Hector Santiago gets a base hit, and the only guys who outhit an American League pitcher are Matt Joyce, Chris Iannetta, and Kole Calhoun. Calhoun makes sense. Nothing else does. The Angels lose 3-2 and the offense remains unraveled.
It's time for people to start putting a magnifying glass to Don Baylor. If the collective angst at a team that once had an entire lineup in a game hitting over .300 was that this was despite the ineptitude of Mickey Hatcher, how can we justify remaining silent concerning Don Baylor when suffering through this debacle?
Baylor needs to be on the hot seat (right alongside a Mike Scioscia moving his productive hitters down in the order while leaving a guy at leadoff who is now 1 for 27), and the MSM needs to be asking the tough questions and making everybody that has to answer uncomfortable as they attempt to defend his results.
(By the way, both runs scored last night were fielder's choice, but still count as earned runs. So the streak I counted out for you yesterday reached 40 consecutive innings before the Halos scored an earned run on anything other than a home run. But if you want to count "home runs or fielder's choice", the streak is now 45 innings.)
Until that happens, deal with links:
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Angels Baseball
Blowback: Robert Alvarado, Angels Director of marketing and Ticket Sales who infamously confessed to not giving a damn about customers who are in the lower economic ladders, resigned yesterday. Tim Mead, showcasing contemporary corporate speak for we talked the guy into quitting so that he leaves with career options and we don't have to pay an unemployment claim" was quoted as texting out: "Robert has made a personal decision to resign from the Angels organization. We wish him well in his future endeavors."..........
Homesick: Roberto Baldoquin is not coming along nicely,and the franchise focus is more about getting him used to life in the good ol' U S of A. In any other prospect we might not worry too much that his first season in the minors starts off with a batting average of only a buck seventy-two, and a lengthy injury. But this kid is supposed to be tracking towards taking over for Erick Aybar when spring training opens in 2017..............
For Your Consideration: 5 guys worthy of an ASG thought: Mike Trout? Absolutely. Albert Pujols and Hector Santiago? Possibly. Huston Street and Cesar Ramos? Anyone?...........
Baubles: Anybody in the market for a Garrett Richards bobblehead? Head to Orem!
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Elsewhere in Baseball
More diaper than dapper: Michael Bourn gets ejected, which takes the Indians by surprise. So much by surprise that manager Terry Francona isn't even in the dugout when the problems start. He is taking a leak. At the urinal when all this goes off, Francona is caught so far off-guard and hurried that he ends up urinating on himself in his rush to field............
A-Gregious: As A-Rod approaches the 3,000 hit milestone, his existing grievance against the Yankees for refusing to pay his home run bonus has been tabled for the time being. We should expect ALL of the bonuses that the Yankees refuse to pay to be bundled into one large, collective, grievance. All or nothing.............
Bunt to Win: This is the kind of thing that happens all over America, nearly every day through Spring. of course, Little League home runs are supposed to remain just there, in Little Leagues.............
Mo Votes #1: So how is it that Royals fans are out-hustling the rest of baseball fans everywhere else, combined? maybe by, uh, using the Cardinal Way? (For the record, I have not done a thorough character-by-character compare, but a quick survey of my HumpLinks article and this guys' "I hacked the MLB Poll" article, using View Source of the page HTML, did not reveal any obvious hidden object as claimed by the author.)
Mo Votes #2: Missouri voters also came to the rescue of their beloved mascot, Sluggerr. This all starts with Sluggerr tossing hot dogs into the stands and nailing one guy in the head, detaching his retina. The dude sued and lost. But the an appeals court overturned that decision by saying that mascots are not a required part of a baseball game, for which all fans are warned to pay attention. Ergo, fans are not being warned to pay attention to the mascot. Thus, mascot guilty. But yesterday a new jury of Big Mo Royal homers took another vote, and the franchise came out ahead again, finding Slugger not guilty. (I should state that I don't actually know if the franchise was a defendant here, or jsut the guy who wears the costume.)
