MondoLinks: Yankees out, Blue Jays flying in.

Well, let's see. Outscored 12 runs to 3 over a 3 game set and you are bound to expect some form of underwhelming result. A 2-0 win yesterday rescued the team from a sweep and gave Jhoulys Chacin an afternoon to look pretty good. That's the kind of thing that works wonders at building hope. Especially the false type.

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Everywhere In Baseball

HaloSphere: It was a pretty busy weekend for news out of Anaheim...........Garret Anderson was inducted into the Angels' Hall of Fame on Saturday. This makes twice for Anderson, since he was "team inducted" when the entire 2002 World Series Championship squad was already inducted back in 2012...........Johnny Giavotella's mercurial run with the Angels is on the wane. Johnny G. was DFA'd to make create more time for the exciting future candidates of Cliff Pennington and Gregorio Petit. I don't know about you, but remain thrilled at all those catchers that Ric Wilson drafted over recent years.............Albert Pujols jumped into the Top 10 MLB Career Home Run Hitters, tying Mark McGwire. He should leave McGwire behind, and the overtake Frank Robinson for 9th place in a couple of weeks. Sammy Sosa and Jim Thome, holding the 8th and 7th spots, will have to wait until 2017..............Huston Street is finally caving in to his ineffective 2016 campaign, and is near considering going to the operating room, from whence he would then join half the pitching staff and start working on rehab for some other time in our future.............Billy Eppler is our Master Dustman. Scavenging from the MLB boneyard, we picked up Manny Banuelos............And, finally, in a bits and pieces roundup, up from the minors come Kaleb Cowart, and C.J. Cron, and Yunel Excobar is out for a few days on concussion watch............Cron, by the way, probably came back up too fast, He was not killing it at Salt Lake, and is 1 for 7..............

Scioscialism: Some of you might have been thinking that this could be the opportunity for Eppler to gain some power and authority and push to some new dugout management team, sending Mike Scioscia off to happy pastures. Nope. Not gonna happen.............I mean, it's not like he is the guy who has guided a team to only 62 wins so far or anything..............

Pros and Cons: One team in the AL West has 73 wins and is running away with the season title. Another team has only 52 wins and is left only with a hope of a Top 2 or 3 draft pick next year. The team with 73 runs takes a flyer on a guy named Carlos Gomez to fix their left field, a guy who just a couple of years ago was throwing out MVP-candidate seasons with 8.5 and 4.8 bWAR. The team with 52 wins is busy taking flyers on Brett Oberholzer and Andrew Bailey, neither of which knows how to play left field...........

Hindsight: The past winter's free agent crop was full of conversation, debate, assumptions and projections. It was a big crop, and well-suited to the needs of the Angels. Looking back on things are working out, however, the decision to sit on the sidelines by Moreno & Eppler was a pretty good one. Because the odds of choosing wisely were extremely low. And the majority of those few selections that are working out came at a very high price (Daniel Murphy and Ian Desmond would have claimed the pick Eppler used for Matt Thaiss)............

Insightfulness: We all have our own opinion, both pro and con and all to varying degrees, concerning a sabremetric approach to baseball. Mine is pro, although not to an extreme, and I defend pro against what I consider to be the ignorance of the con. And this article, I believe, is why I feel the way I do. Without the ability of outsiders (not working within the proprietary world of MLB front offices) to have access to massive amounts of data, it would be very difficult to observe how MLB scouting systems and pitchers have been trying to deal with a Mookie Betts. In the old day, all we would have gotten is some cryptic tidbit from a national writer which would do little more than inform us that the writer knows something we don't, but it's too long and too complex for us to pay attention to. Not any more. Never any more. Information sets us all free. By the way, the article is an excellent study...........And another thing, about baseball data. I have a prediction, which I assume will become self-evident to the baseball community a few years after I have parted ways with my mortal self: studies such as this which pull up analysis concerning exit velocity and trajectory, and this other one looking at the very same topics, ill work itself from lay-person to lay-person and end up as a next-generation approach to hitting instruction for youngsters. And a focus on proper trajectory with an emphasis on optimizing exit-velocity will be the fundamental activity of all leading youth instructional camps...........Yet another reminder that minor league farm systems are based on prognostications, and there is no law that mandates that speculation becomes reality...........Man, this is amazing. The Blue Jays' Aaron Sanchez is tracking towards a CYA candidate for the American League this year. And the Jay's have sent Sanchez down to single-A ball for a spell to manage his pitch count and retain roster flexibility elsewhere on the roster. Stunning...........The Jays, by the way, are doing some housecleaning themselves within their scouting department. There might be a glut of these people on the job market soon, which might lead to a mere reshuffling of deck chairs............Yeah, this Trout Harper narrative, once hoped to be a Mays/Mantle or Bird/Magic type of thing, is not working out so far. Personally, I don't think the Nats are giving a shit these days.............

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The Duffle Bag

A swing and a twitch! Oh, crap, the ball went over the fence. It hurts like hell but now I gotta run the bases............That Kansas City WS title might might end up being the single cherished thing for years and years to come. We know how that feels............Yeah, kid, I hate brussel spouts flavored ice cream too..............Freddie Galvis lined a foul ball into the stands and the impact sent a child to the hospital. Freddie Galvis does not like the emotional liability that comes from the risk of that outcome (the girl is expected to be fine). I am of the opinion that adults who bring children into a ballpark close enough to be at risk from field activities should exhibit maximum responsibility for that child's safety, not the ballplayers ..............Mysteries! Billy Butler has been missing in action for the past couple of game. Due to some injury. Due to something that happened. With another teammate. That nobody is talking about.............Andrelton Simmons would make a solid contributor to an all-world defensive team. That team wouldn't do too badly on offense, either...........By the way, the Little League World Series is in full swing and the West representative, Park View out of Chula Vista, is trying to work its way back up to the title game through the Loser Bracket. They need 3 more wins to get into the US Finals............

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(Friday was the single-season power + speed number, Top 50 all-time. Lots of those spikes are the same guys, multiple times. Guys like Alphonso Soriano, Bobby and Barry Bonds, Vlad Guerrero, Rickey Henderson, Willie Mays, and Eric Davis. Right there in the middle, at #25, is Mike Trout in 2012. That is his only appearance out of 4 full seasons of work. Today a green monster.)

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