MondoLinks: Halos swept us fans off our feet

The media picked a fine time to proclaim that the Angels' offense was heating up, and that Huston Street is both dominant and consistent. Just bad timing, really. Like the bats of a lot of guy under the Halo these days. They eventually do catch up to the real world.

Things really are not going well at the moment. It happens. Sometimes your own guys put out such a shitshow they can make heroes out of flunkees. And it doesn't just happen with the Angels. That doesn't mean that this is how these guys are going to play all season. It's just a phase. They will snap out of it. Sure, we will always lament these three easily attainable wins that were there for the taking, but it's not like players spend all season without snapping out of a simple slump of ice-cold hitting. And, besides, losing streaks don't mean that much, anyway............

Have some 12-Games-Into-A-Season Links:

______________________________

Everywhere In Baseball

K-Town: Just sayin' here. Geovany Soto, Chris Pennington, Daniel Nava, Johnny Giavotella and Yunel Escobar have a combined 116 At Bats, with a total of 14 strikeouts among them. Mike Trout has accumulated 43 At Bats, and already has 13 K's. Worse, he is ZERO for TEN with 4 of those strikeouts all when Runners are in Scoring Position. He might as well be out with an injury, because you are looking at how this team and this offense would run without a Mike Trout...........Which makes for unfortunate timing with this MLB piece on Trout vs. Harper.............

M.A.S.H. Unit: Catching up on the medical reports, the rumors that Arte is in it to "win now" is not inclusive of anything dealing with the medical staff. Tyler Skaggs is still rehabbing in AAA and making progress. But don't make the mistake of thinking that this means we will see him any time soon...........The same can be said of Andrew Heaney. Nobody feels inclined to establish any sort of time-table there, either..........C.J. Wilson, on the other hand, well, he is on the brink of throwing a baseball all of 60 feet! That's only 6 inches away from all the way to home plate. But it should be explained that this is still off flat ground, so he is a long, long way away as well..........Joining them all in the infirmary is Daniel Nava, who has tendinitis in his left knee. Apparently, a lot can go wrong in those 4 months between when the Angels signed Nava and gave him the usual medical inspection, and today..........

Deceiver: Jered Weaver, whether he was aware of it or not, was being pretty heartily slammed by the scoreboard in Target Field, which spent the night calling all his fastballs "change-ups": "Weaver’s average fastball velocity is down to around 81 mph, per Fangraphs. That’s probably the slowest for a non-knuckleball pitcher in the past few decades. Back when Weaver was an All-Star, he averaged around 89-90 mph on his fastball and around 80 mph on his changeup, which explains why someone would think of an 81-82 mph pitch as a change."...........But we have discovered where Weaver's velocity is going. It's going to Hector Santiago, whose velocity is on the rise...........

Too Shifty: We know that the Halos have gone shifty happy mad in 2016, shifting more than any other team. By far. We also know that this shifting business is not working out for them. What we might be learning is that they have gone all-in when the odds on the table might not be supporting going in at all. So, of course, they abandoned the shift altogether in Minnesota, and lost all three close games anyway.........

Baseball Memo: I wondered about this when the recent Mike Piazza 9/11 jersey thing went sour in New York. I was truly confused over the whole issue. Because, as the title to this article asks, To Whom Does Baseball Belong? In the first place, IMHO, some things about the game are just too iconic. It's lost on me why the jersey was manipulated into being such a thing. Why not the helmet? The shoes? The batting gloves? The bat? The ball? I failed to connect. And then, as the linked article continues, you read about the legacy of Don Drysdale memorabilia. That stuff has some value to baseball historians, and some value to fans. It also has value to various members of the extended Drysdale family. Should such family members have to purchase their own family mementos? Are baseball memories any different than the memories surrounding the family heirlooms you have in your own attic? One can find extraordinary objects of far more importance to baseball history in auctions all over the country than the things that crossed paths with Don Drysdale. But in the end, the whole idea of why any sports object is of any importance at all is ephemeral, and any value placed on such things is highly personal. I don't have to get it for it to be of significant importance to somebody, somewhere. None of us do...........

Baseball Biz: The era of 4K baseball broadcasts got off to as failed of a start as possible. This past weekend DirectTV was supposed to broadcast a Giants-Dodgers game in 4K, the first ever. Instead, DirectTV had some kind of technical foul up with the third party with whom they contracted to manage the game, and they left all their subscribers hanging. Badly...........This is more than a little unfortunate, considering the Dodgers have kind of a special relationship with blazing trails for TV viewers..........

______________________________

The Duffle Bag

Calling all lawyers. A fan was injured at Tropicana Field by a foul ball Friday night. She was sitting behind what all believe to be the safety of the netting, but the "...ball went through a gap between netting of about the size of one and a half baseballs behind an area designated for photographers." It's a pretty easy principal that when some organization puts up something to protect a consumer, and that protection fails, the organization is going to be forced in court to admit that things are dangerous and they failed to remove the danger. That lady will get paid..........Just because a batter asks the ump for time doesn't mean spit...........It also pays to know the infield fly rule, in detail..........For the record, sunglasses do NOT allow you to see into the sun..........Mike Muchlinski might be thinking that maybe this career as an umpire isn't all it's cracked up to be. A couple of years ago Mike suffered this. yesterday he suffered something even worse............Jake Arrieta is a pretty dominant pitcher these days, as we found out. He's even more dominant at home..........Shelby Miller, knuckle-dragging self-injurious freakazoid.............Mark Trumbo still hates the Texas Rangers............Get a room, with an amazing view! Some fans getting frisky in the cheap seats, hiding behind nothing but distance..........

_______________________________