Boom! The Great White Out is over. Before the next one hits (which could be any day now), let's catch up on the news and see if we survived Wait. Am I talking about the LAA off-season here?
Have yourself some warm and sun shiny Southern California page of Links:
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Everywhere In Baseball
Torreyes: Holy Moly. The Angels claimed infielder Ronald Torreyes off waivers from the Yankees organization (and DFA'd Bobby LaFromboise to make room). One year ago Torreyes was an Astro, and DFA's himself at the start of the season. He was traded to Toronto. A month later Toronto traded him to the Dodgers. The Dodgers kept him almost exclusively in their minor league system until they signed Kenta Maeda this offseason, so they DFA's him and traded him to the Yankees. The Yankees put him on waivers, where he was ignored by 9 other American League teams until Eppler sucked him up. Now for the punch line: this human pinball, Ronald Torreyes, lands in the LA Angels farm system and immediately becomes our 12th best prospect. So, in theory, we have only 11 players in our entire farm system who might not get drop-kicked around baseball as bad as all that..........
Options: If it happens that Eppler trades for an outfielder, Charlie Blackmon just agreed to play for $3.5 million in 2016..........
Safety First: Ok, the owners just met and one of the first things they wanted to talk about was stadium security. So they invited in the Secretary of U.S. Homeland Security. Naturally, it's the kind of thing where the audience all leaves the session pumped up to do shit everywhere. Maybe we'll all need to start taking off our shoes or something. (Yeah, I'm not the biggest of fans when it comes to measures that impose large impositions upon the actions of the citizenry against un-quantifiable benefits, even when those impositions wear the cloak of security.) But, all that aside, A Cabinet member travels to meet with 30 MLB franchise owners, and that Secretary arrives in a 7-car motorcade? SEVEN cars? Are they Fiat 500's???.............
Red Faced: By now you all know that Chris Correa, front office exec with the St. Louis Cardinals, pled guilty to hacking into the Houston Astros computer system multiple times and traipsing through their private internal research (and possibly using that info to improve their own draft). Mostly, the news push has been that Correa acted alone, and no other part of the Cardinals organization was involved. Bud dude, sure, but rogue. The Cardinal Way remains intact. Except, as it turns out, it doesn't. The full transcript of the Correa guilty plea was released and has been published by The Houston Chronicle. And what do you know? In that transcript, Correa admits that he told others in the Cardinal front office what he had done and what he had found. So, yeah, Correa just let Rob Manfred know that multiple other parties in the St. Louis front office knew what he had done, or was doing, and did nothing to stop it or report it. So they were cool with it............
Woulda, Coulda, : Just because the Mets signed Yeonis Cespedes for 3 years, $75 million and a 1-yearr player opt out doesn't mean that Arte could have signed him for such an opportunistic deal. For instance, the Nationals offered $35 million more and Cespedes walked away from that. True, the Nats deal was probably back-ended and the opt-out was probably before Cespedes could have made it to that $35 million, but still...turning down $35 million is a big gamble. He must have liked the Mets a lot..............
Shoulda...NOT: Ken Rosenthal tries to make the case that the remaining Tier-2/Tier-3 Free Agent players are worth the loss of a first-round draft pick. I think these guys need to start making plans to vacation until June (when teams can sign them without loss of the pick)...........
Bobble Baubles: See? All it takes is a little irreverence and everybody can laugh at themselves and we all get more hilarity in our lives. Like when we give away bobbleheads that make a notable statement about baseball history. For example, the fact that Adrian Beltre doesn't like it when people touch his head, or when Texas manager got into a finger-pointing huffy fit with Astros manager A.J. Hinch.............
DH: Yeah, in the deep, dark, abyss that is baseball news in Winter, any little comment about the DH coming to the National League is sure to generate oodles of articles and commentary. I could have created multiple days worth of links pointing at nothing but declarations that it was certain, and it was time, for the NL to adopt the DH. It will happen some day, and maybe that some day is sooner rather than later. But I chose to step back from that indulgent blab-a-thon and give MLB officials a chance to say something of import. And they did. Commissioner Rob Manfred is cooling the jets on all the talk, saying that "...the designated hitter for the foreseeable future is the status quo." Now we wait until the CBA negotiations to see how truthful Manfred is being here..........
Field Practice of Dreams: Anybody here recall the glory that was the Augie Garrido era Cal State Fullerton infield/outfield practices? Both infield and outfield would be practicing their warmups at the same time and 4 - 6 baseballs were in play all at once, everything running like precision clockworks? Over at ESPN, in their series of ways to "improve" baseball, after mostly silly and obvious stuff, Tim Kurkjian goes after the missing infield practice. In this case, they are right on. Sure, taking fielding practice before games would help defenses (couldn't hurt). That, of course, would just lead to lower scoring but, hell, Law of Unintended Consequences and all that. Meanwhile, it sure would improve the pre-game experience for fans! And for that, I am all in. It sure beats watching the ground crew make the foul lines all pretty and tidy in the first place, which is more like watching the grass grow..........
Baseball Biz: Commissioner Manfred on Cord-Cutting and MLB Blackout rules. In short, MLB still has its collective head in the sand concerning cord-cutting, pretending that it will not end up being at least 90% of all viewers. Then, blackout rules screw everybody. And, finally, the recent class-action settlement concerning blackout territories may have happened, but that doesn't undo how we already sold exclusive broadcast rights and we don't want to have to give that money back...........
Condolences: Sad news in the baseball world tonight. The Houston Astros lost a young pitching prospect, as 20-year-old Jose Rosario of the Dominican Republic was killed in a motorcycle accident..............
Quick Hit: On our way out the door, get a load of this vintage, epic, fail. A batter who swung, missed, and knocked himself unconscious!...........
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