HumpLinks: Say MoY, say MoY!

So the Dodgers are doing pretty good this week, huh? Rookie of the Year...Manager of the Year. Imagine if Clayton Kershaw had been healthy all season, and they had a chance for CYA and MVP to boot.

Consider this some dodging-of-the-blue-bullets-Links:

It's that Most Wonderful Time of the Year again, when visions of sugar plums and trades for Mike Trout dance in the heads of baseball-minded nincompoops everywhere. Here is another one. But, oooh, this one is capital "s" Serious. It comes from a baseball insider. A scout, therefore somebody knowledgeable.  And to think that some MLB team actually pays that "scout" good American money for that person's acumen............And to think, the Braves could trade a huge chunk of their farm to the White Sox in exchange for Chris Sale. The White Sox could then trade that huge farm haul to the Angels in exchange for Mike Trout. And all these "Super Trade" fools would first think to themselves "wow, the Angels sure leveraged Trout right to correct their farm system", but then interrupt their own pea brains with the realization that the White Sox traded Chris Sale for Mike Trout and that whole idea can be made to look pretty stupid pretty fast and "weren't the Angels idiots for listening to the fools" in the first place?...........Then, again, is my counter: 1 or 2 of those farm system haul returns for Trout will pan out to league average or above, the rest will flame out, 100% of them will have matriculated out of the farm system anyway in 3 years, and the farm will be right back to where it would have been anyway. And Trout will have be gone forever..........

Jerry Dipoto draft flame out. Drafted way down in the 34th round of the June 2013 draft, therefore never counted on to take over Albert Pujols' job, the Angels released 1B prospect Eric Aguilera yesterday..........

Oh Cory Rasmus, you won't be living the dreams of Salt Lake City after all. Rasmus chose Free Agency rather than an assignment to the Bees. But that's the thing about pitchers. They have to go into their job with far more confidence than their ERA+ of only 69 and WHIP of 1.662 would ever logically justify. I'm smelling Community College pitching coach in the very near future..........And, Cory, you are now destined to miss out on facing down the New Orleans Baby Cakes. Your loss, dude............

Trout Porn, because why not? Mike Trout ended the season at 48.5 career bWAR, good for a tie at 327th place all-time. But next year is going to be a blast. Every week is he going to blast past a few players, many of them quite famous. In his first few days of the season he will pass Jim Fregosi, Bob Lemon, Sandy Koufax and Nellie Fox. Days later will be Mickey Lolitch, Dennis Martinez Ralph Kiner and Bernie Williams. A couple more weeks and  it will be Torii Hunter and Fred Lynn. The near-daily list then just keeps going..........

NL Manager of the Year is Dave Roberts of the $279,107,794 Los Angeles Dodgers..........Cubs fans are taking it quite well..........Besides, The Internet Baseball Writers Association of America (why am I not a member of this?) voted Joe Maddon NL MoY, so the smart guys are on their side..........

AL Manager of the Year is Terry Francona $114,707,868 Cleveland Indians..........Scott Servais, the guy Jerry Dipoto took with him out of the LAA Front Office and made his skipper of the Mariners, got a courtesy write-in vote from one of his Seattle scribes. That's one more vote than the LAA skipper got (Sosh was tied for 7th place, with no votes), and one of our local guys actually cast a vote for John Farrell of the Red Sox............

Today is Cover Your Ass Cy Young Award Day. This year, the Halos get a special CY Award of Appreciation for providing an opportunity to so many Major League pitchers at the chance to compete for this honor...........

Check out Rookie of the Year careers up at the mothership. Play around with that cool chart. And then think to yourself, 6 years from now Trout is going to be up there on that top shelf...........

Huh. Corey Seager is leading the youth revolution in baseball. Because he is only 22 years old. Because Mike Trout is an old man, at 25. And because Mike Trout's 22 youth leadership was so 3 years ago. (And, as I noted yesterday, Seager at 22 is only a fraction of Trout at 22.)..........

An International Draft is a topic of conversation these days. So at the recent GM Meetings, GM's were asked about their opinion of such a thing and how it would impact the way they go about their business. There are some fascinating responses there. Read them and gain some insight. I was surprised to see that there was far less demonization going on. Then I got to Matt Klentak of the Phillies, who said: "They just advised us not to talk about CBA stuff, so no comment."  Yeah, so take all those fascinating opinions with a grain of salt..........

If you are into this kind of stuff, Ken Rosenthal is spitballing ideas about trade options that might return Brian Dozier from the Twins to solve our 2B problem. It has the exact same merit as my spitball yesterday. The main difference between Rosenthal's photon churning and mine, would be the money that Rosenthal gets to invent his stuff...........

The Duffle Bag