will come out on top.

Kansas City Chiefs vs. Cincinnati Bengals Pick

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First, a retraction. One of the things I criticized the Royals for last week was the cancellation of FanFest in order to hold the Royals Rally. In doing so, I mistakenly conflated the FanFest with the Royals Caravans which have not happened in some time. With that new (to me) and clearer understanding, I withdraw that criticism.

During an interview with MLB Network earlier this week, General Manager J.J. Picollo admitted what many of us had already assumed - the Royals are not going to make a serious effort to compete in 2023. According to Picollo, they are looking forward to 2024 or 2025. Given this new information, I think it’s important to ask ourselves how the Royals' off-season moves look in that light.

How do the Royals' moves benefit the 2024 and 2025 rosters?

The Royals have signed only one player beyond the 2023 season - Jordan Lyles. Ryan Yarbrough and Aroldis Chapman will not be Royals in 2024. For either of them to bring back anything in a trade during the 2023 deadline that might benefit those teams would take nothing less than Angels in the Front Office.

That isn’t to say that a player can’t benefit the 2024 and 2025 rosters without being on them. It’s been mentioned extensively that the Royals need to allow their young pitchers opportunities to fail without making it catastrophic. One way they can do that is by having veterans available to eat innings so that young pitchers having a bad night don’t have to “wear it.” This would also allow them to be demoted to Omaha to work on things with a lesser spotlight. However, neither Yarbrough or Chapman bring innings-eating to the table.

Fortunately, their other signing, Jordan Lyles, does bring that to the table. And he will still be around in 2024!

However.

Lyles doesn’t pitch well. If he still has a major role in 2024 it will be a sign that the team is unlikely to be competitive. They’ll still be paying for him, though. There is always a chance that the Royals aren’t done signing people but past a certain point signing more pitchers would seem counter-productive. You don’t want to get to the point where the young guys can’t pitch at all because the veterans are eating too many innings.

As for the trades, those make a little more sense. Neither Adalberto Mondesí nor Michael A. Taylor were going to be on future rosters. The return for Taylor includes a pair of relievers who might be able to contribute while Mondesí’s return, Josh Taylor, will technically still be under contract to the Royals it’s unclear if that will be of benefit to them. A 30-year-old with back issues who can only get lefties out doesn’t seem likely to age well.

While many are frustrated with the Mondesí trade, it seems to get worse. The Red Sox immediately signed a new left-handed reliever, Skylar Arias, after dealing Taylor. Arias is a bit old for his level as he primarily pitched at A+ ball as a 25-year-old last season, but he’s got huge strikeout potential if he can learn better control. Given a choice between trading Mondesí and a PTBNL for a 30-year-old who didn’t even pitch in 2022 and a guy with filthy stuff but is still only age 25 and keeping the potential of Mondesí around, I’d have chosen the latter. Either the Royals failed to notice Arias was an option or they‘re continuing their old tradition of assuming age will never catch up to a player until two or three years too late.

And, of course, the Royals’ transactions are far from the only frustrating thing to come out of the club during this off-season.

Royals’ claims about renovating Kauffman demand more scrutiny

Listen, we already knew the Royals have - knowingly or not - misled fans about the cost of renovations but now more information has come to light and it doesn’t look any better. In case you need a recap, the Royals claimed that it would cost the same amount of money to renovate Kauffman stadium as to build a new one and followed up with the assertion that they might as well build a new one. However, what they left out of that statement was that the comparison was between building a new stadium and renovating Kauffman for the next 50 years. If you think that the new stadium will be allowed to stand for 50 years - or that it won’t require additional funding to renovate during that time if it somehow is - I’ve got some oceanfront property in Wichita you might be interested in.

