WeekEnd HaloLinks: Y Not 2K?

Take a moment to congratulate Albert Pujols for achieving a rare feat in the history of Major League Baseball. 2,000 RBI’s come in two ways. (1) hitting a shitload of home runs which, in itself, is an historically formidable achievement. And (2), actually coming through with a shitload of hits when a shitload of your teammates have done you a solid and gotten into a position where they score from that hit. Getting all those hits time over time over time, and not choking it up, when the opportunity presents itself is another respectable achievement. Statistically, it’s pretty much the way it happens but there is no la of nature that mandates it to be the only way. There are other possible outcomes. Further, the player has to be consistently healthy and consistently good enough to sustain a career for a very long time. Albert Pujols has averaged 150 games a season across 19 years before this one. Do you know how many Angel players accomplished this under the Halo in the entire history of our franchise? Zero. Mad respect, Albert. And congratulations.

All that said, Albert, you may now return to the Land Of Misunderstanding.

There are days I cannot explain. Yesterday, for example. Not even “Detroit” is enough to make sense out of it. You tell me:

A very brief rain delay. What, 1 hour?.....Tommy LaStella collects 8 total bases on the game - via TWO home runs. Add 4 RBI to that. Give LaStella 9 homers on the season, 29% greater than that of Mike Trout......Kole Calhoun homers. To LEFT field. Isn’t that only something like the 5th true LF home run of his career?.....Even more weird, Justin Bour got a home run! A pinch-hit home run, no less, so he came in cold......He came in for Albert Pujols, who homered for his 2,000 career RBI. For his 600th home run milestone Albert also went the home run route. That cannot be coincidence*.....Shohei Ohtani = 2 hit game.....David Fletcher, an easy inside-the-park home run held up at 3B so as to not violate the dogpiling chapter within The Book of Unwritten Rules (Sidebar: why does MLB not know about David Fletcher? You cannot search for Fletch on MLB’s video page.).....Luke Bard with a scoreless Opener 1st inning.....Skipper Brad letting ANY pitcher (Felix Pena, in this case) go 7 innings.....Then things start to get REALLY WEIRD.....Cam Bedrosian with a clean inning to close.....Zack Cozart gets a hit.....Cozart ends up on second base from that hit.....Kevan Smith gets TWO hits AND a walk AND gets all the way around the bases and scores real runs...TWICE.....Brian Goodwin pinch hits for mike trout, matches trout’s day with a single and is now batting 30 points higher than trout on the season.....In fact, everybody in the lineup yesterday got at least 1 hit, and 4 of them now have a higher seasonal BA than trout.....Finally, just to bring us all back to Earth, some random guy who chooses to continue to live in Detroit ends up in possession of Albert Pujols’ 2,000 career RBI home run ball. Choosing to keep it, he chooses to leave the game and go home with it, immediately lowering it’s value to about $8 retail. This explains why he chooses to continue living in Detroit.

Angels win 13 ( <— YIKES! There it is!) to nothing. They take the series vs. the Tigers 2 games to 1. Now we get our 3 games in Baltimore and a chance for trout to snap out of it. It IS possible. He has 8 home runs there in 100 At Bats. It’s not like it’s Fenway or Philadelphia or Monterrey or something.

Have some Let’s-Go-Bird-Hunting-HaloLinks:

* that was a joke, people.

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A Little Bit Of Angels News

So which one of you people is going to be that person who starts going to Felix Pena games dressed in a big peanut butter & jelly costume and holding a PB&J sandwich on a large stick?...........

Trevor Cahill has surrendered more home runs than any other MLB pitcher this season. And the Baltimore Orioles pitchers have combined to surrender more home runs than an other team this season. I put the over/under on home runs this game at 5 1/2...........

