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Ok, people, we just had two victories against he A's. The first one was a pitcher's duel that lasted 11 innings. It took 3 hours and 12 minutes for those 11 innings, or about 17 minutes and 27 seconds per inning on average. Last night was an 8 1/2 inning offensive blowout. It took 3 hours and 30 minutes, or about 24 minutes and 42 seconds per inning. So what kind of game do you prefer? The kind of game where we worry about length or the kind of game where we get to soak up wherever the contest takes us?
Have some Three-Game-Winning-Streak Links:
A Little Bit of Angels News
Mike Trout says "thank you". And he is saying it to you, personally. Not me. Not the other people around here. Just you. Celebrate yourself on this day...........(By the way, Trout is climbing up the WAR ladder once again. While that MFY guy way down at #26 is getting all the daily press. Trust me. I see his headlines almost daily in this gig.)
New foods at the stadium this year. Pretty damned tame versus what I have linked you to in elsewhere. Of course we have the overly trendy poke bowl. Or, as a visiting European co-worker explained to me earlier this week: "It tastes like fish pudding." Personally, I'm taking down one of them Churro Pops...........
Take a walk back through the 2009 draft with Fast Eddie Bane. It's that walk-off grand slam of a draft, and the pinnacle of most anybody's Scouting Director career...........
Albert used to be Pujols. It was inevitable. I often wonder if Pujols would have fared better through this decline of his had he remained in a familiar league, against familiar opponents, within a familiar stadium, on a familiar team? Sure, not having a DH would have caused some serious career decisions by now anyway and there was never any way that any NL team was going to be on long hook for a two-dimensional player. And yes, Pujols would leave the game with a fine legacy in St. Louis. But the REAL legacy would have been achieving all that greatness at a mere fraction of his true value. His career would end faster, and his income would be $50-&75 million less. And nobody in St. Louis would really give a shit about that. Instead, they would cackly gleefully about how smart their team was during Pujols' tenure. It was a good thing that Arte was willing to step up pay Pujols for the value that the Cards refused to pay when Pujols was producing for STL. And it was timely, with Arte being able to leverage the Pujols name to get a TV mega contract that more than covered the Pujols salary commitment. The sad part is that it now looks like Arte is hiding behind that good deed to restrict his commitment to keeping the rest of the team properly stocked to exploit whatever Pujols still has left in the tank. And, certainly, that is also costing Mike Trout some playoff opportunities, as well...............
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Everywhere In Baseball
Jered Weaver and his 3.91 ERA are becoming event viewing down there in San Diego............
It's true. It's unfair to throw PED shade at Eric Thames. But that's the price that MLB, the MLBPA, and the MSM must pay for their failures during the PEDs era. Then again, we should not be so naive as to ignore the possibility of beyond-the-borders science and expertise when it comes to PEDs in sports, which is a main reason for Thames to suffer the the suspicions, and for us to know that testing today might be meaningless..............
Bloody Wednesday has finally come and gone. The second of many, we can assume. About 7 months ago ESPN was forced to lay off hundreds of behind-the-scenes employees. Finally, the financial pressures of their deteriorating product wrapped within an archaic business model that was most useful as a pimp for northeastern provincialism triggered The Mouse into action. And if there is one thing The Mouse excels at more than they do with antiseptic crowd control, it would be rapid employment de-staffing in the face of threats to executive margin bonuses. Yesterday was worse. Lots of heads hit the chopping block. Lots of EXPENSIVE heads. And it was all across the board. Well, almost. If you look even a little bit, you will notice that what was NOT touched were the in-your-face-with-idiocy debate shows. This is telling. It's not sports content. It's non-sports people shouting at each other about sports things. It's ESPN hanging its future on the lowest common denominator long enough to figure out how to survive some move over to economic exploitation of the cord-cutting model.............By the way, cry no tears for Jason Stark. He will find a new gig easily enough. ESPN's loss could be our gain...........And, ironically, ESPN won't have Jim Bowden around anymore to write articles that they try and charge us to read..............But lookie here! ESPN is looking to refill air time with MLB content!!.............
Are there really any more tidbits for us to learn about Curt Schilling and his 38 Studios video game company? We know he's a dick, and we know that he cannot be prosecuted. So releasing the grand jury testimony can't have anything to do with us out here in sports land, could it?..........
Buying a major league sports franchise is the most solid financial investment possible anywhere in the world. I'd buy one myself if I could only talk enough of you into going in with me to afford one. So if Derek Jeter can manage to pull it off, he can retire..........
Hmmm. Teams that play in high-tax states perform poorer, overall, than teams in low-tax states. Most likely because it's harder to attract high-quality talent with large contracts when more of those contracts are lost from the player by taxation............
By the way, you read it here first. You are most likely aware that you can enter in unusual things into the search bar of Google, Bing, etc., and get proper results. enter "2x5" and "10" comes back. You can get stock quotes, movie times, sports scores, do patent searches, and more. Well, someday I will be able to enter "2017 bapip against" and get a sorted list of all MLB teams and their defensive efficiency. Then I will be capable of easily following up on VPBOB's post about Sosh and The Shift. I will know if Sosh's approach (more shifts) is delivering more value than Joe Maddon's approach (less shifts), and can then consider the quality of defenders and/or quality of pitchers having some impact on all this Shiftiness. And I will also know that advanced metrics have finally won the day...........
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The Duffle Bag
Little League Baseball, because wacky is the best baseball............Tim Tebow keeping pace with Albert Pujols' recent offensive surge.............Why wouldn't Legends hold a stadium job fair for hospitality workers BEFORE the season opened? (By the way, there is no such place as Sunkist, CA.).........Perhaps one of the most embarrassing ways to end a ballgame and seal a loss............This kid really really really doesn't want to play catcher.............King Felix just had his arm die. He's gonna miss our series May2/3/4...........Adrian Beltre is still down, and not expected any time soon.............And Shelby Miller is running around shopping his body in the hopes of finding somebody who will tell him he doesn't need TJ.............
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