TuesdoLinks: Okaerinasai Ohtani-San

With just a touch of luck, we will see Shohei Ohtani back in the batter’s box tonight. With just a touch of luck, we will also see Griffin Canning mow down the Tigers and show us that he has the promise to be the real deal. We just a touch of luck, Billy Eppler will have to drain the roster swamp of at least on bog monster, and move us slightly forward into a real MLB lineup. With a touch of luck, the clouds will finally part on 2019 and we will catch a glimpse of future sunshine. With a touch of luck, Tigers manager Ron Gardenhire will forget that mike trout wears #27 and pitch him stright up, and trout will respond as though he is Trout. Hey, it could happen..........

Enjoy the day with these Let’s-Find-Out-HaloLinks:

A Little Bit Of Angels News

It’s a Tuesday LOADED with good news. First off, Griffin Canning makes his second MLB start. Maybe he can get a glimpse of his longer-term outlook tonight............Second, Shohei Ohtani is now with the team in Detroit, and will get a look over to see if he is good to insert into the lineup. Doing so will necessitate a correlating roster move, which might mean that this one is a double-dosage of blessings...........And, third, Cody Allen is back from IL, and back into his lower leverage role out of the pen. Ok, so maybe that was only 2 good pieces of news............

Pujols is on the verge of his 2,000 RBI. So OCR writer Jeff Fletcher celebrates the “skill” of stepping up to the plate lucky enough to have runners in scoring position, and then batting pretty much the same as you would do if those runners were not there..........Seriously, Albert Pujols career overall: .301/.381/.553 versus Albert Pujols career with Men On Base: .309/.406/.553..........

The Angels, as ranked by SRS, are rated to never win or lose a game against an average team ever again. Of course, the Angels ARE that average team, so every one of those games would be an intra-squad..........

Listen to Steamer, people. Trevor Cahill is prime for a huge bounce back. It says it right there in the data..........

If mike trout no longer swings his bat, is mike trout still mighty?..........

Yes, indeed, folks. Your LAA 2019 pitching staff really is as bad as you think. Worse than the Pollyannas want you to think. Worse than anything imaginable. This chart is telling you that the Halo pitchers don’t last very many innings, and when they are on the mound they aren’t striking out too many batters compared to how often they walk them. And the confluence of those two bad habits is so horrid that it defines the worst possible position on the charts..........

Everywhere In Baseball

I would love to make Ford jokes at the expense of the Astros, but the Astros kicked out butts. The Halos cost me all sorts of smack-talk potential and I just have to eat it...............

The Nationals flight out of Philadelphia and on to Milwaukee was delayed due to mechanical issues. Now, let me be the first to state that staying on the ground when your airplane is not 100% fit for takeoff is THE best thing to do. But check this out. The airline held the players on board that plane from 6PM until 3AM before they finally figured out that they were losing the battle, and surrendered their hostages back to the terminal..........

I’m just sayin’, when a swarm of bees choose to take over a baseball stadium, let them. make sure and include them in attendance figures so that Rob Manfred looks good, but let them have the stadium. First, we need each and every one of those little guys. Second, they can get pretty nasty if you make them angry. And, third, you do NOT want to be the first MLB stadium to try and shoo them away, only to learn that you have encountered Africanized bees...........

The Book Of Unwritten Rules does NOT, apparently, include a chapter on plugging 4 different batters in the same frame..........

But the chapter just before that, about NEVER forgetting no matter how many months when it’s only ONE batter plugged, that chapter belongs to Kevin Gausman. And as a reward for having that long of a memory, Gausman has been suspended and fined..........

Matt Shoemaker is a good man, and you just cannot keep a good man down..........

Ronald Acuna is young, and very good already. But, scary still, Acuna is getting even better. We Angels fans have seen this before. Imagine if Acuna ends up getting so scary good that he ends up being rendered merely normal in his prime season...........

Here we go. The end of the Big TV revenue streams for MLB is drawing near. Everybody in the broadcast industry - meaning the industry that ponies up the money to MLB franchises in the first place - sees it so clearly that the FOX RSN’s sold for a steep discount. And even at that the forecast is for Sinclair to lose anywhere from 50% - 70% of their distribution channels as cable carriers start turning off the spigots..........(Giggle giggle giggle on Derek Jeter’s excellent sense of timing. The Marlins current contract ends after the 2020 season.)..........Wall Street loves the deal. Maybe because they don’t know how this all works. And to the earlier point, this article also notes that distributors are not looking forward to handing anything to Sinclair...........

$$ - Since I brought up Derek Jeter, let’s check in on how great of an employer and businessman he is not............For those without a subscription, this is about “Gary​ Denbo, the Marlins’​ vice​ president of player​​ development and scouting....a longtime mentor and confidant of Marlins CEO and former Yankees great Derek Jeter.”.....So we get this quote from one of Denbo’s victims: “ ‘I’ve never encountered someone in baseball — or in life, honestly — who seemed to go so far out of their way to treat other people badly, to the extent where you think, ‘Why would anyone do this?’ one former Marlins employee says.”....Time for Jeter to stand up for his guy, and shoulder some responsibility. “Jeter, through a spokesman, declined to comment on Denbo.”......Jeter couldn’t even man up to decline to comment on his own behalf..........

Once Upon a Time (21 years ago yesterday), in a Baseball sport far away, an MLB pitcher managed 20K in a single game. That was Kerry Wood. his opponents were the Houston Astros. What was going through everybody’s heads on that fateful afternoon? (The story is a re-print from a year ago.)..........(The game was played on a Wednesday, in Wrigley, with a 1:20PM start in front of only 15,758 people. The game featured 30 K’s in all against only 2 walks, so it lasted only 2 hours and 19 minutes.)..........

106mph. That’s a fastball I don’t even want to imagine, much less stand in against. Even if Jordan Hicks were pitching from center field..........

Hey. Now THIS is a wild-ass irresponsible rumor that I could totally get behind. But, you now, live radio. Anyway, The Orioles to Vegas would create the chance to add them to the AL West. This way we move the Astros out, and dump them into the AL Central. Push Cleveland over to the AL East. Since Cleveland is only 270 miles further away from New York, no big deal. And then we have Cleveland AND Tampa Bay capable of nabbing 2 playoff slots out of the AL East, leaving BOTH MFY and BoSux fans on the sidelines............

I’m thinking that David Price just made things ugly in the Boston clubhouse. We might not hear about the consequences until everyone as retired from MLB, but getting called out like that can’t be a positive vibe..........

Best of luck with your health, Ron Darling..........

The Duffle Bag

Just wanna point out that it doesn’t take genius to market Major League Baseball or connect with future generations............Job alert! You could be joining the cool kids at that hipster franchise in Tampa....Or you could get stuck in Detroit............Cam Bedrosian wishes he had outfielders this committed..........Move over Bartolo Colon. Here comes Pablo “I don’t care” Sandoval..........