WeekEnd HaloLinks: 7 days to go!

That's it, ladies and gents. The LA Angels moving trucks have departed from Anaheim and are arriving in Tempe even we read this. All the bats and balls and jerseys and caps and whatever hell else they don't know how to stock locally in the state of Arizona rolled out away from the stadium parking lot yesterday afternoon. I love the "Old Dominion" freight line. Are they a subsidiary of the famous insurance company? And that logo. "Helping the world keep promises." I hope they know how much we fans are counting on the power of their mission statement to grab hold of our front office.

So here you go, kids. grab your coffee and enjoy yourself some Final-Weekend-of-the-Offseason-Links:

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Everywhere In Baseball

Trout Circles: Let's take HH'ers on a trip to the mothership, which takes readers on a trip back here to HH, and it's all a recap of the Trade Mike Trout folly. Grant Brisbee agrees that Trading Trout ain't gonna happen. And he uses 5thStarter to confirm that we wouldn't be happy with that. But there in the discussion of Trout never going anywhere because nobody in the LAA Front Office is going to ever broach the idea of trading him away, nowhere do we dive into the notion that Trout might choose to seek greener pastures all by himself when his current contract expires...............Of course, it wouldn't be the first time that a team traded away a superstar and local icon.............

Bookmarks: A new season is coming up. Analytics are becoming a bigger part of the dialog of our pastime. Here is a list of most of the important sites to do research, and learn about metrics. Most of these are on my daily wheel. But do not assume I will bring you everything of value from all of these every day. Go there and have your own fun.............

Bad Ideas: As we wrap up the offseason, and franchise scorecards are being issued for the bad things they did, our favored team gets a failing grade for the bad thing of not doing. It could have been worse. We could have signed Chris Davis. Or, it could have been even more worstest. We could have failed to re-sign Zack Greinke. Oh. Wait. We already did do that one...........

How To Do The Stupid Thing: There is a reason that Public Relations experts and consultants exist. It's because, if left alone long enough, normal people with too much access to public visibility end up doing things as dumb as Tim Flannery just did: blowing up on the fans of the San Diego Padres. And, no, Mr. Flannery, the Delete key does NOT erase the Internet..............

What Took So Long?: This is truly America. I am only surprised that it took until 2006 before a bunch of affected people from teh Jackie Robinson West Little League debacle lawyered up and started suing everybody. The best part is that they are suing the whistleblower for tracking them down in order to expose them, and then turning around and suing Little League Baseball for not exposing them..............

Don't. Swing.: I wish they had been this good at looking at the very hardest pitches for batters to lay off back when K-Rod was at his peak. Some pitchers just have something they throw that human vision just cannot figure out. Frankie, for a while, had one of those............

Co-Dependency: The Yankees just cannot leave ARod. One year later and all is forgiven. Not that I feel sorry for their battered reputation or anything............

Oakland Sucks: Stupid A's. Not good enough to make our AL West Division compelling this season. Again. I'd feel bad for them if only I didn't loathe them as much as I do. We don't even have a great team and they STILL bring us down...........

#DataDontMatter: hat tip to HardballTalk. Spend some time browsing around this blog. Loaded with good stuff. But today's choice pick concerns how narratives can influence people's ability to recognize outcomes (conflating causes to explain effect), and how that influences what we think about the relative value of baseball players. In short, screw the data. People want to believe in "system players".............

The CBA is coming! The CBA is coming!: It's about time we started hearing the thunder from the side of the players, what with a new CBA to be negotiated this year. It's something that will formally start soon, so now is the time to start negotiating via the public airwaves. Tony Clark starts inflating some trial balloons...............

Sports Biz: We can start with Comcast, in Atlanta, begging customers not to switch to Google Fiber. if you replace the cord that comes to your domicile from Comcast with a cord that comes to your domicile from Google, is that really cord cutting?...........The Super Bowl ratings might be an early indicator that the NFL is finally coming back down to earth. Good job, there, Roger Goodell.............Here is a microscope to peer into the heart of Arte Moreno. MLB owners have conquered the gate, then the luxury box, then PSL's. And they are currently storming the Internet, social media, and video/audio streaming.  So what's next? "Baseball Village economics"..............The details are in. Here is a closer look at the settlement between MLBAM and some dudes who chose to represent the interest of all us blackout victims. We are now more like "grayout" victims.............

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And finally...

New Zealand opened their World Baseball Classic Qualifying competition with the Haka

Which is fun and all. But I can't help but that the Scots have the very best response...

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