MondoLinks: Halos Roll AL East Powers

Well holy balls. I thought I was just trying to be highly optimistic and keep things positive around here by suggesting that this patchwork baseball team might actually succeed in New York and Boston. But hell yeah, they DID! Two of three against the slumping Yankees and their cooling off Aaron Judge, and then two of three against the Boston Red Sox and their "Killer B's". (Yeah, that's a real thing. Once again the Red Sox world needs some phony-assed battle cry to rally around and, typically, they still cannot come up with something original. This time they are stealing the once-successful phrase from the Houston Astros.) When are we going to start seeing some serious chatter in the MSM about Mike Scioscia for Manager of the Year??

Angels win 4-2. And take note, folks, yesterday was a case of flipping the narrative. We gave the Red Sox a first-look Cy-Rookie in Parker Bridwell. Screw all our uber-horses who are spending their careers on the DL. I'm gonna pull for this unheralded fill-ins who show up and get the job done.

The Halos now play 4 straight against the white hot 50-win Dodgers, who were 15-1 going into Sundays game against the Rockies. They play two in LA, followed by two in Anaheim. A gargantuan test.

More of the Lost Weeks Links:

A Little Bit of Angels News

Weird one. I did note last Friday that Kaleb Cowart had a mighty game in AAA late last week. And that was on top of a pretty solid showing he had going on. That tripped a lot of back and forth in the comments about the merit of calling him up. The idea was how much worse, really, could Cowart be than Danny Espinosa? Well, the Angels chose to send down an infielder after all. But it was C.J. Cron. Eduardo Paredes was brought up to take his roster spot. That lasted less than 24 hours. Paredes went assigned back to Salt lake and Cowart was called up, landing in Boston just in time to take over at 3B (instead of 2B, where Espi-no-make-contact 0 for 3 with yet another K) and leading the Angels to a 4-2 win................

It's time to pull the plug on Tyler Skaggs. Just let it go. Maybe 2019. Maybe for the Angels or maybe for somebody else. Maybe he will be good and maybe not. Maybe he will stay healthy and have a productive career, or maybe not. But for now can we just start thinking of him as some 5th round draft pick instead of a missing piece to our playoff hopes?...........

Third rounder Jacob Pearson was signed over the weekend...........

Keynan Middelton is getting noticed. Rightly so. But there is no sneaking up on anybody any longer................

FanGraphs seems annoyed that Mike Scioscia is not settling into ROLES. Forget the fact that the LAA back-end bullpen has been  pretty damned good. No, it's scary red "volatile" because it might be any of 4 different guys.............

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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?

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The Mystery of Tim Tebow is getting more Mystery-er. Pretty much sucking now at A ball (.222 with .651 OPS) he is getting rewarded with a promotion to High A. It's obvious to everybody that this not a baseball thing..............

Count me as a guy who no problem with Rougned Odor of the Texas Rangers falling flat on the face of his own career............

Mike Trout has the greatness, but Bryce Harper has The Hair.............

After admitting that all the frightening strikeout data is real, one guy decides to go whistling into the darkness of baseball's future. Good luck with that, dude..............

Now that The Great Ocean Liner of Cable bundles has finally seen the iceberg of cord cutting dead ahead, it is occurring to them that maybe they might consider flipping the bird to ESPN and selling skinny bundles of entertainment without sports content surcharges.............

Yeah, on the one hand there is a school of thought that coaches have no impact. On the other hand is the reality that for guys with no impact, there sure are a lot of 'em............

How long was that Dodger TV package mega-deal, again? 4 years now without SportsNet LA being able to sell the LADs and Dodger fans still cannot see their home-town team. And nobody is even trying to fix it any more.............

In the College World Series, LSU faces Florida State in the Finals. Both Brackets saw the team coming up from the elimination games take the first, with LSU sweeping BOTH games against top-seeded Oregon State. That means that the losers bracket reps won 3 of the 4 games against the undefeated reps...........We also had a nice living example of how human oversight can still flummox technology. It's why the robots will eventually wrest control of themselves away from us. Because we are idiots.............

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The Braves need to go out and hire themselves a faster Freeze. This one they got now is getting toasted by dudes in tennis shoes............Old man Ichiro just out old manned old man Ricky Henderson..............Dude. Doesn't anybody practice these first pitch things?............The minimum requirement for a ceremonial first pitch is to at least do as well as a 103-year old war veteran............Who needs scouting reports and video tape when you have a PlayStation and 'MLB The Show'??...........Hate to be the one to break it to you, Mary Craig of Beyond The Boxscore, but in this country people are allowed to have differing points of view..............Apparently, Nats fans are wimps. We Halo fans suffered decades of failure and survived it just fan..........What? Athletes use foul language?? Who knew??..............Boston fans. Because Boston.............We should all be pulling for Zack Cozart to make the All-Star Game now...........