However, the Kansas City Star published a report on Thursday that suggests things may not even be as dire as the Royals claim, anyway. It turns out that Jackson County does yearly inspections to ensure the Royals are caring for the stadium to the agreed-upon degree as the primary tenants. The most recent iteration of the report notes that the stadium is in “satisfactory” condition and makes no note of the alleged “concrete cancer” that the firm the Royals paid to evaluate the stadium for renovations alleges exists and leads to the exorbitant renovation fees.

The Royals’ response was that the two reports have two very different purposes. They claim that Jackson County is only evaluating whether the stadium is currently in good condition while their report is more about the future of the stadium. Of course, that’s true, so far as it goes. But it doesn’t explain why Jackson County inspectors noted various issues but none on the scale in the Royals’ firm’s report. It’s almost like there’s another difference between the two reports.

Also of note in the Star’s article is the fact that Dodgers Stadium, a few years older than Kauffman, needed only $100 million in renovations a couple of years ago to justify its position as All-Star Game host in 2022. Are the Dodgers just taking that much better care of their stadium than the Royals? If the Royals have really proven to be as poor stewards of their stadium as they are claiming, should they really be trusted with a brand-new stadium?

The bad news just keeps rolling in for Royals fans. At this point, I think some of us are looking forward to Spring Training just so we can go back to searching for silver linings on the field. Heaven knows the off-the-field happenings just aren’t offering us much to work with.

“He was looking for an opportunity to rebound,” Picollo said. “They pursued us as much as we pursued them. There was interest on both sides. “We have a pretty clear understanding what happened at the end of last year. These things happen in sports. He was as disappointed in how the year ended as the Yankees were.”...

“We haven’t assured him anything,” Picollo said. “No promises were made that he would be our closer. We had that conversation with Scott Barlow as well. ... I don’t even want to call it a competition. Scott Barlow is our closer.”

Anne Rogers writes about the due diligence the Royals did to investigate Chapman.

“Clearly, that’s something that’s important to us, to do that background,” Picollo said. “… We felt very comfortable with what had happened in the past and what we uncovered, which I’m not at liberty to discuss. We were concerned with figuring it out, but unconcerned moving forward. What I would like to say about that, too, is that there are many players that we’ve done the same type of work on in the past that we came to the conclusion that they don’t fit our culture. And that was not the case for Aroldis. We feel like we’ve done the proper work. That was seven years ago. There were no prior incidents. There were no incidents after that. There is a little bit of speculation of what may or may not have happened, but we feel like we’ve got the facts and feel like we can be comfortable with Aroldis on our team and in our community.”

So this move offers Mondesi a reset that perhaps could help him realize at least some semblance of his potential as or before he turns 28 in June. And it provides the Royals with clarity as they have sought to prioritize Witt as the everyday shortstop.

It should be said that Picollo politely disagreed with the suggestion it stands for a broader organizational shift. With only a year remaining on Mondesi’s contract, he said, “It was likely he was going to end up playing somewhere else in the future, anyway, so I don’t think it’s the end of an era.”

It sure seems like another statement of an ongoing transition from one, though, gradually at first with Picollo’s ascent to the GM role in late 2021.

David Lesky at Inside the Crown writes about the off-season plan.

To be upset that we’re now going into the seventh season since they last even finished at .500 and they’re still a year or two away in the front office’s minds is frustrating. But I also think the moves they’ve made and what they represent show a little of what I’ve thought for awhile now. They messed up and it was a pretty bad mess-up over the last few seasons. The past can’t be changed now. And the man at the top, John Sherman, showed with his actions that he believed Moore was the biggest issue. That’s all we can take from the fact that he left the majority of the front office in tact. Time will tell if he’s right, but Picollo (and Matt Quatraro) seem to be putting their stamp on the team.

Kevin O’Brien at Royals Reporter has four Royals non-roster invitees to camp to watch.

MJ Melendez is doing work.

