TuesdoLinks: Winter Meetings Day 2

The Winter Meetings have kicked off less with a bang than with a lot of saber rattling. Mostly, compared to the Big Splashes over the weekend, there have been a bunch of lesser named players moving all over the place to fill out tier 2 depth needs. But, hey, 'tis the season of gift giving. And other holidays. So let's all try to keep pace and be prepared for that blockbuster that blows up HH and renders all my hard work overnight obsolete!

In the meantime, enjoy the hell out of your National Take It In The Ear Day Links:

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Angels Baseball

Blueprint: Finally. After weeks and weeks of doing every other team, and just in time to be far too late to be meaningful, Sports Quotient gets around to mapping out an offseason profile for the Angels..........

Richards: Garrett Richards is very good, but not an Ace. He was just very lucky, Once............

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Elsewhere In Baseball

Deconstructing Greinke: How the heck can an Arizona Diamondbacks afford a contract like the one they gave to Zack Greinke? By signing a TV mega-deal of their own, $1.5 billion over 20 years. Greinke is merely getting 1/7th of that, and he's taking a 3rd of that contract term to do it. This, of course, supposes that sports broadcasting remains at status quo for the next 20 years. Not something I would be thinking, but then nobody has pulled that particular money trough up in front of my door..........On the other end, losing out on the overhead of such a huge financial commitment opens up the Dodgers to new opportunities, the net of which still has the chance to be off-season positive. As long as the other teams don't get in the way............

Rule Breaking: It's a pretty tough thing to learn about being a grown-up, and having to deal with grown-ups who have been grown-ups far longer than you. Take the case of Kris Bryant, learning at the knees of Scott Boras. Bryant, as you might recall, was pocketed by the Cubs down in AAA just long enough to gain the Cubs an extra year of service time before Boras could sell Bryant's services on a less-than-open market. Them are the rules of the game, which have been in place for quite some time now. They were negotiated by the players' own union reps and the players' own lawyers and put in place on purpose. And the owners use those rules as best they can. Just like the players do. Well, that's not good enough. The players might be entitled to use the rules to run their business, but not the owners, no siree..........

Back in my day: The Winter Meetings used to be hilariously primitive. Here is a New York Times walk down memory lane wherein Bill Veeck wreaks havoc..........

Idle Hands are sometimes the Angels Workshop: deals not made can be important, too. Just look at what can happen when you don't not make a trade you shouldn't be making..........

Indentured Servitude: Minor League baseball Players are never going to make progress until they find some magic way to unionize and hire their own Marvin Miller. Until then, they will always be riding buses and cleaning out vending machines for sustenance. Because this approach, long overdue, turns out to be quite effective.........

Oakland: Yeah, we might not have the Oakland bullpen to kick around any longer. We will have to satisfy ourselves with kicking around the rest of their roster..........

Doyer Vision: Grant Brisbee, noted SF Giants fan so you kind of know where this is coming from, looks down upon the most recent developments in Chavez Ravine and has an interesting take on the LAD Strategic Planning: "That wasn't the Dodgers' plan, though. Losing Greinke confirms as much. The real plan was something like this.....Spend more money than everyone else, building goodwill and rejuvenating interest in the post-McCourt Dodgers.....Develop players to make their spending less urgent.....Eventually spend like a normal-rich team, not a super-rich team." Yes, indeed. Not a bad plan, either, when you start to focus on the LAD farm system..........

No HoF For You!: I guess we have run out of names. That, or we are now applying the modern standards to the names of yesteryear. For the second year in a row the MLB HoF Veteran's Committee (comprised of 16 living HoF'ers) announced that they have elected nobody from the pre-integration era of baseball. Somewhere there is a team of MLB interns who no longer have something exciting to set up in their Grand Ol' Opry Hotel conference room..........I disagree, however, that just because the results differ from what any person might hope it means that the process is broken...........

OT: Here is a PSA for any HH'ers finding themselves in and around the city of Novato. Beware of one pissed off squirrel..........

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Hot Stove Season

Trying to keep up: Day One Recap...

• Royals sign Joakim Soria and Chris Young (here and here)
• Cubs sign Trevor Cahill (here)
• Tigers sign Mark Lowe (here)
• The Red Sox are interested in getting back Mike Napoli, the guy they benched last year for sucking so hard (here)
• Darren O'Day is staying in the DC area, but he is NOT jumping to the Nats (here)
• Mariners get Wade Miley from Redo Sox for Carson Smith and Roenis Elias (here)
• Zobrist focused on Nats, Giants and Mets (here), but the Dodgers have popped up at the last minute (here)
• Speaking of Dodgers, the trade for Aroldis Chapman that was a lock (here), may be breaking apart (here). The latest news is that the hangup involves a potential domestic violence incident (here). Fortunately, there is a lawyer on the case, and he says...um...what? (here).....Note to HH: please check all your jokes and puns about "passing the physical" at the door.
• The Royals think the Cards are going to be their biggest threat to sign Gordon (here), which would imply that they believe the Cards are going to lose Heyward to somebody?
• Jerry Dipoto is on overload. Now he is chasing Adam Lind (here)
• THE ANGELS lost BP prospect Danny Reynolds to the Dodgers on the waiver wire (here)
• THE ANGELS are open to move C.J. Wilson, but we shouldn't expect too much back on him with only 1 year of control left (here)
• THE ANGELS are sniffing around Brett Lawrie of the Oakland A's (here)
• Why you want to avoid signing Johnny Cueto now that we know what we know about the Dbacks offer that he rejected (here)

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