TuesdoLinks: A Royal resuscitation

Baseball is weird. The Texas rangers are 1 win away from the most wins in all of baseball, and the lowly Angels swept them. Houston is a good team, but were only 5-5 over their last 10 when the Angels rolled into town at a smokin' hot 8-2 pace, and the Astros steamrolled them. So now the Halos go off to play the defending champs in their own back yard, and romp with a 6-2 score. Meanwhile, the Astros hosted the Yankees, living the season way down here with the Angels, and the Yankees take the 'stros 2-1. the Yankees got that same good pitching that Matt Shoemaker delivered, but the Yankees had the courtesy to score a couple of runs for their pitcher, Pineda.

Over the most recent 10 games, the Astros are 6-4, the Royals are 4-6, the Rangers are 2-8. And the Angels and Yankees are 7-3.

Those 3 games still sting. But, hey, baseball!

Have some Take-what-you-can-get Links:

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Everywhere In Baseball

PSA:. The product on the field may be disappointing, but that shouldn't cause you to abandon the team in the broadcast booth. Get on over to Awful Announcing and vote up Victor and Gubi right now!........

Trade Winds: The world is full of places to dive deep into trade rumors this week, and Josh and Jessica are doing fine jobs of creating link pubs to chat about specific stuff. So all I need to do here is a quick summary to trigger any lingering thoughts among you all..........The Angels ARE listening to calls on Matt Shoemaker after all (linky), as they are with Hector Santiago (linky)..........The Giants are looking all over the place for relief, and that includes calls into Anaheim sniffing around Huston Street (linky)...........But not Mike Trout (linky)..........And especially not any Trout to Cubs with Cubs selling their farm to Eppler, since the Cubs just sold a good chunk of that farm to the Yankees for Aroldis Chapman. This means Chapman has to do his domestic abuse apologies to a whole new audience, all over again. (Question of the Day: so now, after the Yankees profited off of having Chapman for a few months, even though Chapman is now gone do domestic abuse activists move on from the Yankees altogether?) By the way, this headline confuses me. "Why the Cubs should have outbid the Nationals for Aroldis Chapman". Maybe they clean it up before this link gets to you....Anyway, there is a reason this is big news. The Cubs are loaded, and Chapman does something nobody else on planet earth is doing...........

Forever Yours. Or ours: Because we have Mike Trout, the phrase untradable means "too valuable". But normally, "untradable" means something a lot less full of goodness. And baseball has quite a few dudes that are untradable, in the less goodness sense of the word. One of those, of course, is also a Halo............

Freakishly Bad: Let's spend some time with a fresh web site for Daily Links, High Heat Stats, reviewing the Hindenberg arrival at Lakehurst, New Jersey, otherwise know as Tim Lincecum 2016.  On Sunday, Timmy put his name into the record books, earning a spot that will be branded on his ass forever......So now, after that abomination, Lincecum needs 35.1 scoreless innings just to get his ERA below 4.00.....Comparing Lincecum's first 7 starts of 2016 to that of Clayton Kreshaw is like comparing a tricycle to a Porsche. One of those two things has no business anywhere near a real race track.........But we aren't done. It took Kyle Hendricks 11 innings to give up 28 runs earned. Tim did 29 runs and required only 30 innings...............

HoF 2017: Now that HoF 2016 is behind us, the "experts" chime in on what will happen with the HoF 2017 vote. Vladdy doesn't even make the cut..........(TheSportingNews disagrees, thinking Guerrero will get in, eventually. Of course, they show him on their home page as an Expo...)..........

Auto Hound Alert: I don't normally do this, but what the hell else we gonna get excited about? Jefry Marte and Gregorio Petit will be the T-Mobile store in Anaheim this Saturday...........

Tip Jars: Once upon a time, my youngest son had a high-school job working at a DQ. I learned after a while that the boss, a local franchise owner, was taking the tip jar and keeping all the tips for himself. it didn't matter whether the boss was working at that shop or not, the employees were told to empty their tip jar into the back and leave all the cash for him. That franchise owner managed his way into having to shut down that DQ outlet. I always wondered what happened to guy like that? Now I know. They move to Seattle and go to work for the Mariners............

Sports Biz: MLB Advanced Media is expanding their pathways to your video devices, signing with twitter to stream live MLB games. Don't worry. Draconian MLB blackout rules will still apply...........Also, not (yet) baseball related, Sony is making itself a cord-cutting sports option by hooking up Playstation Vue with NFL content. So while lots of folks are claiming that the end of sports mega contracts is nowhere near the end, they are ignoring all the cracks spreading rapidly throughout the foundation...........

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The Duffle Bag

Sweet catch, ump!...........That Andrelton Simmons trade just keeps getting better and better as time goes on. The Braves are working hard to dump Erick Aybar completely...........Oh, how tragic for the Rangers. The skies are certainly falling. Prince Fielder needs surgery, and will be taking his -1.2 bWAR with him for the rest of the season...........Interesting. This Baseball Prospectus mid-year review of Scott Servais managing up in Seattle shows mixed results, with a lot of the bad stuff being due to Servais locking his pitching staff...into roles...........Chris Sale should thank his lucky stars, because his uniform assignments could have been a lot worse...........Grant Brisbee thinks that this Sale episode marks the death knell of Sale's ChiSox career.............On eglass-half-full way to look at being a seller and not a buyer at the trade deadline is that we know we won't be making some big buying mistake............What's the opposite of hitting a grand slam with your first MLB at-bat? In Opposite land, that would be being a pitcher, AND making the worst debut in MLB history............Minor league players getting in some advanced training on Major League brawls.............The author of this article is really amazed at the fan making a bare-handed catch. I am amazed at how few fans are present at a Sunday home baseball game...........When was the last time anybody saw this? The ground crew in San Francisco painted the right field foul line CROOKED, and the umpires had to fix it in order to start the game. that must have been an interesting conversation behind the scenes afterwards..........

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(No, no no! You don't get off that easily. You get Monday's chart all over again. This time you get two hints. ONE - the red bar is Mike Trout. TWO - This data was accurate as of Sunday night and the longer you take to figure it out the more it's going to change and the harder it's going to be to look it up and solve it. Maybe today we get at least one guess??)

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