TuesdoLinks: Who ya got?

Light 'em if you got 'em, folks. The last 7 games of the 2015 season are upon us. After this, we are back to the long, cold countdown.

Here are the numbers in the background on the series, all the dollars and cents..........

So let's kick off this World Series with your best guess. Who you lulling to LOSE? While you mull that over, munch on some links:

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Angels Baseball

EpplerVision: It's time to restock the Front Office. Not necessarily today, but soon enough. There is real work to be done between now and the start of Free Agency, which could be as soon as 12 days from now. The team has to figure out Qualifying Offers, host a conclave concerning the needs and the markets, both domestic and international, review all the existing scouting data, and chew the fat concerning their go-forward philosophy. They are competing with 21 other teams in real-time, and starting soon is the period where the competitors are not the ones on the field, but the ones in the Front Office. Eppler needs his team. So we know that he knows it. But I have a question: how come, in all the chatter about various people being candidates for various openings in the staffs of every other team, we are not hearing about anybody being a person of interest to fill our openings (beyond a couple of softballs tossed up in that single article, linked)? Sure, it's only been a matter of hours since we lost our staff, but we all knew they were heading off to other pastures weeks ago...........

Never Surrender, Rev!: I was browsing tweets for LAA news and tripped across one from LA Times writer Mark Saxon, claiming to know about a lot of conflict between Mike Scioscia and Scott Servais, predicting some interesting rivalry impact in our future. I wondered to myself, "huh? I don't recall hearing about all that while it was happening. Only about the fact that there was some dust-up concerning spring training instruction." Maybe Saxon was linking to an article of his where he goes into that? So I clicked over to his tweet. Nope. Still nothing. But right there at the top was Rev, still smacking the local media hard in the ass for hiding this kind of shit from we, the public that they are supposed to serve. Because, yeah, if Saxon knew about shit like this going on he had a duty to report it. And like so many other swallowers that are granted a level of access that serves little more than free food opportunities, Saxon folded and he is an assbite for so doing.............

Trout Porn: Mike Trout writes an article for the Players Tribune, and chats about how awesome - and difficult - it is to be a baseball player. " I remember turning on the TV last year and watching an amateur game of high school All-Americans and they were all wearing Nike Trouts."...........

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Elsewhere in Baseball

Robots: This could not be more sad. We actually have people tracking a statistic about how good catchers are at getting umpires to correctly call pitched balls that happen to pass through the strike zone a strike. I mean, you should know you have a problem when you have to give a catcher credit for tricking an umpire into doing his job correctly. Right? RIGHT??. By the way, the current winner of this trick is Travis D'Arnaud...............

Torii Hunter: With Hunter now retiring, to accolades everywhere, And all that is good sstuff. rihgtfully so. But I wonder if he will be keeping that promise to restate his opinions on gays (doesn't want them as teammates, claims he was misquoted) and black ballplayers (doesn't think we should be counting Latin ballplayers, claims he was misunderstood) and domestic violence (doesn't matter what athletes do off work, fails to extricate himself from that position). He once was quoted as saying that he would open back up on these subjects when his playing days were over. "We can do that later, when I retire." Was that quote accurate?.............

NYC Pub Scrawl: So a local sports bar is renaming itself Daniel Murphy's until the World Series is over, huh? I wonder if that applies to employee checks? I hope, for their sake, that Murphy doesn't pull a Buckner..........

Royal Rookie: This is audacious. Raul Mondesi has a Junior, and Junior is a serious prospect in the Royals minor league system. The Royals are considering the possibility of adding Junior to their World Series roster, and for real baseball reasons. Junior has yet to play above AA, so if this happens and he gets into a game, he would become the first player in MLB history to make their Big League Debut in a World Series game..........

Royal Pain: The Royals need to win this Series, because after it ends, they have put themselves into a quite an off-season pickle for a small-market team..........

Fixing the Playoffs: As you should know by now, I always love to mull over ways to improve the MLB playoff system. This one is pretty good, but only inasmuch as this is pretty much how things will eventually shake out some day, anyway.  We are on this road, and it's merely a matter of how many years til we get there...........

David Price: Price ain't gonna come cheap. Even if another top-line starter is not #1 in the list of need in Anaheim, it's still good to compete there if for no other reason than to drive up the cost of Price, thus draining the resources of some other competitor..........

$ Per Win: This is one particular list that one does not wish to come out on top. Which teams paid the most per win in 2015? As a tease, let's just say that the Halos mad the Top 10, but towards the bottom of the Top 10..........

A Leg Up: Advanced scouts. I wish we had some of those. Oh, we do? You got any evidence of that?Because if you do, that would be helpful..........

Near Perfecto: Ex MLB pitcher Pat Misch took the mound in Game 7 of the Taiwan Series baseball championship. He walked a batter in the 5th inning. And that was the only thing that stands between Misch and a perfect game. Misch threw a no-hitter to clinch the title. Amazing............

Free Marketing: yeah, MLB needs to get clued in. It's no secret that social media represents a major source of information dissemination, and it's also no secret that sporting enterprises provide huge amounts of content to those social media information dissemination conduits. So MLB choosing to block this is not an oversight and not an accident. It's just plain stupidity masquerading as greed...........

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