MondoLinks: Hasta La Vista, Angeles

Poor Skipper Brad. He has a Matt Harvey on the mound with a 3-2 lead, 2 outs in the 5th inning, and Harvey has only thrown 57 pitches. But the bases are loaded and Harvey has done nothing this season to earn any benefit of doubt. He also has Cam Bedrosian. Yeah. THAT Cam Bedrosian. And the bases are still loaded and the lead is only 1 run. This is what is known as Hobson’s Choice, when you are giving a decision between two options and neither one of them is a win.

The deal, though, is that if you leave Harvey in there what is the worst that can happen? Alex Bregman hitting a grand slam home run to turn a 3-2 lead into a 6-3 deficit from which you will never recover? Nah. Harvey might be bad but he wouldn’t be that bad. And Bedrosian might be bad but he’s probably less bad that Harvey bad. No way anybody is gonna give up a grand salami, but Harvey might give up the lead.

And thus, verily I say unto you: Skipper Brad shall handeth over thy ball of bases to Cam of the Bedrosians. And Cam sayeth hello, thank you, and good bye......And, hey, it was Cinco de Mayo, the Official MLB Day of Grand Slams. It was kinda like the thing batters were doing. Cam was just there to do his part..........

And in the end, we had a horrible showing in Mexico. Houston outscored the Angels 24 burritos to 6 tacos. Not enough tequila can make us forget the humiliation of being reminded that we are AAAA.

No game today, so we go at least 5 days without a win.

But not us, folks, We have here our usual offering of Major-League-HaloLinks:

A Little Bit Of Angels News

Tomorrow might finally be Ohtani Day...........

Albert Pujols is 1 away from 2,000 career RBI............

Noe Ramirez had his moment in Monterrey............

It’s pretty well understood that predicting the weather is the best job anywhere. You get to have all kinds of data and lots of cool tools - green screens, free trips to hurricanes, satellites and shit - and you never have to be right. And it’s also pretty well known that Mike Trout loves the weather. If this baseball thing doesn’t work out, Mike already has the chops for being wrong: “Do I think we’re giving the Astros an advantage? Obviously playing at home means a lot to us, but it’s going to be an exciting game. I don’t think we’re going to give them an advantage too much. (Looks like advantage Houston to me.)… We’re not going to change anything...... It means a lot to us.”...........In fact, Mike had a pretty tough weekend...........

Weekly Mike Trout Career WAR Perp Walk. This past week Mike, with only the 30th-best week among MLB position players, managed only to pass up Don Sutton. As I expressed last week, Mike and Zack Greinke are currently neck and neck, and with Mike being in one of his weak funks he dropped behind Greinke. He is stalled for the season, barely moving forward. On Fangraphs he has fallen back into a tie for 3rd overall, and with only 0.2 points ahead of Brian Dozier (this Brian Dozier), he is one the verge of dropping out of the AL lead for the first time this season..........Meanwhile, Christian Yelich returns from IL and immediately homers, again..............

Everywhere In Baseball

The pages of the Internet are filling up with all sorts of juicy baseball stories. No, not that kind of juicy. This kind of juicy............Pitchers know that “the baseballs suck”...........Let’s look inside the little devils and familiarize ourselves with how they are made................

Miguel Cabrera is not old. He has not been chronically hurt these past few seasons. Baseball has not changed at all. Pitchers have not changes how they approach At Bats at all. Managers have not changed how they use pitcher roles. No, the reason that Cabrera is not smashing home runs anymore is because he has shitty teammates batting behind him..............

Philadelphia fans have shaken off all that off-season pixie dust, and have reverted to, well, Philadelphians. Keep in mind that the Phillies are 7-3 over the last 10 and in 1st place in the NL East...........

Derek Jeter can’t really be this clueless, can he? Jeter and his financiers purchased the Marlins in September of 2017. At that time he had Giancarlo Stanton, Christian Yelich, Marcell Ozuna and J. T. Realmuto on his team. That’s 4.9 bWAR right there. He gutted the Front Office and recently fired his head of Baseball Ops. and he looks out and sees that the players he has rolled out there has only won 9 games and nobody in the Miami area gives a shit about his product. Jeets is “not happy”. And Jeets is not going to allow anybody in the organization to be happy. Jeets wants everybody to believe that his player personnel is actually better than 9 wins. Because “...everyone knows we’re better than this.”...........No, Jeter. No you are not. You have put together a team that looks to be historically bad............

We get front line starters and turn them into weekly catastrophes. The Rays take weekly catastrophes and turn them into front line starters. The Rays are smarter than we are. Deep sigh.............

Well, supposedly, Trevor Cahill and Wade Miley became the first and second MLB pitchers in history to have pitched in 4 different countries. I dunno, man. Look at Cahill stat line for Saturday. I’m not certain that anybody can say that he actually pitched...............

Baby Vlad has yet to take off.....But nobody in Toronto is worried.......Meanwhile, nobody is talking about his service time manipulation any longer.............

No, people, we do NOT need a Matt Kemp.............

Michael Paddock is pretty salty to get himself into the Rookie of the Month club..........

Tim Tebow update! Because I know that you were wondering...........

(h/t reddit) The FBI informed Major League Baseball that there was steroid use in the league, and Bud Selig and his cronies sat on it, doing nothing.................

You probably thought that this had already happened. But, no, Jake Peavy had not officially retired after his last appearance in 2016. He took care of that this weekend.............

The Duffle Bag

It doesn’t take for Mexico to showcase their own ballhawk............Boston has banned chicken, then beer, then video games from the clubhouse. But if there is one thing that just says ‘Boston’ it would be mariachi bands, and there is no keeping down such a strong tradition from the Boston clubhouse...........Little League triple, based off of Little League base running...........When social media hos go full stop stupid...............Kevin Pillar isn’t making miracle plays for the Blue Jays anymore. He makes them for the Giants. (Except that the real miracle here was his recovery, having overshot that runway.)...........Baseball meets Futbol.............