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THE HOT CORNER - HOT STOVE OBSERVATION
Well, this is interesting.
As many of you have figured out, my plans as Daily LinkMeister were to continue doing this until I retired from my day job, which was due to occur in December of 2021. The clock was ticking down and getting close, but there were still 2 full seasons ahead of us all.
Recently, the State of California passed legislation placing more controls on how corporations could classify “contract employees”. Technically, that is how I am classified within VOX media working with the SBN tools. Because of this legislation, VOX is forced to accelerate their ongoing plans to restructure all the California sports blogs so that they fall into compliance with the new law. They probably were going to do this anyway, and they probably are going to do this everywhere, but the Sacramento bureaucracy must have messed up the VOX bureaucracy. VOX didn’t have to handle things this way, but this is the way they way they ended up doing it.
Yesterday we all received notice of this change.....You can read the mothership announcement here.....You can see other reactions here......And it’s not hard to find this information in the general news......Because it’s kind of a big deal....The net of this is that the HH masthead membership as you have known it becomes “Community Insiders”, reporting to a much smaller group of SBN employees (full and/or part time) to be hired. It might be possible that among these SBN employees there will be one or more people who have been on the historic masthead. Or probably not.
I am here to inform you that I will most certainly not be one of them. It’s not with regret as I have had a blast, you have had a blast, and I was going to meander away on my own accord soon enough, anyway. I have nothing to regret. But I have no interest in changing careers, or taking on a secondary career that might in any way threaten my current one. My current one is serious, for which I probably am compensated more than all but the highest employees of VOX as it is. I will not be taking on an SBN employment position and I am not interested in being a free-lance contributor who submits story ideas to an editorial board, waits for their approval, and then accepts their commission for writing here. And the gig I have owned exclusively since #cesspool cannot fit into the State Assembly Bill 5 mandate of 35 or less submissions per year.
Not to diminish you all or the daily Links experience, this has merely been one of several hobbies that I enjoy. But it does eat up more hours of my non-working time than all my other hobbies combined. I will miss doing this, and I will miss the community experience of you all, and I will miss the back and forth and the banter. Then again, I will not.
The State of California has mandated new rules and regs effective January 1, 2020. There is plenty of blame to be laid at the feet of California politicians for this. VOX kicked their re-org and efforts to re-staff into high gear as of yesterday, volunteering to assume a bunch of blame to be cast upon themselves. That’s just over a week before Christmas. To paraphrase, “harvest season” for the money-keepers. An entire staff of VOX/SBN decision-makers blessed with insufficient clue just turned themselves into the very character that Charles Dickens made infamous 176 years ago and one that these people have doubtless disparaged annually since their own childhood. Allow me to be the one who points that out to them and ruins their entire holiday season.
Anyway, that means that it falls to me to let you know what the new deal will be with yours truly, a deal which will now be coming up real soon.
I will do the Links for the balance of this week. My final fresh and original Links submission will hit Friday morning. I was going to take off all the days from 12/23/2019 through 1/3/2020 as DIY Links days since I have family in town and will be focused on that, hoping that you do the same. I was going to be back on January 6th. Now, due to the changes, that will not be happening. Friday is it.
We have had fun, we will have a few more days of fun, and then I will free up a huge amount of my life to go off and have a hell of a lot of other fun. And, since I won’t be deleting my account, maybe I have some amount of fun being a regular dude/dudette just like I used to be, and just like you already are. And stay tuned. Who knows what happens next?
Sincerely, Stirrups.
ANGELS
Anybody want to hire Shohei Ohtani’s high school buddy?............
Anthony Rendon and his camp went to the Rangers and heard their initial offer, then heard the offer from Billy Eppler and Arte Moreno, and never bothered going back to Texas and allow Texas to re-bid..........
As players get signed, teams win/lost draft slots. Here is where you can keep track. As of this writing, the Halos have #10, then #84...........
We are still in the B+ range for the offseason, which is refreshing! (Personally, I would have us in the “C” range, but whatever.)..........
HOT STOVE ACTION AND OTHER RUMORS
Gee. I wonder who the agent is for Dallas Keuchel and Hyun Jin-Ryu?? Oh yeah, Scott Boras via Jon Heyman............
Even if we wanted to best the Diamondbacks for Madison Bumgarner, Bumgarner is familiar enough with taxes after having been working in San Francisco that he and his crew knew that Eppler/Moreno would be forced to go very very big..........Which means that those 5 years look worse. If 5 years are worse for the Minnesota Twins.....and even the Giants didn’t want to go 5 years.....imagine how much worse it looked to the Angels..........
And what were the Diamondbacks thinking? They have been working hard to clear payroll for this?...........
Corey Kluber went to Texas pretty cheap. He’s a Free Agent after nest year, having a ot to do with it. And that “to do with it” is an pointer to the fact that nobody really wanted Kluber at this time..........
Wade Miley is now a Cincinnati Red. 2-years, $15 million.........
Joe Smith is staying with the Asstros. 2-years, $8 million...........
The Twins are about to nab Sergio Romo. 1-year, $5 million..........
Your available Free Agent pitching tracker status...again..............
We are now going to see position players get picked up? Avasail Garcia moves to the Brewers. 2-years, $20 million..........
We are approaching the winter solstice, as far away from the best that summer has to offer as we can be. Here, enjoy a long form. Because baseball on summer evenings is the best..........
BASEBALL THINGS IN GENERAL
Bernie Sanders is taking time off from his Presidential campaign to take the fight for MiLB to the doorsteps of MLB in New York. Somebody has to. In fact, lots of Congressional somebodies have to. Why I am not hearing the words “anti-trust exemption” from any of them is a mystery to me............
It would be very interesting, indeed, if the outfall of Tyler Skaggs’ death is an MLB that leads the way for society to become far more enlightened about drug issues and drug health and treatment practices. We could put an end to nearly one hundred years’ worth of idiocy..........
2019 was a watershed year for Major League Baseball. It was the year we learned that they are lying to us...........
STUFF
When Oakland fans see the final game of their local sports team in Oakland Stadium............Anybody have any idea why this 2011 HalosHeaven article is getting fresh eyeballs this week???..........From UniWatch:....The Chiba mascot that eats people.....Delino DeShields, showcase player today, gone tomorrow...........You bet, it is almost winter and there is a reason we don’t want to play baseball now...........
