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Today we FINALLY see the Angels back in action! The first game of Spring Training kicks off with live baseball versus the Oakland A’s, 12:05 PDT. The game is at the A’s facility in Mesa, AZ., Hohokam Stadium. “Hohokam” is the term used by the Pima to mean “those who have vanished”. As in the Oakland title chances.
Have some Oh-Say-Can-You-See-Our-Future-This-Weekend-Spring-Training-Links:
A Little Bit of Angels News
Nick Tropeano returns to the mound after TJ recovery, scheduled to put in a couple off innings today............
Shohei Ohtani takes the mound or our first look on Saturday..........He might make his DH debut as early as Monday..........As a pinch-runner, not Trout fast but sure looks to put Pujols in the dust...............Oh. Yeah. And he can hit.............
The easiest thing to do is to predict failure in the sport off Baseball. In a sport built on the statistical probability of fail, it’s easier than the no-pitch IBB. So when somebody steps up and tries to look smart and be the iconoclast by predicting how something novel will go wrong, it’s pretty cowardly. Meet Will Leitch, predictor that the Ohtani 6-man rotation will fail. It’s or guys like this that I keep studying flex plans. A flex plan can be made to work, and can be made to work for an entire season with the number of arms that the Angels have AND while still protecting Ohtani’s off day needs. But because that will still not conform to Leitch’s limited ways o thinking, he will still find a way to call himself right all along. It’s what they do..........
I, too, think it would be great for Chris Carter to choose to regain form this calendar year............
In case you need reminding, the LAA infield might be one of the best in Baseball when everything is totaled up...........
Jered Weaver and Dan Haren are solid twitter follows.............
Billy Eppler is a new dad. Congrats to the whole family from Halos Heaven!..........
Everywhere In Baseball
Home run records keep falling (and pitchers don’t seem to be figuring out how to stop that). In 2018, it might be the team total for a single season, and it might be eclipsed by more than one team..........
Jeffrey Loria lost Round 1. It’s kind of amazing to me that Loria has long been so used to getting away with easily hosing everybody on flimsy fairy tales that he and his team had no clue as to how fast that shit can get smacked down in the real world. Expect Loria to drag this out or 5 to 10 years, or however long it takes him to figure out how to look dead broke while phoning in his apologies to the court from his Swiss chalet..........
Hey, are you serious about wanting to shorten the overall length of baseball games? Ditch he commercial breaks and turn players into NASCAR pit crews..........Or get rid of walk up music............
Ernesto Frieri is going all the way back to ground zero to try and restore his pitching career...........
Defensive Runs Saved. Read it. Memorize it. Love it...........
Baseballism...coming to a brick-and-mortar near some ballpark nearest you..........
You are going to be getting a series off Over/Under articles coming up. So let’s give you a taste and review the SBN fan voting results from last year, where we get the best line: “Rangers fans. You fools. You ruined this for everyone.“..........
Brian Cashman wants Yankees fans to know that a 91-win ALCS team that added Giancarlo Stanton is a scrappy little underdog. Uh, sure. Yeah. Whatever you need to say to fill those $1100 seats, there, Cashman............
An entire essay on Busts in Baseball, and Brandon Wood is not mentioned a single time........
Commissioner Manfred has not given up on finding out who it was that leaked Shohei Ohtani’s medical records from Japan. In case the guilty party might possibly turn out to be one off the quickly spurned teams - Cards, Yankees, Red Sox, Cubs, and a bunch of other random names - he has his best man on it...........
Female ump Jen Pawol getting closer to The Show! Of course, at this pace by the time she makes it she will be 60, and umpires will be replaced by robots.........
A couple off long forms or your weekend...........The first is to remind that Eric Hosmer is a human being who has been working hard at baseball for a long, long time. Which is nice. Not $140 million nice, but nice...........The second is that of a dying man, who was saved by the miracles of modern medicine and allowed to carry on with his love of baseball...........
Most off you are not old enough to recall the time of the earliest alt-network television world where providers searched all over for content to fill the time, and we got to see different stuff, as opposed to 12 hours off re-run recaps revisiting the same 3-hour content from the night before. (I’m looking at you SportsCenter.) So it is with streaming today, which is why we will be getting 14,000 events from CBS this year as they package up high school and college competition through a new partnership with Sidearm Sports..........
Hot Stove
Remember that the Rays are getting torched this Winter and a lot of that is over stuff like DFA’ing Corey Dickerson. Which is why I find that, now that the Pirates have picked up Dickerson in exchange for prospects, suddenly Dickerson is flawed:....” unlikely to provide All-Star value in 2018”....” is not much of a defender or baserunner”.....”not a great defender”....”His zone contact slipped, as did his fly-ball rate”....The article is telling us that Dickerson’s value comes from being paired in a platoon with some other guy who can bat right-handed..........
The Rangers, who still have all that international pool money after not getting Ohtani (like Jerry Dipoto) and not bailing out on those funds after not getting Ohtani (like Jerry Dipoto), now sits in the catbird seat for Julio Pablo Martinez and are the clear favorites to sign him. If Martinez does sign and the Mariners spend the next decade getting terrorized by Ohtani and Martinez, we can all say “Well played, Jer...”..........
The J.D. Martinez deal formal announcement keeps getting delayed because of medicals. All the reason for BoSux fans to have fits, which is a good thing. But it really is more about getting everybody’s calendars all straightened out. One would think that an MLB team would have these kinds of things locked down..........
Jesse Chavez found a home. The Rangers. I love it...........
The Duffle Bag
MLB giving you your own entry into the Home Run Derby, via Virtual Reality..........If the MSM is doing the Tim Tebow thing again this year, you all know what THAT means..........One top pitching prospect goes down with an ST injury, and another top pitching prospect goes down with drug program violation.........So if I am reading this right, it’s quicker to get to Angels Stadium than it is to get to Oakland’s ballpark, if you are starting out from Wells, Nevada..........Russell Wilson bringing game to ST...............Enjoy this diversion into uniform name fun...........
