MondoLinks: LA Angels host Kansas City Royals recap

Awww, man, where you people been? A few HH'ers had a hell of a time this weekend here on the boards. Did you miss it?

Maybe I should ask a different question first. Are you here? Is anybody here? It's Memorial Day holiday, the unofficial kickoff for summer 2014. You should be in bed sleeping, or outside doing something fun. It's not like I am going to be spending my midnight penning any tarty commentary for everyone's amusement. Not when I can be having a holiday too!

And it is midnight as I type this. I just drove 3 1/2 hours across the vast expanse of the San Joaquin Valley, in the dark, away from San Francisco, just to settle in and recap baseball for y'all. There's a lot of unfortunate in that sentence, I know. I'll just stick to the upside of the finale there and punch this out and get myself some well-earned sleep. I be back later in the morning to see how you people are all doing and make sure nobody is causing any trouble.

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Pretty good holiday weekend so far, yeah? We opened on Friday night with a solid 6-1 win behind C.J. Wilson. The offense cranked out 6 hits, including bombs by Mike Trout and Chris Iannetta. And, by the way, Trout appears to have grown Tool #5:

...and Aoki is left to stand there and look out at Trout and say "Really?  Now you got a cannon too? FML."

By the way, he still does stuff like this:

and this:

Dear Detroit fans, please see definitions of "player" and compare to "hitter".

Saturday was kind of a crap. Down 0-3 heading into the bottom of the 4th, the Halos mounted a comeback and took the lead 4-3 after 5. Unfortunately, the game would last 13 full innings and the offense was never to score again. I hate it when the home team has 4 frames to score 1 measly run and end the contest, yet continues to fail long enough to allow the opponent to finally wake up and kick some ass. That was Saturday. 14 hits. 4 runs. 10 men left on base. And 3 errors. A fatal one by Mike Morin in the 13th. Trout committed an error, too, but he also homered for consecutive games. And the Angels squandered the game, losing 7-4.

Sunday was comeback day again, but this one paid off. Garrett Richards got back on track with 3 runs allowed from 5 its surrendered over 7 innings of work, and Iannetta capped off a comeback from down 0-3 to homer in the bottom of the 8th and yield a 4-3 victory, taking 2 of 3 from the Royals. Nice. Especially nice was that this was a win taken from the Royals, who had sent Jason Vargas out to get us. Vargas was strong, but the Royals bullpen was, well, let's just use the word "familiar".

But here is where it gets really, really good. The Oakland A's have lost 4 in a row, including getting swept by the red-hot Toronto Blue Jays, and stand 5-5 over their past 10. The Angels are 7-3 in that span, and are the last team that spanked the Jays (the Halos went 3-1 against them 3 weeks ago and the Jays are 10-2 since). And what does all this mean? It means the Angels enter today's series opener against the Seattle Mariners only 1.5 games out of first place in the AL West. One point five games!!! There are a lot of people wearing green and gold wondering these days what the hell was the value of all that incredible run differential...just sayin'.

By the way, Matt Shoemaker has gone back down, and we will see the Wade LeBlanc Experiment this week. And Josh Hamilton isn't going to be back in the outfield against Seattle today, after all.

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Elsewhere throughout baseball land, Mike Napoli was sent to the DL.  I bring this up not so that somebody around here can crow I told you so, but to bring up something more interesting I learned recently. Naps injured a finger sliding into second base head first last month. Not so different than Josh Hamilton sliding head first into a bag. in fact, several players have hurt their digits sliding head first into bases of late. Bryce Harper into third comes to mind. Here is the interesting part: it turns out that the bases these days are made of hardened rubber so as to help the umpires hear the bag contact and make their calls, AND to help the grounds keepers with field maintenance. Somebody in the front office needs to read Rule 1.06, where it states that "The bags shall be 15 inches square, not less than three nor more than five inches thick, and filled with soft material". We should NOT have lost Hamilton, folks.

More Boston B.S. the Red Sox are trailing 8-3 in the 7th when Yunel Escobar takes 3rd base on defensive indifference. Beantown Backup catcher David Ross barks at Escobar from the dugout. One thing leads to another and we have benches clearing. Unwritten rules about not piling on more runs and all that. Yeah, as if the Red Sox would not create some huge trope about turning their whole season around and being gutty little warriors had they come back and took advantage of Tampa Bay going soft for some unwritten rule and won the game in some "heroic" fashion. Buck Foston.

You might have heard that Becky threw a no-hitter yesterday. I still despise the guy..........Hunter Spence lost his scooter, the one that made his bobblehead so famous...........(by the way, note the cool site for stadium giveaways!)..........Quote of the day: Robin Ventura on Jeter celebrations: 'He's not dying'..........

And we close with Hank Conger..."brilliant"

via sports.cbsimg.net

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Moreno-Carpino Shame Update

Jim Fregosi still not being honored with a memorial patch.

49 games lost. Only 113 games remaining to save face.