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THE HOT CORNER
I confess. I spent a large part of my waking holiday weekend checking my phone for baseball news. All 4 days. I was hopeful. But as the hours and days went by I didn’t see much of any change to the major front pages of the most active news sites. I was figuring on a very bad day. Or very good if the goal is to get the effort over as fast as possible.
But when I sat down to pilfer actual news, I found that the major sites were all on holiday, too. We actually Do have links! Enjoy some reading before Cyber Monday craters all the bandwidth on the Internet today...........
ANGELS
Shohei Ohtani hanging out at a Lakers-Wizards NBA game watching his Japanese bro Rui Hachimura............
($$) - Athlete of the Decade goes to Mike Trout, planet’s best baseball player.............($$) - So certainly Mike is the center-fielder for The Team of the Decade..........
Kevan Smith has changed rep agencies. Maybe he needs to thinking about changing his batting stance...............
Obscure Trout Porn Factoid of the Day: Mike hit more home runs out of the 2 spot in 2019 than any other player hit out of any other single spot............
HOT STOVE ACTION AND OTHER RUMORS
That Dustin Garneau contract is a real doozy. It looks like a $1MM deal - $650,000 salary in the major leagues and $300,000 in the minors plus major league performance bonuses. But of that, only $100,000 is guaranteed......Garneau should have looked at following his buddy Justin Bour..........
Here is one part of the Free Agent market we don’t need to visit. The Oakland A’s are thinking about trading away Blake Treinen. I, for one, am not going to lament losing Treinen out of the AL West...........
Once Upon a Time the Dodgers needed a bunch of marquee names to boost attention and attendance while they rebuilt their farm system, and didn’t mind blowing up their wallet along the way. This proved a propitious opportunity for the Red Sox, as the Dodger gave them a get-out-of-jail-free card and took on a lot of payroll with a lot of decrepit big names. This freed up the Red Sox for an accelerated reboot. Two seasons later the Red Sox won the World Series. Well, the Red Sox are back in that bind. A roster loaded with marquee names that are either (a) aging and decrepit, or (b) about to become super-expensive Free Agents. So why the hell not suggest that the Red Sox do all that again? Dump Trade David Price, Nathan Eovaldo and one year of Mookie Betts off on the Angels and pillage the Angels farm system as icing on the cake! Sure, because from the perspective of a New York writer that sure makes it far more likely that Gerrit Cole is not a Halo, but a Yankee............
The Nats signed Wilmer Difo to a one-year, $1 million contract and avoided arbitration. I link this NOT because Difo is a foil to Garneau (above). I link to it because at 8PM tonight MLB teams hit the deadline for offering contracts to players to avoid arb, and the Angels are one of these MLB teams..........
Kyle Gibson, pitcher, is off the market. To the Rangers, 3 years $30 million............
Drew Pomeranz, another pitcher,is also off the market. To the Padres, 4 years $34 million plus $8 million as a signing bonus. Wowsers...........
And if Pomeranz can get $42 million overall, that makes a Zack Wheeler at $100-$110 million a steal.............
And Yan Gomes, another catcher, is off the market. Back with the Nats (expectedly), 2 years, $10 million...........
The Pirates hired their manager, plucking bench Derek Shelton away from the Twins. One must wonder if now that Shelton has his own way, he will have all of his players taking batting practice with a Speed Hitter gizmo?............
ASSTROS NUTZ
($$) - MLB pitchers, most of all, would seem the most likely class of player to be ticked off by the Asstros cheat schemes. Which gives us ‘Losing a war that you weren’t informed of’: Some MLB pitchers are livid over electronic sign stealing. I have written this before, but if MLB isn’t going to tolerate pitchers taking matters into hand and dealing with this themselves, MLB needs to own up to the responsibility of policing that they have claimed as their exclusive right and issue the Asstros franchise a legislative bean ball...........
More Inspector Internet analysis of Asstros brazenness, doing the hard work for Rob Manfred.............
And more info is arising out of the 2019 ALCS. Yankees complained of flashing lights at Minute Maid Park during 2019 ALCS. Not sure what that would be about, but the Asstros have earned every bit of questions and challenge and doubt by now................
BASEBALL THINGS IN GENERAL
Gee, imagine that. The incident level of ADHD is declining among MLB players. Exemptions for ADHD drugs in MLB drop to lowest in decade. Who knew that scientist had found a cure?...............
($$) - Huh. Counting down the 20 greatest MLB games of the 2010’s and only 1 of the 14,400 regular season games makes the list. I’m not very comfortable with those odds. And what are the odds that this 1 regular seasons game of the decade involves the AL East? And the Yankees?...........
Baseball fans love their local baseball announcers. Undisputed. Which makes it even more cool that Victor and Gubi are considered one of the best in MLB today.............
Won’t somebody think of protecting Ichiro’s arm??? The man just tossed a 131-pitch complete game............
Rest In Peace Seymour Siwoff, “the statistics maven who turned the Elias Sports Bureau into the place to go for exact information on teams and athletes for more than a half-century”. Siwoff was a SABR pioneer and a legend. He was 99-years old..........
Rest In Peace Dorothy Seymour Mills, pioneering baseball historian. She was 91-years old...........
Department of Grand Irony in Media History: Mark Cuban launched his career as the earliest of early sports streaming services. Audionet into Broadcast.com. Mostly, his gig was to take commercial content and then re-broadcasting that over the Internet. DACA did not exist back then and media was not paying a whole lot of attention to controlling their content over that silly Internet thing. He sold that business at the peak of the dot.com boom for a grossly over-inflated $5.7 billion. He was the Internet dog food delivery service of sports/news content but all that money gave birth to the infamous Cuban ego writ large with which we have had to deal ever since. Along the way, of course, Cuban bought himself his own toy sports franchise, the Dallas Mavericks. That makes him a content source and a part of a sports league that would send out multitudes of lawyers to grind down anybody pirating NBA broadcasts today. No, by golly, the NBA is locked into the gluttony of cable TV mega-deals (sound familiar?). And now here sits Cuban, most cognizant of what’s going on among all NBA owners, who is realizing that those cable TV mega-deals are taking the NBA down with them as sports consumers cut the cord..........
By the way, before we exit and while we are on sports broadcasting, it sure was a tough holiday weekend for sports reporters. College football coach loses big game, takes it out on the post-game reporting pool..........College football coach loses big game PART 2, also takes it out on the post-game reporting pool..........College football coach WINS big game, gets caught celebrating too early, takes it out on post-game photographer...........
STUFF
We need to get to more HoF ballots. Right now, Derek Jeter needs just as much help of Rafael Furcal............This video is supposed to be about how amazing it is for the kid to be swatting incoming bottle caps with a baseball bat. That IS amazing. Not near enough credit is being given to the guy using a slingshot to throw strikes with a bottle cap............
OT: Not baseball-related but, yes, journalism is hard. Too bad not enough people really do it any more.