HumpLinks: Sabre Rattling

Long before the creation of the very first Street Fighter, my brothers and I grew up in an age of more traditional ways to settle spats. We slung mashed potatoes at each other across the dinner table after dad had finished and left for a night of television. Yes. Mashed potatoes. And with spoons.

But that seems so much more dignified than the MLBPA - MLB - Scott Boras spittle of yesterday. “You’re an idiot!”...”No, YOU are!”...”No, YOU are TIMES TWO!”...”MOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!”

What we need next is for somebody to hold their breath until they turn blue. Because that protestation always works.

Have some Wet-Diapers-Offseason-Links:

A Little Bit of Angels News

A big step forward for our roster prospects. The Angels released their list of non-roster invitees to Spring Training. Matt Thaiss? Jahmai Jones? Cool beans! Notice the name of Ian Krol there, too, who was signed yesterday by Billy Eppler as Eppler moves forward with his bullpen cattle call...........And then there is that Shohei Ohtani cat listed as Pitcher/DH. That one came out of left field, did it not?...........

Ohtani is on his way to America. And seems like a pretty good quote source...........

Albert Pujols Countdown Action Figure. Get yours April 6th............

Registration is now open for the annual Angels 5K run...........

Everywhere In Baseball

Deep sigh. Let’s just plow through it. You know what I am talking about. The Players Union needed to act tough and issued another statement complaining about the slow FA market this offseason. This one focused on the tanking phenomenon. Saving me a bunch of link work, that ESPN article includes the tweets of players jumping in on the conversation. The comments to those tweets reveal that the players will lose this social media battle with the now much-smarter fans. But for more such tweets and their back and forth, go here..........

MLB fired back at Tony Clark, claiming (hilariously) that “the owners are committed to putting a winning product on the field for their fans”. I mean, come on...does that describe Derek Jeter???............

Ok, so the game is on. Scott Boras immediately chimed in on the MLB language and insinuated that the only way that the MLB Front Office would know about “nine figure offers” is if that info was being shared. Which is against the CBA and would be collusion. Because, of course, the people within the New York offices must be more stupid than we fans for that to be true. Instead of getting the info via some backdoor pipeline direct from the franchises, they could have heard the same thing using easy to find sources (such as this very page). Either I need to give Boras an HH logon, or maybe you and I are accidentally in on the collusion.............

Well, that brought out some random MLB big wig Dan Halem, blasting Boras for being “inflammatory”..........

So Boras whipped out his Batphone, and rang up his personal media relations expert Jon Heyman, who.....got.....very.....busy.....tweeting.....on Boras’ behalf............

And then, a magical moment when we get a rare bit of clarity out of Buster Olney...........And it was all capped off by a TL;DR summary keyed in by Jeff Fletcher...........And what this all adds up to is a public relations loss to be had by all, with the MLBPA leading the way...........

By the way, as Buster Olney points out, the concept of tanking goes back a long way. And had the Bud Selig blessing............

Ervin is getting old...........

To the surprise of no thing living on this planet above the level of rock, with the explicit exception of all the political and baseball officials who should be criminally charged, the redirect of public funds into the hands of the Atlanta Braves to make possible the revenue-generating playground to benefit billionaires will end up costing the citizenry their libraries..............

In media news, here come the ESPN streaming fees.............And DraftKings is looking to jump in to what is becoming the flood of streams, if you will...........

Hot Stove

Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas are forcing the Royals to choose. I guess we CAN blame this one on the Royals. They have years to break apart the contract cycles of these two guys and avoid this. If only they had more foresight and parked one of these guys in last year’s market. Or next year’s. Or both. I’m sure that would have worked out well for both players........

That this is an extremely slow offseason is not really news, no matter how colorful FanGraphs presents the data. I would be happier to see a less polluted chart and focus on the most recent 5 to 8 seasons, that we might see if there is a general trend downward as Front Offices smarten up...........

I would also think that we cannot measure the status of the industry based off this year alone. What’s it going to look like when all is said and done this year? And what’s it going to look like after next winter? And then the winter thereafter? Certainly that would be hurtful to real people as we find out, but what if this year is the one anomaly? Will that mean that this was a hell of a lot of nothing? So let’s talk about ‘blips’...........And let’s talk about yearly payroll increases/decreases...........

The Duffle Bag

Need a job? Love the color red? The Angels are hiring a graphic designer!...........Tim Lincecum comeback, Part Deux. He ends up with Oakland, and crushes us...........So the winner gets a ticket to go see their favorite player never play for their team again. What’s second place? TWO such tickets?...........Play the game. Guess Mike Trout. Were you surprised that you were NOT looking at a left-handed batter, as I was?..........