Greinke leaves camp...RC set to arrive...

RC was alerted this afternoon that Zack Greinke left camp over the weekend to return home to Orlando. The Royals have indicated that he had permission to leave in order to take care of "personal matters," but they refused to speculate further, beyond saying it was not injury-related. They have also refused to speculate on how long Greinke will be out, but they didn't rule out that it might be for an extended period of time.

This is obviously not good news. We cannot even begin to guess what the problem is, but clearly Greinke has something he needs to work out for himself. Though you won't often hear us admit it, there are more important things than baseball, and we hope Greinke takes care of his problem -- whatever it is -- and gets back on the mound quickly. Speculation about the cause of Greinke's departure at this point is pointless, so we're not going to do it. We're all curious, of course, but RC just hopes that Zack is OK.

On a more cheerful note, RC tomorrow afternoon will depart for our Official Spring Training Trip. We will be in Surprise until Sunday afternoon, and we are scheduled to go to three spring training games, two intrasquad games, and two Arizona State games (vs. Texas Tech and Auburn). As always, we promise frequent updates right here on Royals Corner throughout the week, including scores of original photos and videos. Stay tuned!

We had heard that Runelvys Hernandez reported to camp in horrible shape, but we had no idea how much weight he actually gained. The few small photos we'd seen of him didn't make him look too much bigger, but a search for Photo Day shots of the Royals today revealed the truth about Hernandez. And oh my! RC is in no position to make fun of fat people, so we won't go there, but Hernandez is really starting to look like a Domincan Bob Wickman. Check out the photo here. Also, Royals Authority has an interesting take on Hernandez's weight, so we recommend you check that out as well.

RC is pleased to announce that we've updated our College Prospect Tracker, which includes a quick recap of last week's action and stats through this weekend's games. Missouri's Max Scherzer had the weekend's most impressive performance, picking up a win against the nation's #1 ranked team, the Florida Gators. Not to be outdone, North Carolina's Andrew Miller had a dominating performance today against George Washington University, striking out 11 in seven innings pitched while allowing only two hits and no runs. Be sure to check the page frequently as we track the progress of the nation's top collegiate talent throughout the season.

As you probably know by now, RC takes great pride in the original photographs we provide. Through our travels, RC has built up quite a catalog of quality photos of many, if not most, of the best prospects in baseball. We often offer other sites the use of our photos, and a few, such as Inside the Dugout, have taken us up on those offers. We're pleased to announce that our photos will soon appear on two of baseball's best and most popular sites.

In addition to our reporting on the Royals while in Arizona, we're planning to snap some photos of Rangers prospects for the Newberg Report. The Newberg Report has an insane following of Rangers fans, and we look forward to seeing our photos appear on that site.

Also, John Sickels today published one of our photos on his blog, Minor League Ball. The shot of Adam Jones certainly isn't one of our best efforts, but we plan to continue providing John with more photos in the coming months. If you've never before checked out John's site, we highly recommend you do so. He combines traditional scouting techniques with sabermetrics, and his Prospect Book is one of the best around.