#Royals C/OF MJ Melendez is preparing for a special 2023 season, his second in the bigs. We go to Miami for an inside look at his offseason training, where his father, Mervyl, plays a huge role. "I feel very confident going into this next season." @mjmelendez7 @CoachMelendez24 pic.twitter.com/GPT8fq5uHS

— Bally Sports Kansas City (@BallySportsKC) January 27, 2023

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The Royals signed veteran infielder Matt Duffy to a minor league contract Friday, per a team announcement. The TWC Sports client will be invited to Major League Spring Training and compete for a roster spot.

Duffy, 32, spent the 2022 season with the Angels, where he played three different spots around the infield and posted a combined .250/.308/.311 batting line in 247 plate appearances. Duffy held a similar role with the Cubs in 2021 when he batted .287/.357/.381 and played all four infield positions in addition to left field.

Once the starting third baseman for the Giants and a key piece in the trade that sent Matt Moore from Tampa Bay to San Francisco, Duffy’s career has been severely hampered by injuries. An ailing Achilles tendon in 2016 eventually required surgical repair. That, paired with a separate procedure to remove bone spurs from his heel, cost him the entire 2017 season. Duffy returned to play in 132 games with the 2018 Rays, but a hamstring injury cost him the first four months of the 2019 season and ultimately held him to 46 games.

Duffy doesn’t have much power, but he tends to have a low strikeout rate and is capable of playing all over the infield with passable or better defense (generally plus defense at the hot corner). He’ll give the Royals the type of contact-oriented profile that is so often a hallmark of their roster, and he provides some insurance at second base, third base or shortstop in the event of injuries or a trade.

Kansas City has reportedly drawn trade interest in Nicky Lopez — including from the division-rival White Sox — and their top option at third base is Hunter Dozier, whose contract team would surely prefer to move, if at all possible. Twenty-four-year-old Michael Massey is expected to have the opportunity to win the second base job, but Duffy provides a veteran alternative if Massey struggles this spring.

Late last season, not long after J.J. Picollo took their baseball operations reigns when the KC Royals let Dayton Moore go, we surmised here that the club might consider bringing back long-time Kansas City pitcher Danny Duffy, who the club traded to the Dodgers in 2021 and became a free agent when the 2022 campaign ended.

Friday, the Royals announced they've signed a free agent named Duffy.

It's just not Danny.

Instead, the team is bringing aboard Matt Duffy (Twitter link), a notably versatile major league infielder with seven years of major league experience, including stops in San Francisco, Tampa Bay, Chicago as a Cub, and most recently in Los Angeles with the Angels.

Duffy joins Kansas City on a minor league contract and has an invitation to spring training.

What can Matt Duffy bring to the big league table for the KC Royals in 2023?

Duffy's big selling point is his versatility, a valuable commodity Kansas City seems to covet with increasing frequency. He's played every infield position and owns a slightly-above-league-average overall fielding percentage of .968.

The bulk of his infield work, however, has been at third base, a position the Royals have struggled with since trading Mike Moustakas to Milwaukee in 2018. In his 475 games at the hot corner, Duffy has a .964 fielding percentage (also better than league average); his isn't Gold Glove-caliber defense, but it's serviceable.

At the plate, Duffy doesn't display a lot of power (his 12-home run 2015 campaign with the Giants remains the only double-digit homer season he's had), but his career .279 average and .337 OBP suggest he can get on base. After slashing .287/.357/.381 for the Cubs two seasons ago, he hit only .250 for the Angels last year, but he also spent almost three months on the Injured List.

So, assuming Duffy makes the Royals' Opening Day roster, how might he fit in? Because he's played third base more than any other position, and Kansas City still hasn't solved its puzzle there, the hot corner seems the most likely spot for him. But if the club obtains another big league third baseman, or Hunter Dozier, recently-acquired Johan Camargo, or perhaps Nate Eaton look better this spring than Duffy, he can certainly fill a utility role. The latter is especially true if the Royals choose to trade Nicky Lopez.

Time will tell. For now, though, Duffy is likely in the running for a big league job.

Kansas City has signed Matt Duffy.