MondoLinks: Two weeks left. Will Trout heat up?

A Little Bit of Angels News

Mike Trout is Everyday Excellence. Sure, it's a wonder that his is not more of a household name. But creating a household name across 4 time zones for a guy who doesn't play under the noses of a lazy media, in a sport that is far more regional than national, is a hard thing. The only way out is for the national media to do more of the hard work. So, for that, we should thank USA Today. The sorry part that now exists, though, is that they have done such a poor job of things so far that any effort at attention now is just wearying. Take it from the LAA players themselves: "I’m so (expletive) sick of the Trout interview, dude."............

On the plus side, "Mike Trout plus almost anybody else seems like a fair answer to the question of which team has the best 1-2 punch in baseball." This, from FanGraphs as they look seriously into determining the best 1-2 punch in MLB.  As it happens, Since the Dodgers have a Clayton Kershaw AND a Corey Seager,  and a Corey Seager is a guy who pulled in 7.5 fWAR last year, the LADs got it a tad better.............

Kind of interesting would be the idea that the Angels might be getting pro-active and advancing sports therapy by having their pitchers perform an exercise routine back in the clubhouse after they complete their outing............

No pressure kid. Torii Hunter Jr. takes over on the base path and in center field for Mike Trout............Even more weird, 25-year old Mike Trout can now already say that he played baseball with the father AND the son............

Cameron Maybin finally broke his hitless spring, and now is looking to get "locked in". Kind of a stretch, there.............

On the long road to recovery, Andrew Heaney and Nick Tropeano are throwing baseballs again...........John Lamb has been sent back to LA to have an expert check his progress recovering from surgery last year............

Matt Shoemaker put up a bizarre line yesterday. 4 innings of work with 8 strikeouts, only 1 walk, and only 2 earned runs? Pretty good. Enough to claim a review of "sparkling", and "dominant". He also gave up 6 hits and 2 other runs and hit his pitch limit before getting to his target 5th inning. Enough for another review to claim that he had his "struggles"..............

Meanwhile, Alex Meyer one of those "next outings" that I wrote about last week. He went 3 innings and struck out 2, giving up 1 run on 4 hits. Sure I am doing selective filtering, but if you take out his March 6th outing he has pitched 7 innings and given up 1 run on 7 hits with only 3 walks. This is solid work right there............

The Angels remain the leading MLB team this spring with 36 stolen bases. So it would seem to be a nice reason to chat up Danny Espinosa and his willingness to contribute to the LAA base running explosion.  Except, though, that Espinosa has only 2 of those stolen bases, and against 1 Caught Stealing. And he is only 11th on the team so far with 10 total bases (C.J. Cron leads the team with 32). By the way, although the Angels lead MLB in Stolen Bases, they are way down there in the 26th/27th/28th place in MLB in Total Bases. So, no, don't be fooled by the base stealing, these guys are not base-running demons after all............

______________________________

All things WBC here...........But before we move on, if we were to forecast a 2021 WBC edition of Team USA, a Mike Trout would top the list. But Trout is not the ONLY LA Angel that would be on the  hoped-for squad.............

We Angels fans are going to have to contend with The Slider of Edwin Diaz this season. So we might as well start preparing for it............

Curious. MLB appears to be  wanting to shut down Disabled List shenanigans by teams looking to manipulate their roster a bit here and there as the season drones on. We all suspect this goes on and we all point to odd and convenient "injuries". But is this really something that all the brain trust in the New York MLB Front Office really need to push up to the top of their priority list?..........

Adam Jones made a nice home-run saving snag over the weekend for Team USA. That's a pretty low wall there, so I am not as gaga as the masses. Maybe more oddball, though, is a subjective ranking where that theft is ranked among a Top Ten, and Mike Trout robbing Jesus Montero in a game with real playoff implications ranks as merely an Honorable Mention, right down there with Jeffrey Maier............

LONG FORM ALERT: At a minimum, bookmark this link so that you can come back to it when you have set aside some time for quality reading. This is Part 2 on the history of the MLB Players Association. (Part 1 is here.) Part 2 is about the decline of the Players Union from its pinnacle of being the most powerful player representation in all of sports, to the organization today that lives an existence of happy satisfaction with the earnings of its own elite............

ANOTHER LONG FORM ALERT: This is an interesting admission. Statistical data for baseball remains flawed, in that it contains only fractions of the events that actually occur on the field of play. So many things might happen that statisticians either find uninteresting or non-quantifiable, and yet they play a part in outcomes. And since they do happen, in games covered by broadcasters paid to tell us all what is happening, we do have one place where the information for these missing events IS recorded.  So wouldn't it be valuable to have full transcriptions of the play-by-play and colelct them all into a full-text searchable database?..........

______________________________

The Duffle Bag

Tim Tebow, 4 total hits now in ST. Yeah, Man on Fire............Who says that the players don't take Spring Training seriously? Not Ryan Hanigan.............Do ex-MLB players wear magic shoes that know how to protect the surface of the field of play, something that we mortal fans lack and, therefore, prevent us from being allowed to walk onto the field?..............Looks like this year's WBC is drawing the ratings that MLB was hoping for in order to keep it around in 2021.............Yeonis Cespedes' arm is ready for Opening Day..........

______________________________

Halo-Oppo-ly

Week 7 of our Chance/Community Chest cards!

______________________________