TuesdoLinks: Halos take to the road

Well, here we go. Yankees + Red Sox + Dodgers. With things as they are, there are so many ways that the next week and a half could go wrong. But this is baseball, where anything can happen...and usually does. Up can be down, left can be right. Patchwork Halos can be world beaters. Stranger things have happened, and wouldn't that be fun for the Angels to blow through these three quality teams?

More of the Lost Weeks Links:

A Little Bit of Angels News

So what might we expect over the next few days? Carnage, most likely. We have one of Baseball's most home-run dependent teams in the Yankees, pissed off as all get out over being forced to play in stadiums other than their own and ending up having a crappy road trip, fueled by one of baseball's most home-slanted power hitters in Aaron Judge, inviting in for a feast the Angels, one of the more home-run gifting teams in the American League. The good news, I guess, is that LAA used to be the League's clear-cut loser when it came to surrendering home runs. Lately, though, they have fallen to #4. So progress............

Here comes that missing Matt Thaiss power I was asking about last week?..........

Yeah. We have to be realistic here. Mike Trout's magical run of WAR production from Day 0 of his career will take a significant hit because of this injury time out. He is not going to fall from #1 to #187 or anything, but that leader board up there at #1 is a tough crowd. Regaining that #1 slot at 26 and beyond might be something that never happens again...........

______________________________

Josh Mayhood's Library of Mike Trout Hagiography

This section placed on hold indefinitely, in memory of Mike Trout's 2017 season. In the meantime, we provide The Jessica DeLine Trout Recovery Watch tracker. When will Mike be back?

______________________________

This is beautiful. What the baseball experience means to Latin players..........

When 30 teams draft over 1100 kids in 3 days, there are bound to be some interesting oddities.............

Yasiel Puig informs us all that the Dodgers have forced him to stop having fun, explaining why he has not morphed into Mike Trout. It might also be that baseball figured him out, and that explains why is has not morphed into anything spectacular. But it's easier to believe the "no fun" story..........

I just want to put this out there for MSM beat writers everywhere. California does not need a Cody Bellinger to be our answer to Aaron Judge. Aaron Judge IS ALREADY from California. Besides, we do have a Mike Trout. Trout is merely injured and will be back pretty soon. He was not abducted by aliens or anything..........

On in the same vein, Aaron Judge is NOT an MVP candidate that "came out of nowhere". Aaron Judge is an MVP candidate that came out of an errant head-first slide by Mike Trout. Prior to Trout's injury, which was just a few weeks ago, the consensus around Baseball was that Mike a season for the Ages. Maybe one of the top 2 or 3 seasons ever put together. The MVP was pretty much written off as his, as long as he remained healthy and on track. Judge is not the leading AL MVP candidate "particularly" now that Trout in injured. He is an MVP candidate at all ONLY because Trout is injured. And Trout being injured did not sneak up on anybody. It was headline news, everywhere. But again, just 3 weeks into a trout-less baseball season, major parts of the fickle MSM have moved on as though there is no such phenomenon as a Mike Trout..........

There are these apocryphal stores about guys like Sandy Koufax, Nolan Ryan and (more recently) Aroldis Chapman that claim how they became stellar pitchers by slowing down their pitch velocity enough to gain control over location. In that same line of thinking, could it be that Aaron Judge does not need to hit 495 foot home runs since no park has 500 foot fences, and by slowing down a tad he might gain some control over his rather unfortunate strikeout rates?..........

By the way, I expect that by the time MLB figures out how to pitch to Judge, he will have had so many At-Bats in Yankee Stadium that he will have crushed Mark McGwire rookie record of 49..........

Tim Kurkjian of ESPN goes on a fantasy jaunt about what Baseball will look like in the future, with massive changes afoot to improve Pace of Play. I like how he notes that eliminating 20-inning games will be important because, among other things, it helps sports writers make their deadlines. I also like how he thinks that all teams will have to have retractable roofs, but ALSO have magical tarps to protect the fields from the rain that would not be able to penetrate those retractable roofs in the first place. (By the way, writers only have "deadlines" when they write for outlets that require mechanical processes to deliver the content to a readership. The rest of us simply wait longer before clicking "Publish".)..........

The Yankees have lost he #2 prospect in all of Baseball for the season. Gleybar Torres is out with a torn UCL. non-throwing arm. Casualty of a head first slide that went wrong. Hmmmm...........

If you are going to throw out the position that MLB needs to allow the trading of draft picks, you are honor bound to let your readership know the reasons why this was blocked in the first place. Because there are reasons. It's not like somebody in the MLB Front Office woke up yesterday and read the article linked and had an epiphany, running off excitedly to Rob Manfred in support of such a revolutionary idea. The original idea was to force small market teams to take their slotted pick and force them to improve their product. Believe it or not, there have been times in history when teams did not want to do that. It cost money. And when a team knew that it had to draft high, and knew that it would then have to pay high, it tended to draft smart and make sure that it derived value from what it was forced to do. Another reason is that it is all too easy for HS draftees to opt for college and college undergrads to top to remain in school. There are no rules in place now for compensation when that happens but right now the only price a team pays for a pick is their win-loss record. That is not the same as a team surrendering talent resources in hand in order to reach a draft slot, only to lose the draftee AND the resources they once had in hand. Until the readership knows the "why's" behind the status quo, the conversation that might be spawned will be rather feeble............

This is a real long one that I didn't put in yesterday because I was already full with general Baseball stuff. But it's a great clinical piece on the topic of "tunneling".  For the newbies to the subject, it's explained quite well in the very first paragraph..........

The FTC is looking to block the merger between DraftKings and FanDuel. I can understand that outcome, since the FTC typically frowns on one company owning 90% of any marketplace. On the other hand, it's a pretty weird market since it is heavily driven by regulation from so many government agencies: usually right out of the country altogether..........

College World Series: Cal State Fullerton is gone. Florida State prevailed 6-4 to remain alive in bracket play. And Oregon State crushed LSU 13-1, jumping into the bracket final against the winner of the LSU/Florida State elimination game.

Bracket 2 play continues today with the Texas A&M elimination game, and then tonight with the Louisville/Florida contest between two undefeateds.

______________________________