Thor’sLinks: Who says things are quiet?

Maybe things are quiet for Free Agents, but that doesn’t mean that Baseball is silent. We have a huge amount of stuff today. We are almost to the final lap of the offseason, and I am going to have to start culling out the Hot Stove section just to make the daily news consumable. As it is, I left 4 good links off the list today. But we do have good stuff, so grab your coffee.

Consume these Trying-To-Keep-Pace-Offseason-Links:

A Little Bit of Angels News

Nice photo from the recent Supermoon. It’s a great omen for 2018, because it was a blue moon, a blue “supermoon” no less, that went to red. And it went red because it got eclipsed. Kind of a cosmic microcosm of SoCal Baseball...........

Andrew Heaney has the potential to become a major comeback story in 2018. As mind-blowing as it seems. in my opinion the same could be said about Mike Trout..........

John Sickels is making progress on his study of the LAA farm system. He has narrowed things down to 62 players. They are listed in alphabetical order. Note the “B”’s..........

No, Stacey, the Brewers do NOT have the best outfield in Baseball. Listen to your peer, John Heyman. That would be the Angels..........

My guess is that Andrelton Simmons could have been one incredible soccer player had he had chosen that path..........

Everywhere In Baseball

Poor Larry Walker. Very unhappy that the thing that made it appear as if he had a Hall of Fame caliber career, is keeping him out of the Hall of Fame. The article puts forth his career numbers, and they are appealing. The totality of his body of work suggests HoF. But if you subtract Coors Field at-bats, which voters appear to be doing, his career slash line becomes a more pedestrian .282/.372/.501 with 229 home runs and 156 stolen bases. 1346 hits against 940 strikeouts. Coors Field helped him amp up his numbers to the point where he earned over $110 million in his career. He should be a happy guy..........

I like where FanGraphs goes with this idea of tiering television/media rights fees per team based on games won. It’s intriguing. Not the part where we enrich the rich, but certainly the part where we stop enriching the scammers. We already know that Derek Jeter has built his takeover plan on the coming revenue-sharing and BAMtech gold rushes. This avenue needs further consideration...........

The greatest hit I ever got as a youngster came off a bunt. In my case, I was practially just starting out in Little League AA ball and my manager took me aside before an at-bat to instruct me to “lay it down!” Over and over he went on that, passionately. He was so encouraging and so earnest and I wanted to do so well for him. If only I knew what the hell he was talking about. I had never heard the phrase before. Lucky for me, the last thing he said before he pushed me out to take the batter’s box was to “bunt it down third base”. Aha! My face must have started beaming as I finally understood. My grandfather was the adult assigned to babysit me at the game and afterwards what he said to me was the very best thing he ever did say, to me or about me. He was practically bursting with pride as we walked away from the game, his arm around my shoulders. He told me that my bunt crawled all the way down the base line, spinning directly on top of the chalk, until it crashed into third base. And he was especially proud that since I was doing my very best as a baserunner and charging for all I was worth to reach first base, I refused to look back at what I had done and was (correctly) committed to what I needed to do. In this way I never saw a thing. I was the only person at that entire game who did not see what I had done. I did not even get to see the winning run score from second. 9-year olds are the greatest..........

Fair warning: I am going to be following this sports betting news batch more closely. I truly believe it is going to become a huge deal once the Supreme Court announces it’s decision on the New Jersey attempt to take down The Bradley Act. Maybe not MLB game parlays at the local 7-11 level of a huge deal, but huge enough. Just to give you an idea, Nevada saw a major boom in sports betting in 2017, and they credit that merely to network mentions of betting tidbits............(Fun little aside. The guy who argued on behalf of New Jersey in front of the Supremes was Ted Olson. I know him. In a past life I used to be one of his main IT guys.)..........

Just to remind you that owners are beasts of a different mindset, way down in this little article about how they would rather work with the players on pace of play versus work without, we see that some of the owners got together to talk about things like how the new Federal tax laws impact player trades. WTF? Teams pay taxes on trades? Who knew that?!..........Oh, and they are also whispering about how to deal with the coming sports gambling changes..........

Milton Bradley is at it again. And for what, the two hundred and eleventy-first time?..........

You think I type a lot? You should hear me talk. Apparently, if I ever want to make any actual money off this stuff my future is in podcasts...........

Rest In Peace Oscar Gamble..........

Hot Stove

Travis Sawchick over at FanGraphs takes out his hammer and smacks a much different nail. A heretofore overlooked issue of the evolving offseason is the fact that slow signings equate to slow news and less fodder for fan interest. And this is especially true as we fans have morphed away from box score worship. The kind of information we feed on - roster building and franchise projections - are born and bred in Winter...........

Eric Hosmer wants a deal longer than 7 years in order to sign. Let me restate: LONGER than 7 years. Like 8, or more. I suppose that would be doable, Mister Pretending-That-Jason-Heyward-Never-Happened, if the contract is totally front-loaded..........

And then we have Brandon Moss, pointing out that the Players themselves are to blame for ‘incentivizing the owners’ to not pay a Hosmer a lifetime contract by negotiating poorly with recent CBA bargaining cycles..........

Not everything is silent. The Mets and Pirates made a trade. So, yeah, I do admit that those are two teams swapping cheap potential between each other, instead of signing any of the dozens of arms still on the open market...........

The Duffle Bag

Just something to think about. Sometimes when people get so excited to build a shiny new sports venue, in their excitement to make a lot of money they forget things. Oh, and they seem to have the sphincter now working..........If Cleveland wishes to change their name entirely, among the many ideas would be mine: The Cleveland Typos. Hey, the locals are all in..........Need a job? Like to watch TV? Want to mess with Bryce Harper’s strike zone? The Phillies are hiring..........I have only one question to ask about this list: why no Baldoquin?..........Damn. When a Davey Lopes is too old for Baseball, my days are numbered..........The Rockies are looking to one-up the Halos with a new scoreboard of their own..........Yankee fans are feeling it again...........