TuesdoLinks: Angels back and Dodgers blue

The Angels zoomed back into SoCal and immediately blew past the LA Dodgers, reminding everyone as to who owns baseball in this part of the country. Heck, they even did it with a Matt Shoemaker on the mound.

The Dodgers did put up a fine fight, though, dragging the game on with a slow down rope-a-dope that took the game into the 23rd hour of the day. It was almost a Tuesday double-header mini-series.

By the way, while you were all busy celebrating the Angels' sweep of Seattle in my absence (perhaps that was just a coincidence), I was being reminded of the paradise that is life along the California seashore:

Have some Back-in-the-Saddle Links:

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Everywhere In Baseball

New Age Richards?: Garrett Richards has opted to delay TJ surgery in favor of stem cell therapy. On one hand, this might just delay his return by months. On the other hand, this could accelerate his return by months and result in future players having the choice of TJ surgery or GR therapy...........

Choi is Bok: Ji-Man Choi indeed cleared waivers as, oddly, no other team wanted him. So he has accepted an outright assignment to AAA rather than try his luck as a Free Agent and sell his skills to all those teams that didn't want him..............

Freaking Out: By the time you read this, the Lincecum posse may have finalized their agreement with the Angels, who appear to still be in the lead............The crack up here, though, is declaring a Lincecum-to-Angels path as "obvious". This is bullshit. If it was so obvious now, why was it not so obvious two weeks ago?.............

Mr. Wilson: C.J. threw a 40-pitch simulated game before last night's game in Chavez Ravine. It must have not gone so well because Mike Scioscia proclaim Wilson to be "...not game-ready"..........

Trout: Oh, sure, Manny Machado is the current love interest of a fickle press now over their earlier infatuations with Trevor Story and Bryce Harper. Not to slight any of these three, who are all very talented ballplayers (Machado and Harper being proven top-tier with Trout), but Mike Trout continues his inexorable march up the ladder of 2016 all-around ballplayers. And we have another 124 games to go...............

Texass Holes: Just to make a point about asshats. Notice how the Rangers fans behaved in the background when pissant Matt Bush takes his cheap shot at Jose Bautista, which as a very-long-in-waiting obvious response by the pissant Rangers after getting their pissant selves bounced in the playoffs last year by bat-flipping Bautista. Not just celebrations, but standing applause. Bautista should have done another epic bat flip...........And if Rougned Odor gets creamed by MLB brass when the suspensions are handed out, we can bet that will only make him even more popular in the Lonely Star state.. For his part, Odor doesn't give a shit about what MLB brass may think............By the way, the BEST read on the whole brawl comes to us, of course, by Sam Miller...............

Crunch Time: Wait. What? The folks of suburban Atlanta, eager to snatch away the Braves, have parked them in a place where the local transportation infrastructure is going to be a giant parking lot on game nights? Tell me it ain't so. Because, of course, the whole tale behind moving the Braves in the first place included a chapter on how difficult it was for suburbanites to access the already shiny Turner Field. "Fans who must take I-285 or I-75 to the game will never make it for the first pitch of any Braves game. Ever. They’ll probably miss the entire first inning. And probably the second. Traffic there is already blizzard-of-2014-like without thousands of fans converging on a 30,000-seat ballpark."............

Crowded Wisdom: Oooh. Crowdsourcing MLB broadcasters. The count down begins. Hawk Harellson and Steve Stoen come in as the worst, so this might be more accurate a ranking system than most. I am all a-flutter at where our guys end up...........

On the Case: Some MLB players recently suspended for PEDs are taking up the hunt to find out the truth as to how the banned substances finally found their way into their bodies. Maybe while out there sleuthing, they will also find the real killer of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman............

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The Duffle Bag

Gerrit Cole with some wishful thinking...........Brad Ausmus is bringing new style to the ancient practice of manager protestation...........Old guy rulez. not-so-old guy droolz............WTF? The old Washington Senators of the early 1900's used to pack up and install their own infield dirt when traveling to play the Yankees?...........MLB gets a women pitcher. At least that's the pitch from Fox Entertainment.............3 hours of math to demonstrate that the Angels have won almost about as many World Series as one would expect the franchise to have ever won............MLB is quibbling with their own rules and backing off taking a hard line on the new sliding rule..............Oh no. Please. Please don't start some kind of campaign to keep Big Papi from retiring.............