SportsIllustrated has noticed that mike trout has learned how to take a lot of walks. They are impressed. I would be, too, if trout were holding his SLG...........

$$ - Justin Upton wishes to thank the LAA franchise for changing the outer wall dimensions. With 7 extra homers to RF, he benefits more than any other Halo..........By the way, thanks to reddit, try and figure out which one of these is the Angels Stadium playing dimensions...........

(h/t UniWatch) Here come the California Burritos! (Brilliant logo, but non-Cal HH’ers need to understand that the recipe for a “California” burrito is that it comes with fries.).............

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Everywhere In Baseball

Dee Gordon is right, and we fans say it all the time. If J.A. Happ cannot control his location inside, he should not be risking player health by throwing inside...........

Ben Clemens of FanGraphs represents that person on the analytics team that gets left alone too long with their laptop, and comes up with what they believe to be an amazing new insight. But it comes at 2AM after too many Red Bulls and sour worms. So when the GM finally rolls into the office and finds that person asleep in their cube and surrounded by empty wrappers, and wakes them, the entire notion of advising a real MLB baseball batter on the strategic advantages to be had in certain situations by letting a real MLB pitcher hit said batter with a 97mph fastball is just no longer something that represents an opportunity for career advancement..............

In the game of sink or swim, the sinker is not treading water...........

TheRinger wants to explain the 2019 home run surge of Christian Yelich on swing plane. I look at his splits and see that he has 15 HR’s at home, and only 1 on the road. Last season it was 22 to 14. So I would explain his surge on his getting traded from Marlins Park to Miller Park before the start of the 2018 season..........

Wait a second. I am not advocating for Dallas Keuchel here. And you need to know that this research is not limited to teams with a really playoff shot. But who is it that FiveThirtyEight has pegged as the LAA 5th starter who is close enough to the Keuchel ELO rating as to prevent the Halos from mathematically benefiting most by Keuchel’s presence??

This whole Yusei Kikuchi pine tar event is truly curious. In short, the Yankees AND Mariners AND MLB are all just rolling it back behind the curtain. Only the fans are making a case of it. And we have the media chastising the fans for refusing to follow the party diktat. I side with the fans. Baseball has a massive rule book. We are educated on all those rules every game, every day, all season long. And then even in the offseason. It’s how we follow the sport and how we follow the events on the field of play. We know what rules give which players some kind of advantage and we want an even playing field so that we know what it is we are watching and understand the outcomes we are rooting for. By choosing to pretend like this is a non-event, by choosing to not honor the rules bond with their fans, all these parties are acting like an Enron caught with their hands in the cookie jar...........

Kyler Murray 1, Major League Baseball MiLB bus riding 0. But let’s not call it game yet. We got 8 more innings of history to play this one out............

Ballpark foods ranked. Well, by exactly one guy. He ranks pretzels ahead of hot dogs and peanuts so all he demonstrates is that he knows nothing...........

MLB crypto block-chain collectibles game. So many possibilities and they do virtual baseball cards?..........

Long live The Onion. MFY fans roasted.............

I got it!.....I got it!.....I got it!.....No, you got it............

Athletes compete at the extremes of human capability. As such, they tend to get hurt. And when they don’t get hurt, sometimes they decide to do something stupid, make up for it, and hurt themselves...........

Sinclair wants to do it. FOX Sports is gonna do it. Here come gambling apps from sports broadcasters...........

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The Duffle Bag

Keep in mind that the Houston Astros play in a park with a roof to protect the fans and players from the rain............Over in Colorado, they are tough. They know it snows. Deal with it..........Rob Manfred wants to impose controls on Clayton Kershaw, when Rob Manfred has controls in place long before he became commissioner which the umpires are ignoring. This is the umpire’s job, not Kershaw’s.........USA Today Fail, with a capital F. Almost as bad as the White House social media intern FAIL. All caps.............

Javy Baez with the most chill slide of all time.............And Cameron Maybin with a slightly less chill sliding catch..........

OT: Not baseball, but as Barry Bonds/Jose Canseco defensive play as ever was............

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