Thor’sLinks: We Need To Speed Up The Off-Season. Too!

Look, Baseball World, I took off a week and a half to give you all some time to gather up some momentum and do shit for me to share with the readership. I’m back. You ain’t doing anything. It’s January now. Pitchers and catchers will start reporting in just a few weeks. Stop this dawdling and let’s see some action, else I am going to lobby the Commissioner’s office for an activity clock. If Manfred wants to keep us all interested in season with pitch clocks on the players, it’s only fair that he establishes transaction clocks on owners and Front Office exes in the off-season.

Get busy, MLB! I have coffee drinkers to satisfy!!

Have some Mind-Numbingly-Slow-HaloLinks:

A Little Bit Of Angels News

It looks more and more as if picking Jonathan Lucroy for your fantasy team in 2019 will come pretty cheap. All upside, since few beyond Billy Eppler have faith in his rebound............

Mike Trout vs. Shohei Ohtani: the Amazing Race..........

Shohei has yet to learn the news of Eppler signing Justin Bour, I see..........

Shout out to Victor for getting into the merch biz..........

Everywhere In Baseball

Never forget: people are the worst. here is on Hall Of Fame voter who is rejecting Sammy Sosa as an HoF candidate NOT because of his pre-PEDs Hall of Very Good career (as this voter recognizes), and NOT because of his PEDs creds. Nope. He rejects Sosa because post-career Sosa has bleached his skin color............

The idea here, coming from an obvious pro-labor source that is not concerned with spending their own money, is that a team cannot have too many Albert Pujols contracts on their books. Nothing to learn there. Nope. Just move along and keep doing it..........

So let’s roll with this payroll thing a little more. Thanks again to reddit, we have this great view of overall payroll versus playoff and WS success. There is a ton if useful info in that one chart. First, to the point, almost all WS winners spent more than the league salary average. And spending more increases a teams chances of getting into the crapshoot. And, as the reddit comments point out, the delta between the haves and have-nots is widening at an accelerated rate, but I would point out how the timeline for this correlates to the dawn of the tanking era. That would mean that as teams shed their higher-paid talent to reap draft picks (and fill the roster slots with minimum salary scrubs and prospects), the higher paid talent accumulates onto the competitive teams, which are committed at that time to spending more to hold open their playoff window...........

SportsIllustrated is a year behind the rest of Planet Earth. They list 5 trends to look for in the upcoming season, each of which is a trend that was fully fleshed out in 2018..........

Bad news for those rebuilt Mets. Yeonis Cespedes might not play in 2019 at all..........

The Venezuelan Winter league has a fun twist on their playoff process. Teams moving on get to draft two players off of teams that have fallen off the championship track...........

Now that college football bowl ratings are in, and they suck, will the MSM start writing articles about how college football is dying? No? Why not??..........

Hot Stove

Bryce Harper and Manny Machado remain the pied pipers of this FA class, with scribes and GM’s following their every move. And things are starting to boil over, which is good, because the general consensus is that once Harper and Machado sign, the rest of the teams will be scrambling to fill up their rosters with all the guys bottlenecked behind those two.....Team Boras/Harper just sat down with for a long session with the Nats............As did the Phillies (who are still waiting on a response from Machado)..........

I’m still a tad confused by Kikuchi’s decision to sign a team-friendly deal with a franchise that is entering the 3-year basement phase of their tanking cycle.....I also wonder about that “Seattle is so Japanese friendly” meme. If the Seattle metro area has a population of about 3.9 million, and the demographics claim 1.3% of that is Japanese, we end up with roughly 50,000 people of Japanese descent there. OC, alone, claims better than 40,000. And we sure have had a fine following of supporters in Angels Stadium for Ohtani.........

The Duffle Bag

This could be interesting. My older brother was a pro-quality pitcher (who found girls first), so I got a first-hand look into a pitcher’s mentality. I am curious to learn whether David Cone shares some of that crazy...........Never stop being Vladdie, Vladdie!..........Roberto Clemente. May his spirit never die..........