Thor'sLinks: Off to a Start

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Everywhere In Baseball

Form Funk: Prospect Greg Mahle is already a submariner, which is not something we see too often under a Halo. To make things even more interesting, Mahle has added another arm slot to his retinue of release points. If this kid makes the roster, this might inspire a drinking game..........

Cron-ic: C.J. Cron might be on the wrong team. Hell, he might be in the wrong sport. Cron is of the belief that his path to improving enough in order to get more playing time is to get more playing time in order to improve. Somebody should introduce Cron to his manager, Mike "Platoon" Scioscia. Or, better yet, show Cron how to use BBR and research how many different lineups Sosh can use in a 162-game season............

Yo!: And to think so many of you people didn't want this Yeonis Cespedes character on our team. It's been less than a week, and we already got cool cars, then horse rides, followed by a $7000 pig purchase, a pig which he cannot keep after all and has to eat by law. And, best of all, along the way he has already pissed off PETA. For all this, having the tools to bring 6.7 fWAR to the roster is merely a bonus. And it wouldn't have cost us anything but money...........

Moving On: Get used to it. It happens. While we are focused on how our new set of catchers competing for a role all shake out, our old catcher immediately posts a success on behalf of our old G.M.............

MLB TV Bucks the Fans: MLB still doesn't get it. They still default to behaviors that shut out fans unless those fans commit cash first. Take Spring Training. MLB is proud to pump their streaming subscriptions. But instead of doing something as forward thinking as giving away the product for free for all Spring Training games, something that might accidentally attract new patrons who could learn how flexible and convenient it is to carry live baseball in their pocket, they want to charge real money first. For stuff like this..............

Busted: The Sports Authority is going broke, closing 1/3 of all stores already............

Red. Flagged: MLB has the Rays playing in Cuba later this month for a special international event, the first such game played in Cuba since 1999. To celebrate, they came up with a special event logo, and they got hte Cuban flag wrong. See if you can spot the problem. (h/t UniWatch)...........

Grass is Greener: The Phillies are switching out their field grass, going from Bermuda back to Kentucky Bluegrass. The deal here is that Bermuda plays too fast for fielders and the Phillies want to focus on inducing more groundball outs. What strikes me as problematic is why they went away from Bluegrass and over to Bermuda in the first place. They did it because Bermuda holds up better in hot weather and heavy use. In other words: because it was easier on the grounds crew. But fans don't pay to watch what is easy for the staff. They pay to watch the players. This violates what I considered my Prime Directive back when I was an I.T. Big Wig Executive. I would tell my staff every week: "Never do anything that impedes the ability of a lawyer to do his or her job just to make your own work life a little bit easier. That is a fireable offense." It's an important concept because it actually happens all the time. Even with baseball field maintenance. Left unchecked, it always leads to bad business outcomes...........

Shifty: The Padres should be fun this season. New skipper Andy Green is shift crazy, and very successful at it last year in Arizona. And you want to read something mind-blowing?? This sentence actually came out of the mouth of a Major League Baseball manager: "I’m the kind of guy who is going to explore every idea. I’m going to listen to whatever the data says." We fans of LAA did not believe such a thing was possible..........

All Ty'd Up: Millions of dollars. Millions. What was almost considered hoarder trash turned out to be 7 super rare, super vintage Ty Cobb baseball cards from more than 100 years ago...........

Progress: Give MLB credit, they are going to lengths to try and solve the human trafficking issues surrounding the movement of Cuban ballplayers out of Cuba and into America to play in the MLB. Essentially, MLB is creating a clearinghouse consortium made up of Cubans, union members, and MLB officials. And MLB is working with the U.S. Treasury Department to make it all legal. It smells like a non-profit youth training academy, jointly organized by all sides. I don't know much about this system other than what the article summarizes, but I do like the effort............

Two questions: I think these are fair questions....(1) how the hell is this thing at the Angels Team Store considered "vintage"?. It's a brand new item, never used. It is an outdoor game that has only come into popular being in the past decade. And the graphics are as current and contemporary as anything found in the stadium. That only equates to "vintage" from the perspective somebody in the front office who cannot see further back in time than 2002. Then, (2), how is it that the item made it into the store with the actual common name of the game - cornhole - and not some white-washed OC safe-for-soccer-moms equivalent such as "bean bag toss"?..........

Graph of the Day

Above more than just Average: High up in the Rocky Mountains, Coors Field is above it all. Way above. Remeber this color, becaues tomorrow I'm going to show you "normal".