Ok. It’s Thanksgiving Day. You should not be here reading this. I wrote this yesterday so I have an excuse.
You should be with your friends and families, giving thanks for all the blessings in your life against any of the woes. You are above ground, and that is the most important thing. It will not last in spite of all your current thought processes.
So don’t make me write a lot of stuff for you to read. Go forth and be productive. Like these guys, who took one of their Thanksgivings and invented the sport of softball.
You can do it. I know you can.
But for the rest of us, I give thanks for all of you who read my daily schtick. I also give thanks for having the Angels franchise in my life. And I give thanks for my family, and for all my friends, and for my ongoing participation in my employer’s salary continuation program.
Have some Tryptophan-Offseason-Links, and tell us what YOU are thankful for this day:
A Little Bit of Angels News
It’s been a notable week in LAA franchise history. This was the 40th anniversary of the signing of Lyman Bostock. It was the 10th anniversary of the signing of Torii Hunter (Sr.). And it was the 4th anniversary of trading Randal Grichuk and Peter Bourjos tot he Cards, for David Freeze and Fernando Salas..........
Everywhere In Baseball
Just an observation before we begin here. Most of the daily sports news sites have roundups from around the country, and they are stuffed with hopeful speculation about how their particular home town club can make a run at Shohei Ohtani, or Giancarlo Stanton, or all the freed up Braves prospects, or all of the above.
Ok, here come some answers to my question about what happens to all the prospects that Rob Manfred unleashed for the benefit of the Yankees/Twins/Rangers, who all have the international bonus pool funds to take full advantage of the opportunity that exists at this fortuitous moment.........The pertinent parts are that each team gets a $200K headstart, meaning that the first $200K won’t count against their pool, and teams can dip into their pool for next year instead of their pool for this year. It’s an either/or thing, team cannot combine the pools for both years. That last part might aid Billy Eppler..........
And now that the punishments have been meted out, here are some good questions that need to be asked. Such as why it was that President of baseball Operations John Hart was allowed to walk away from this in advance, unscathed?..........
Ok. so you are still here reading the links. maybe that’s because you are taking the day off from all the demands on your time from those who surround you. So let me gift you a nice, long, attention-demanding read on the value of Wins. To entice you, here is a key finding: “Furthermore, we can see this team should never pay more than about $6.5 million to add a projected win to its preseason forecast. This means it should not pay the going market rate for most free agents...“..........
So Michael Wilbon sides with Joe Morgan on the Morgan letter begging voters to reject PEDs nominees (as if anybody even knows who should be on that list or not). Ok, we all have opinions on this issue even if the complexities are well beyond what a person may have considered. I don’t link because of those. I link because of Joe Morgan. Wilbon’s point is that Morgan played the game, therefore his opinion carries a higher level of authority. We all know (or we SHOULD know) of the history of FireJoeMorgan.com. Legendary. Lethal. To “fmj” something is to walk through some declaration by a supposed expert and shred their claim sentence by sentence, point by point. It’s all based on just how consistently wrong Joe Morgan’s opinions have been. My personal favorite was the 2002 WS. There was a moment when the camera was on the broadcasters talking to each other with the game going on in the background. And Joe Morgan was lighting up the Angels and Mike Scioscia for their approach to offense. And even as Morgan was going off, the action in the background was of the Angels at bat, going through their get ‘em on, get ‘em over, get ‘em in approach and scoring an important run. Joe Morgan may be a nice old man, and he certainly was a great player, but his credibility as an informed authority has been absent for decades...........
Doomed and boomed Atlanta execs John Coppolella and Gordon Blakeley are lawyering up............Coppolella has his defenders..........
Are Derek Jeter and Company already looking to cash in on their initial investment? or are they simply low on capital to begin with, which was what was feared before they closed the deal? I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the other owners gave the sale the green light as much to rid themselves of Jeffrey Loria as anything else (seeing franchise values rise as they do with any exorbitant sale, having a stable franchise that won’t screw everything up, having a new country club buddy who will be smart enough to follow the billionaire rules of keeping shit to themselves). But I do have a question. Does MLB allow for this kind of outside equity ownership without a vetting process?..........
Hot Stove
Look for possible action out of Miami today, which has a history of working on the holiday. (Why that would have anything to do with an entirely new management regime is beyond me, but it’s a link.)........
Five bargains, and 5 pitfalls (pratfalls?) in the FA market this year..........On the bargain side is your very favorite Carlos Santana. But if he is a bargain, he should get a lot of interest. Getting a lot of interest should crate competition for his services. Competition should drive up his price. Driving up his price would make him less of a bargain..........
Jonny Gomes give us his scouting report on Ohtani...........Speaking of which, here is Jeff Sullivan not too subtly slobbering over what Ohtani would mean to a franchise like his beloved Mariners..........
In all this chatter about how to build a deal for Giancarlo Stanton, why no mentions of multi-team packaging? These methods do hold the power to overcome exchanges where finding fair endings can be challenging. It is, after all, how the Angels got their hands on Andrew Heaney..........
The Duffle Bag
Baseball is most certainly NOT dying. I lost track of the revenue split issue that should have been in the latest CBA........Don’t want to spend the day watching football? Get you and your buddies into the garage and make yourself one of these...........If Rob Manfred truly is serious about “cleaning up baseball”, why would we still be waiting to learn of any serious punishments targeting the STL franchise for hacking Houston?..........I would think a lot of these people now have as much free time as they could have ever dreamed about to attend Red Sox and Yankee games..........
Something else for you to think about and post on this Thanksgiving holiday: what is Major League baseball’s closest equivalent to the butt fumble? And it has to be really really bad. The butt fumble has its own Wiki page.