R.I.P.: Nelson Doubleday, Jr., former owner of the Mets and descendant of Abner Doubleday, has died at the age of 81...........
OT: Why is it that whenever a hockey or basketball or football team wins the championship of their sport, the first thing that the victors do is to (in order).....put.....on.....baseball.....caps? Not soccer, though. Not soccer.
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#CardGate Central
Cardinals-Astros Hacking scandal: everything you need to know...
(Personal observation: the demographics for St. Louis, Missouri show that only 3.5% of the population is Hispanic or Latino. So why the Taco Bell site name?)
News and reactions from our brethren at Viva El Birdos, #1...
News and reactions from our brethren at Viva El Birdos, #2: Scene of the crime...
Hilarious twitter roundup over at The Crawfish Boxes...
(See, this one makes sense. Houston is smack in the middle of crayfish land, having a huge festival and a forest of Crawfish restaurants and everything.)
SBN Mothership Summary: Cheap. stupid, and illegal as all hell...
Grant Brisbee about The One Great Unwritten Rule..
News Roundup: The investigation itself is supposed to end pretty soon............up in St. Louis, Cardinals employees are starting to lawyer up..........Punishments against the franchise will depend on how high the hack went up the food chain, but we can expect loss of draft choices and fines.........But, getting more realistic, we might expect that a couple of low-level interns are probably all that are going to take the fall for all this..............And, as first evidence of this, the first thing we hear from any lawyer is that all the guys who can afford good lawyers are all innocent............Why all the fuss? Well, for starters, because this is a Federal crime that was broken, not just some MLB gentleman's agreement. Feds care, especially when there is a soft target that makes for good media copy.........Humorous moment: some fans and media got the wrong Cardinals..........Cards Front Office, now with lawyers, jumps in and issues an official announcement..........David Brown over at CBS Sports wants to blame Houston...for stupid passwords. Personally, I want to blame St. Louis, for keeping everybody's passwords written down on paper in the first place! THAT is what is "mind boggling"............And, finally, all of this is life imitating art. The Cards are living a Simpson's episode.
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And now, being the full service weekend linkage institution that we are, here is the obligatory moment we take out of each Friday Thursday...for beer...(which works better on Thursdays anyway, because it gives you all some runway to take advantage of Friday goings on...)
Friday: San Diego International Beer Festival runs all weekend at the San Diego County Fair..........
Saturday: San Diego International Beer Festival continues..........Also in San Diego, at Golden Hill Park, is the Balboa Park 1915 Expo Centennial festival as a Beer & Food event...........LA Brewers Beer Week kicks off today, starting at Exposition Park (where, I might add, there is also an incredibly cool Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit with actual fragments of the real Scrolls!). This event runs through the 28th so visit the site to keep up on the full schedule and locales because there is also a huge center for this in Chinatown...........Closer to the Stadium, the Phoenix Club is hosting So Cal Brew Fest...........The 2015 California Beer Festival makes its tour stop in Novato this week.............Lodi is holding the Lodi Craft Beer Festival as part of this year's Grape Festival............Big Solano Brew-Haha from 1-4 at the Joseph Nelson Community Center in Suisun City..........
Sunday: San Diego International Beer Festival concludes.........LA Brewers Beer Week continues...........Pig Roast & Toast to Dads!, a Father's Day Celebration, will be at Pyramid Alehouse in Walnut Creek...........
BEER BONUS: A fantastic event series that deserves following comes to us from the HH community. red floyd points the way for us all to Ales for ALS 2015. The target for events surrounding this cause are the months of June & July. As of yet, no events have been established. But the list of California Brewers participating is promising so we should hope for some cool events that serve such a worthy cause. We will be following the web site and publishing/linking to events as they come into view.
BEER BONUS #2: John Coffey, out of a singular moment of brilliance, now permanently resides in the Pantheon of Heroes of the Halos Heaven Favored Beverages Brigade.