WeekEnd HaloLinks: Garrett Richards is therapeutic

A Little Bit of Angels News

I win. Mike Trout loses. Oh, sure, Trout got to toodle around a little in a real stock car. But at the very time Mike was put-putting for a photo op, yours truly was over in Carson doing this. Like, 148 mph on the Launch Pad run. Like I said, I win............

Trout tripped up Jeff Sullivan. Again. After a lot of hard work Sullivan thought that he had finally came up with a stat that shows where Mike Trout sucks. His great discovery: Trout is pretty bad when he swings at the first pitch. You and I know that the whole notion of Trout swinging at a first pitch is a rather rare thing, so the numbers will be pretty small and the percentages pretty extreme. And then it occurs to Sullivan to look at how that suckage looked in context. Lo, and behold! In context we find that, overall, when Trout steps up to bat and swings at the first pitch, overall he is pretty damned good at the outcomes of those at-bats. Better, even than when he doesn't swing. And Sullivan is forced to back away from his earlier line of thinking...........

C.J. Cron better keep getting good, because he has a challenger rising fast in the farm system right behind him. Baseball America has noticed Matt Thaiss. (Log in required)..........

But Alex Meyer is falling behind Jesse Chavez in the race for a rotation spot. Personally, I think Meyer still has enough chances if (A) the keep him in Tempe long enough and (B) Meyer keeps taking advantage of his chances..........

Meanwhile, I am spending so much time thinking about the back end of the rotation, I forgot all about the annual honor of who gets to take the hill for Opening Day as #1 on the depth chart. Will it be Shoemaker, or will it be Richards?..........

But, at this point in camp, the roster is starting to come into focus. The thing that jumps out at me is how quiet the MSM has been as Pujols transitions from 1B to DH. It's like it is happening so slowly that they are not even noticing. C.J. Cron is penciled in as starting 1B, with Luis Valbuena his backup and nary a mention of Pujols here. Pujols played 116 games at 1B in 2014, then 95 games there in 2015, and only 28 games there last year. And Marte can play 1B, as well. Pujols might see less than 15 games on defense this season and nobody is making noise about him losing his glove...........

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Git yer WBC vittles here............But a special link would be Team SoCal is carrying Team USA...........

Manny Machado is a great player, but this is just overselling. Machado was barely out of bounds. His throw ran out of gas by the time it reached first base. And it was wide. And the guy running to first base was the 1,622 year old Miguel Cabrera and NOT Billy Hamilton. But, hey, when you have been starving for real baseball, these kind of things look like Hall of Fame plays...........

Aaron Sanchez had a very good season last year. Very, very good. But it was just one. His previous season was shortened by injury and less stellar. His only other season, the one three years ago, was only 33 innings pitched and doesn't even count. So the Blue Jays made Sanchez an offer that included a small raise.  Scott Boras and Sanchez rejected that, so the Blue Jays gave him the minimum. And that has made Scott Boras really, really pissed............

Ryan Braun, while earning $20 million this year, is also really pissy. He is bored and doesn't want to waste time playing Spring Training ball anymore. He thinks it's all far too long. Keep in mind that we are all sitting here hoping that our pitchers get enough time before the season opens to get fully stretched out and locked in for real baseball. We need all that time Brain wants to chuck away. And note also that Braun himself is only batting .222/.300/.333 with 0 home runs, 0 triples, 1 double and 3 total bases. Braun ain't exactly dialed in yet, either...........

Scott Kazmir's hip injury turned out to not be major, but now he has contracted Jered Weaver Syndrome..........

You like math? Here is a lot of it. I mean, A LOT. I think it is saying that the better the pitch, the worse the outcome for the batter. I know, right? Who knew?...........

More fun, still with science, would be this one on how hitters are tooling up to exploit the fly ball revolution.............And if we want to see this in action, all we have to do is follow the results down in San Diego, where we might get to see a shitty team flip most dramatically as this hitting coach brings the fly ball revolution to the Padres..........

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The Duffle Bag

Yeah. Holy hell that's gotta hurt. How does that even happen? Cellphones, again??............So some girls just prefer pro athletes, right?..........The details behind Jose Fernandez' death are pretty damning. Essentially, he was totally impaired and killed himself and his two buddies...........Yunel Escobar..."too sexy"...........Yasiel Puig already in mid-season meltdown form (and the umpire is also in mid-season form of ignoring MLB guidelines on raising the strike zone).........

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Halo-Oppo-ly

Week 6 of our Chance/Community Chest cards!

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