Thor’sLinks: Halos Goosed by Gold & Green

Deep sigh. Has it occurred to you that the Oakland A’s have now scored 17 runs against the Halos in these past 2 games? That is what we in the home improvement circles call a shellacking.

I know there are many among you who disagree, but I remain firmly of the opinion that watching Oakland fans squirm as their team falls closer and closer to the rising Tampa Bay Rays and possibly losing out on a WC spot altogether just too juicy to pass up. The Rays are doing their part, 8-2 over their last 10 games. IMHO, we need to be sweeping these guys right now, not getting clobbered. It IS a rivalry, people. I submit our biggest and longest standing. And you tell me, if there is an unwritten rule that a team up by 9 late in the game should be trying to steal a base, shouldn’t the corollary to the rule be that the team up by 9 late in the game not get pissy about a close call on a meaningless infield single and force an Instant Replay review?...........

Congratulations, Sherman Johnson, on your first MLB At-Bat. You will always, ALWAYS, get to tell the story about how you were subbed in as a defensive replacement over, and to pinch hit for, THE Mike Trout...........And, with the singular highlight of the night, congrats to Joe Hudson on your first MLB hit............

Take the lumps on a 10 to NOTHING loss and deal with it.

(In yet another road sign that I am hurtling towards aged irrelevance, doing all my Links work yesterday within the updated Chrome has me slightly discombobulated. On the other hand, the spell check dictionary that comes with Windows10 knows all about the word ‘discombobulated’.)

Meander through these Missing-Our-Chance-To-Mess-With-Oakland-HaloLinks:

A Little Bit Of Shohei Ohtani News

Here we go. It’s about to start. The Angels are wasting Shohei Ohtani...............

A Little Bit Of Mike Trout News

In a segment that should have been re-titled ‘outfieldchatter’ Mike tells us how he plays baseball. If you don’t have the ability to listen, the answer is: “much, much better than anybody else living”.................

Mike is the furthest thing from a singles hitter that exists in all of MLB..............

A Little Bit Of Angels News

Having another rising infielder showing up on the national radar - Luis Rengifo - is intriguing. A baseball team only has two middle infield positions. Having three productive middle infielders opens up worlds of possibilities................

Ty Buttrey. That accidental snag by Billy Eppler that we needed back in February. Look at his game log for the 2018 season. In 14 game appearances, 60 batters faced across 15.1 innings of work, he has allowed exactly 1 earned run. And until the Tuesday night game, when he came in with the bases loaded and allowed 2 inherited runners to score off a Dustin Fowler single, he hadn’t allowed any inherited runners to cross the plate since he started working for us in mid-August..........

We get to keep the 909 in our Farm System for another 4 years.............

Today is a Facebook game. That should crater productivity in the Menlo Park area this afternoon...........

Everywhere In Baseball

Some stories can come from no other place in the land other than Florida. Likewise, some stories are ultimate Boston. Such is yesterday’s story of the wayward Red Sox AL East Championship Banner. Mysteriously, that banner popped up on the national radar because it was in the hands of some random pair of goombas. Their story was that they were just driving own the highway and found it lying on the side of the road, obviously having fallen off of a delivery truck. Well, yeah, that happens every day. Especially with turnips. Those goobers knew full well what they had, and to whom it belonged. And they were quite ready to give it back...for a price. So let’s recap: the Red Sox jumped out in front of an actual accomplishment, they lost their showcase prize, a pair of Bostonian dudes claim to find it by accident and hold it for ransom, even making a ransom video, and the whole thing hinges on the tale that such an important thing was lying loose on the back of some 1920’s delivery carriage being driven by an operator too drunk to notice his huge load was flying off into traffic. In the end, the Red Sox sent some Southie enforcers over to reclaim their banner, without bothering over any compensation..........

This is the kind of thing we knew was probable before the season even started. We knew that good teams are getting gooder as they hoard the best talent being shed by tankers. And the worst teams are getting worsier as they shed talent for prospects and draft position. So it stands to reason that the gap between the two would grow, and we would end up with new world records for games behind first place. We just didn’t expect it to involve the Orioles...............

It’s official. For the first time since 2003 the National League bested the American League in Interleague play............

Ticketmaster hard at work finding new ways to screw ticket buyers? Who would have guessed?...........

The hand, AND the fingernails, are an MLB pitcher’s major weapon. And they go to great lengths to protect that weapon over the course of a season...........

Rob Manfred’s juiced baseballs are creeping into AAA next season. Offense is expected to mysteriously explode...........

Oh, yeah, Minor Leagues. Keith Law tweets about MiLB attendance. Read it. Then read all the comments. Keith accidentally gets into a dogfight with a couple of people who have more experience within MiLB than Law has observing and reporting on MiLB............

Still rubbing the local noses in it, New York City Mayor is hanging and partying out with the Red Sox right at the time when the Red Sox are on the verge of stomping on the necks of the Yankees. I’m thinking that George Steinbrenner would be out in public destroying Mayor de Blasio’s chances of re-election...........

Wow. Where is Miller Park that it is significantly worse than Angels Stadium when it comes to being able to walk to a game? Unless you, like steelgolf, live in one of those new neighboring condo complexes, nobody gets to LAA home games on foot. Hell, it can take 20 minutes to walk from parking. Miller Park must be located within the 3rd circle of hell, the one where all the beer and cheese are kept..........

Baseball is THE sport built for comedic integration. We need more people committed to nothing but comedic material in our sport. Not enough of that anymore.

In a shocking turn of events, now that sports betting is getting legalized throughout the land, the first pro sports team to ink a sponsorship deal with a sportsbook is the Vegas Knights. Who could have known?...............

The Duffle Bag

Are they making bobbleheads that do bat flips now?...............Any month now we will all discover that burglarizing the home of Yasiel Puig is actually some Internet meme...........Here is something that wouldn’t happen in baseball. Alex Curry getting booted for arguing with an umpire. In football, though, well you bet..........ICYMI, the Baltimore Orioles braille uniforms...........This is why I could never have raised a daughter. No sense of humor...........Because, really, ‘MLB’ stands for “The Ump Show”............