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Yeah, we all heard it. Al Michaels, who lives in Los Angeles, twice announced the Mike Trout in the stadium in Minnesota last night as being with “The California Angels”. And a good time was had by all. Good marketing job, there, Arte Moreno!
But, with some luck, a very happy Mike Trout might be all that more awesome as an athlete himself, now that he has a football trophy to celebrate as a long-time fan. Do you know what else flies, Master Trout? Angels. Angels fly.
Have Super-Hangover-Offseason-Links:
A Little Bit of Angels News
The LAA Farm system staffing has been announced. You go there, Jack Howell Manager of Burlingham...........
The team is all packed up.....And on the road to Tempe..........
Just to keep you advised, I am still working on rotation options for Ohtani in 2018. It’s a lot of option work that still needs a way to visualize and present, but there is one thing that keeps jumping out to me. As I sum up all the games where Ohtani could DH, I realize that those are the same games that Albert Pujols would be placed at 1B to play defense............
Everywhere In Baseball
Jeffrey Loria is stiffing the people of Miami-Dade County one last time, as we all knew he would. He is using Hollywood accounting practices to claim that his sale of the marlins resulted in no net profits..........
Yes! Bring back the bullpen carts!!!..........
In defiance of rising revenues, some people are noticing that player payroll is, compared to prior seasons, decreasing. Craig Edwards at FanGraphs puts up some revealing charts that make it easy to visualize. Jeff Passan at Yahoo! gives us the same POV, but in long form. A growing community of tanking franchises, along with some overbuying in past years, are a pair of potent driving forces here............
This saddens me. Deeply. But it appears as if the Mariners are about to have their competitive window slammed shut on Jerry Dipoto’s fingertips...........
I see these collections of un-signed Free Agents comprising an All-Star team capable of competing for titles, such as what Jon Heyman does here, and I wonder to myself in what fantasy league could the author could the total payroll?..........
Here is a nice essay to bookmark. You can just keep a map back to it for reading another day, because that other day will come up every year for the next 5 or 6 years. And come up every time around Hall of Fame voting discussions. Normally, the discussion about the PEDs era brings forth comparisons to the earlier eras of other pharmacological boosters. But not often enough do those conversations mention the advantages that many of the greats already enshrined from the early eras had by playing in segregated baseball............
Hot Stove
This is why the arbitration system is so...er.....arbitrary. The Marlins won a decision and lost a decision over the weekend. They won their argument against J.T. Realmuto but lost the argument against Justin Bour. Realmuto was a 3.6 bWAR catcher for Miami, earning $562K. Bour was a 2.3 bWAR first baseman, at $552K. Realmuto was asking for $3.5MM and Bour was asking for $3.4MM. Bour got his $3.4MM, and the better player at a premium position Realmuto ended up with $2.9MM...........
Ken Giles also won his arb hearing versus the Astros. That’s the price to be paid for winning.............
Lots and lots of hand-wringing over the weekend, all over the slowness of the Free Agent market...........One agents threatened a Spring Training shut-down..........Writers wondered what that meant........And writers wondered how to frame the news......... Then another agent jumped on board............But MLBPA union head, Tony Clark slammed the door on such talk with this rebuttal. And now all is quiet...........
And one particular writer, Tom Verducci over at SI, gave us a surprisingly insightful summary. That article is one paragraph after another of bulls-eye shots aimed right at the heart of the players and their agents. And out of all of them, the reason we all have to to participate in the dialog comes from this one: “You don’t hear much about the Boras binding business now because even the most analytically-challenged club has a firm, well-educated grasp of value. Thanks to sites such as Fangraphs and MLB Trade Rumors, the average fan has a better idea of value than what some clubs had in 2008 when Perez was on the market.“........
And another writer, Henry Druschel of The Hardball Times, points to how the Players Union ignored the International Market and, in so doing, allowed the owners to gain access to a viable talent pipeline at low prices. This creates a channel for better value when investing monies than the FA market full of 30-somethings...........
The Duffle Bag
Bartolo Colon, Baseball’s reigning class clown, is still hanging in there, now out of Arlington with a minor league deal.......Need a job? Want to help take away those high strikes called on Mike Trout? How about a gig as a Trackman calibrator?............Marcus Stroman trying to take a shortcut to becoming G.O.A.T...........More of that impressive Cardinal Way?...............