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Did you feel it? No, probably not. YOU are already bouncing off the walls with joy over how things are unfurling early this season. That, or you ain’t local. A 5.3 quake rolled a decent part of the SoCal coastal areas yesterday afternoon. Scientists are scrambling to blame it on geology and shit, but those nerds are completely clueless to the tectonic plate shifting underway between towards Anaheim and away from Chavez Ravine.
My work is done (for the week). I’ll see you all on Monday, after some good times in Anaheim. It would be cool to return with the Halos being the envy of MLB. Hey, it could happen. Easily.
Meanwhile, deal with all these Shake-And-Bake-Weekend-Links:
A Little Bit of Angels News
Mike Trout has clearly focused on cutting down the K’s. Only 4 strikeouts against 34 Plate Appearances so far. His 11.8% K rate is about half his career norm. This is a carry over from the total body off work out of his Spring Training season, and is scary stuff - especially for opposing pitchers. Almost as especially for WAR trackers. that kind of thing could blow the lid off his 2018. But this is Trout we are talking about. Why work on one major improvement when you can work on TWO? Like, in addition, his defensive prowess...........
And all along, Mike is a really really cool cat. And he knows the power of his influence with young fans, which is nearing smelling salts levels..........
Ohtani Porn. It’s everywhere at the moment. Kind of like a lovely-smelling cloud of fog obscuring all other LAA news............LAA is looking to fixate on 6-days rest between starts. I am tracking this against all the modeling I did a couple off months ago. With no off days between Sunday the 10th and Sunday the 17th, we are going to need a 6th starter next week.)...........MLB on a national news level is charmed.............More than just one of the coolest moments of the first week of 2018 baseball............Ohtani embarrassing some other teams through the power of small numbers...........The Ringer giving him RoY right now...........What could be next in the list of amazing things?............The talking heads are walking back their opinions, mostly as if their earlier opinions never existed...........Other heads are now experts at projections...........With nothing to slobber over up in the Ravine, the LA Times is pedaling hard on the bandwagon. (One off these bandwagons.)..........Shohei is DH’ing tonight..........
High Heat Stats has been running a novel idea as to how to use Ohtani. Unconventional. HHS actually got the idea from one of his followers but he keeps looking into it. So he’s kinda bummed to see it ain’t actually going to happen...........
In order for that Ohtani schedule to work, so does Parker Bridwell. That was what I figured out, too..........
Struggling to work at all would be Matt Shoemaker. He had an MRI that didn’t reveal any major problems with whatever it was that the MRI machine was looking at, but that doesn’t mean that anybody knows what’s wrong..........
Ouch, This is hard to believe. Not only is FG (via RotoGraphs, which wants to focus on how you, the fantasy player, earns points) still a couple of years behind the times when it comes to Anaheim (still underselling the success of the Halo ‘pen...still not realizing that Scioscia has turned a corner in reliever flexibility), but they are implying that the LAA bullpen roster is ‘volatile’ because Sosh does not appear to be committing to ‘roles’..............
He’s back. Dustin Ackley (a Boras client) has agreed to a MiLB contract...............
Hey, we’re #10 and rising. Very slowly.............
Welcome to professional baseball, Griffin Canning. 4 innings pitched for the IE 66’ers with 1 hit, 3 walks against 6 strikeouts. Word coming out from tweets present is that he was riding 95 and maxing out at 98...........
Everywhere In Baseball
Who do you think has more clout in Philadelphia right now, Gabe Kapler or Jake Arrieta?.............It’s now a place where the skipper is getting booed............And it’s a place where the players are whining about statistics............
We should begin by recalling how Jon Lester has this phobia about throwing to the bases to catch base runners. So there he was on the mound yesterday. And we got Ryan Braun while leading off first base: “Why, yes, I will take the free base thankyouverymuch.” ..........Well, that was embarrassing. But successful. Why not test him again? Ok, we will. Ryan Braun while leading off second base: “Why, yes, I will take yet another free base thankyouvery-ohcrapwhat’sthisbouncepassshit?!?”......Out. Embarrassment pivots 180 degrees.............
Mike Trout is out there at the leading edge of batting helmet fashion. And when all the cool kids are wearing C flaps, the world off baseball will be safer for us all...........
Haha! It has begin. Derek who? FG hints at it. This is what happens when a career transition goes awry Bad press day after day washes away the gauzy memories of past glories from (now) long ago............
The trend towards bullpenning continues, and has already made some notes in the margins of the 2018 storybook...........But, it’s way early. Recall that the Yankees bullpen is lined up to be historically great and not the smoldering dumpster that it has been..............
The great thing about Baseball is that it contain not only superlative wonders, but that it also contains superlative folly..........
Man, this really pisses me off. It’s upsetting to learn that the rise of StatCast has failed to kill the subjective-laden human defensive measuring systems. In fact, they are not only thriving, they are serving as corrective filler for StatCast...........
Doing a transaction in Major League Baseball is a bitch off a process. Snarky words cannot do justice to just how complex the whole shebang is. What makes it even more amazing is to think about how Front Offices contend with this process at Trade Deadline, when things are flying fast and furiously...........
The extended netting ain’t too bad. But those poles...........
We talked about this a few weeks ago. We need to stop pigeonholing young athletes with passion and talent merely because of old assumptions and predispositions. Only then will we learn what is truly possible..........
That MLB streaming by Facebook is still reverberating throughout baseball. But not in a good way...........And, yeah, it’s a distracting different experience. But better?.............
The Duffle Bag
I cannot leave you without sharing one the random weirdness tales that I tripped over in my nightly hunt. This one is a real stinker. But it explains why we feel the way we do about Alabama...............Tim Tebow grabs a headline again............(Followers might notice an absence off Jordan Serena news outta me. Not gonna happen. Can’t. He was released by the 66’ers last month.)..............Montreal still banging the MLB drum...........Miguel Cabrera, welcome to old age...........Rangers fans are the slowest baseball figure-outers on the planet. Really? It’s taking them 5 years to realize Rougned Odor ain’t Mike Trout after all?............Mariners fans, their entire career of fandom immortalized in one short film...........
OT - it’s time for be to start lobbying for a new laptop. The one I am using is a beast of beauty over which nearly all off you would lust, but I can declare that the keyboard is somehow flawed. It has worn down over the year off use and half the keys don’t fire properly. I am trying to self-edit, but please forgive the crap that I am missing these days. Most notorious are the ‘F’ and ‘M’ keys. Extra strokes and missed strokes, at random. Sorry, peeps. Just tolerate me for a while. (Case in point: there are 25 typos in this paragraph alone that I need to go back and clean up. 25. All ‘F’s and ‘M’s. Crapola)