TuesdoLinks: Crash. Then Burned.

Pffft. Somebody needs to call a timeout. THE Home Opener? Your own house? In front of your own fans? It’s OK to not win them all. It’s not OK to Vinnie Pestano your effort.

And that’s one of my new verbs. To ‘Vinnie Pestano’. As in, ‘Replace something of quality with something embarrassing. On purpose.’

And it’s gonna be shitty, because just when it appears that our ongoing punishment by Mike Napoli is ending, our ongoing punishment by Mike Clevinger may just be beginning...........

Don’t be fooled. We did have some decent plays in the field last night. It’s just that they shall all be overshadowed. The entire game was stigmatized. The offense did stink. J.C. Ramirez did stink. But those will be overshadowed, too. Nobody will recall all that other stuff. Nope. Our 2018 season in Anaheim was launched thusly..............And we gotta own it..............Because everybody else already knows we need to..............

Have some Still-Being-Owned-By-Cleveland-Links:

A Little Bit of Angels News

It’s official. The news that was broke here months ago has been admitted by the franchise. Jahmai Jones IS moving to 2B...........

MLB is now trying too hard. It’s time for them to force a nickname for Shohei Ohtani upon us all. (Let’s see how many stupid ones I can come up with.)............

Ohtani woke up America, though. People are taking notice.....and diving into the details to explain what is working for the kid......with some of them just mind-boggled......Others are obvious: love the splitter, work on the slider..........By the way, we just don’t know when the Oh-train is pulling out of the station next............

Mike Trout is having some fits with the 2018 start. But our expectations for him are kinda high. With his down days, he is also showing sparks of his usual excellence...............

Blake Parker, promising to stop sucking............

Everywhere In Baseball

I am totally willing to believe that the amount of money that MLB is paying out to players in 2018 is less than all the money they paid out in 2017. But breaking things out on a team-by-team basis, as FanGraphs does, fails to present this case. For example, if Oakland drops their payroll ~19%, that doesn’t mean much if their 2017 payroll was only $82 million. That’s about a $15 million decrease. It means far less when comparing to a team such as the Cubs, where an increase of only 5% means an $11 million increase. But presenting the data in that team-by-team way allows for the implication that Oakland is gutting their team while Chicago is merely being conservative with their raises...........Also, FG is being rather cavalier in terms of value when they dismiss the Angels with “Zack Cozart and Ian Kinsler simply replace Josh Hamilton‘s salary”. One of the major themes we have been pounding all Winter is that teams are smartening up and less inclined to do stupid deals. The Angels have been a showcase for both the past and the present behavior. FG is pretending that bad behavior (and their castigation of bad behavior) never existed...........

Hardball Times (a property of FanGraphs), laments the trend of MLB ownership away from an era of spoiled children and their franchise toys since they have been replaced by people who are less of ego, constantly overwhelming the calculated planning of the baseball expertise of the GM office. The TL;DR version of this HBT article would be today’s owners are all the villains in our developing players-as-victims narrative............

Maybe Joe Maddon and the Cubs have figured out some new competitive edge: pick one off the three true outcomes and monopolize it..........

Less than one week of MLB and we have already have bellyaching and nanny wagging over extended netting? That would be Peter ‘bellyaching’ Funt, and then Jeff ‘nanny-wagging’ Passan............

You could try to throw outside to Jose Altuve. But you could still be disappointed. So you could try to throw waaaaay outside to Jose Altuve. But you may have nothing to show for it but exasperation..........

Bryce Harper knows better than you or me that this is his money year..........

The Gabe Kapler experiment appears not to be going well among Philadelphia sports fans. Shocking, I realize...........

The debacle that was the regional sports network in Texas is ending in a manner somewhat dissatisfying to the Astros...........

Here comes the new ESPN OTT service. April 12th, $4.99 per month..........And if the ESPN strategy to reconquer the fleeing viewers fails, there are a lot of sharks in the water following the chum line..........

The Duffle Bag

Dammit. This kind of shit crushes my fatherly soul..........Mother nature hates the Yankees. And Mets, too, but mostly the Yankees.............Everything is bigger in Texas. Even banner-revealing clusterf%#ks............Job Posting: Nats R&D web developer. But you know this one is going to be a shit show when you read IN THE FORMAL JOB DESCRIPTION “Balance long-term projects with day-to-day high priority changes”. That’s corp-speak for ‘we are going to pull you 3 different ways, every day, and it will always be your fault that nothing gets done’..........Ron Gardenhire is learning the power of media, where the people with the megaphone and the power of the last and final word, can crush one’s silly little use of reality...........