MondoLinks: Angels Offense on Parade

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Everywhere In Baseball

Trout-astic: Mike Trout doing more good deeds. Trout just had Nike back up a truck and unload a couple of tons worth of new gear to Millville High School. Let's hope those kids take a shine to the Halo............

Surprise: Billy Eppler goes on the record and informs us all that the Angels are done with making moves. So then Billy Eppler goes out and makes a move. Eppler agreed to send some cash to Houston in exchange for right-handed pitcher Troy Scribner.  Pay attention to that part of the first link that explains how retaining Ji-Man Choi is going to cause roadblocks to roster flexibility this season. In short, the Halos won't have any ability to move position players without serious consequences. It's all gonna be pitchers doing the SJC shuffle until something major forces Eppler's hand..........

Hit the Road: Yeah, the LAA bats have been smoking hot this Spring. I hope this offense really settles in as the season goes on, but I think we can all agree with Mike Scioscia that this particular group has a long way to fall in order to reach the depths of last year...........Also, one particular ex-Angel is also having one hell of a Spring. Jean Segura is on a tear himself. The guy is batting .529 with an OPS of 1.312.........

Read This: Jeff Fletcher reads Halos Heaven. It can't be any other thing. Fletcher knows all too well how we here in the Intertubes blow up when Scioscia loses a baserunner at home on his favorite tactic of the contact play. "A sharp two-hopper is hit right at the shortstop, playing in, as the Angels runner takes off from third. The shortstop throws home, and the runner is out easily. Three … Two … One … Social media bubbles with disgust." I don't argue against Fletcher's data on runs produced by the contact play but I would ask about context. When he finds 56 times the Angels had the correct situation in place for the contact play, does that mean that the Angels actually ran that play every one of those times? How many times do the Angels (and other teams) score in those situations without the contact play? I don't know. That kind of data quoting looks pretty Lyle to me............

Wasted: The really big news yesterday, reported by nearly every outlet possible, involved an elderly Cuban immigrant running onto the field and yelling at the Rays in the dugout and then throwing his can of beer at them. He was easily subdued and arrested. Nobody got hurt. And, yeah, he was pretty pissed about the Rays playing an exhibition game last week in Havana. We shouldn't be surprised. These are the kinds of things many people simply don't get over. Look it up, we are still arguing over the Armenian Genocide. Anyway, the rule around here is to take your politics elsewhere, but there are no restrictions against getting real damned pissed off at some radical asshat making a fool of himself in front of thousands while he wastes perfectly good beer!!!...........While on the subject, I sure hope this does not mean that now that we have had the Astros and Padres doing an exhibition series in Mexico City, we will have some guy abusing a bottle of Negra Modelo in Houston any time soon............

Strike!: This is brilliant. A blind young man threw out a ceremonial first pitch. Damned if he didn't throw a strike! Probably the best first pitch I have ever witnessed. Take that, 50 Cent..........

Winners. Losers: When casting about and collating various data points into a map in order to compare a 2016 forecast to some team in the past, some interesting comparisons come about. For example, the Cardinals forecast to be right about where the Cleveland Indians were in 1997. That is a pretty good place to be. The Indians lost the WS that year 3 games to 4, and mad the League Championship Series the following year, and the League Divisional Series the third year. So what about the Angels? Well, upon close examination, they look a hell of a lot like...the Angels...of 2014. In other words, pretty much themselves. And not like any other team, ever. "The Angels provide the most boring doppelganger among 2016 teams...the reality is that the most similar franchise to the 2016 Angels (by far) is the 2014 Angels...the 2016 Angels would be in the exact same position–within five percent in each category–as their 2014 iteration...If you have to be stuck in a franchise rut, you can do much worse than one in which you hit 85 to 90 wins most years."..........

Knuckleheads: Guys. Really. Another catcher plunks his own pitcher with an errant throw to send base trying to nail a baserunner? Like it's not enough to have to worry about what the hitter might do with a line shot back up the middle? At least, in this case, pitcher Drew Hutchinson was not hurt.........

Fanatical: Man, some people take their sports way too seriously. In Minnesota, a baseball team cannot even hire a laborer to do some handyman task if that laborer is gonna show up wearing some article of clothing that carries the logo of the Georgia Bulldogs?...........

Yanksters: The Yankees are pissy that the Mets only pay a tenth the amount into the revenue sharing pool, and both share the same market. I would guess that this is a consequence of the Yankees being 10 times more popular in their shared market. Or something............

Meddling Lawyers Blockade: MLB is interjecting itself into the growing fun that ballplayers have been having with tiny little stickers on the knobs of baseball bats. Geez, people, find something important to worry about............

Armageddon: Some people went out to a baseball field to watch some practice game, but got great seats to the power of atmospheric spectacle, instead. And they got wet............

Oh Jose: The end must be near. How else to explain how it becomes news that a thing that calls itself twitter volunteers upon itself to alter the standing of some guy who used to play baseball, and this all becomes something that I link to? But, yeah, I link to Jose Canseco losing his Verified status............

Tax Pillage: This is getting ridiculous. Here I had thought that the Braves were the worst for choosing to abandon a taxpayer funded Turner Field, only 20 years old, in order to pursue greater owner profits via another taxpayer-funded ballpark outside of town. Now we have the Diamondbacks thinking about following right behind. And the DBacks ballpark is only 18 years old. It, too, was funded by taxpayers, and they were none too happy about that at the time. So the DBacks got their stadium money from the taxpayers, having railroaded the public policy-makers into ponying up the first quarter billion bucks. But because the grandiose stadium overran its budget and the Dbacks were on the hook for those overruns, and because the DBacks were prevented from revenue sharing during their first 5 years of existence, they have always been operating from a bad financial situation. The DBacks want out. Or, more accurately, they want over. Over to some other location where they can grab the real estate dollars surrounding their business enterprise.............

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