Basically, most athletes have terrible taste in music as revealed in their lousy walkup music, just like most team chairmen have terrible taste in Buttercups. Let's face it, your job is to throw, hit, catch and toss the ball mister major leaguer. You're good at it, great even. But your taste in music sucks, bro. Put it this way - you can kick my ass, but my iPod would melt yours if they were to meet on the astral-audio plane. And I am not even a music snob. The Angels would do well to have a sophisticated musicologist curate songs to match the strengths of the team's players at their moment of stepping up. This is the first in a series.

LINK ... Albert Pujols is the Hurdy Gurdy Man. Here he comes singing songs of love. Nothing sums the greatest batter of his generation more than that simple phrase. Instead of the Hippy Dippy Donovan original, the 1970 Eartha Kitt cover of this classic has just the right amaount of brassy big band boom that a slugger deserves along with a tender yet remote vocal that is just distanced enough from reality that you wonder how this batter is even really real and with us all on the material plane.

Watch the greatest Catwoman and Lady Bird Johnson killer here and imagine her transfixed on jersey number five stepping into the batter's box as one of 45,000 fans waiting for the miracle that is always a little more likely to happen when our Hurdy Gurdy Man Pujols approaches.

What song do YOU think the Angels should curate to heighten the live entertainment value of an Albert Pujols plate appearance?

UP AND IN is a weekly podcast via Baseball Prospectus featuring two dudes who write for them, Jason Parks (@professorparks) and Kevin Goldstein (@Kevin_Goldstein). It's a podcast for extreme baseball nerds like myself and has helped me get through the off-season. They also do a bunch of non-baseball, "dude" type stuff like the "What Are You Drinking" segment.

Anyways, they did their run down of the Angels farm system recently. I typed it up while listening so I didn't differentiate between Kevin and Jason. With the Halos system they seemed to mostly agree on each player anyway so it doesn't matter much.

Here's a short, concise recap of who and what they said:

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My conversation with actor Cheech Marin continues here, he discusses the heroics of the Dodger Game that he threw out the first pitch and recollects the Washington Nationals giving him the A-List star treatment when his publicist let them know he was in town and was a big baseball fan.

Cheech and I discuss the cross-town rivalry between the Dodgers and Angels in light of fifteen years of interleague play and he reveals which Angels player was his hero when he was an infielder playing in American Legion Ball and High School.

And no discussion of baseball is complete without the story of when it broke your heart. Hear Cheech's tale.

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The MLB Daily Dish site has the full story at this link but minor league free agent Greg Smith has signed with the Angels. Smith has bounced around as parts of two infamous trades: He went from the Arizona Diamondbacks to the Oakland Athletics in the Dan Haren trade and from the A's to the Colorado Rockies in the Matt Holliday trade. He is an Angel.. or at least a Salt Lake Bee, now. Smith is a left handed starting pitcher.

Actor/ comedian/ cultural icon Cheech Marin and I were talking baseball and I just had to get the camera out, as he really knows and loves the sport. Here is part one of our conversation at his pad in Malibu.

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You'll have to wait for your answers edition of Halolinks:

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