Thor’sLinks: Bour Four!

Well, thank you Justin Bour for waking up the Halo offense. I will certainly take the wins and bank them just as all the other Cincinnati Reds opponents have been gifted to do. But it feels somewhat icky. These two games showed us a Reds team that played sloppy, played sleepy, played listeless.

It was, by contrast against the Reds’ indifference, very impressive to observe how hard and fast and vigorous the Angels play the game, even if they committed a pair of errors themselves yesterday. Hats off to them.

The Angels win with their second consecutive 5-1 drumming and now greet the Oakland A’s. Remember, Brad, I have one simple rule...

Back above .500 with some Taking-On-The-Green-and-Gold-HaloLinks:

A Little Bit Of Angels News

Wilfredo Tovar put on an impressive display of speed and aggressive, productive, base running on Tuesday night. He took one guy’s base hit, and two other guy’s fly ball outs, and manufactured a run out of them. But in the tangled world of LAA roster injury shuffle, that merely means that Tovar is the next guy to have to be DFA’d. Between Cesar Cuello and now Tovar, that’s 0.8 of bWAR over 18 games (7.2 bWAR across an entire season) sent onto the waiver wire in the past few days as a consequence of roster crunch...........

And our reward for opening up a roster spot vacated by Tovar is...Trevor Cahill. Yep, Cahill and Jaime Barria are coming up. Jake Jewell is going to Salt Lake City (let’s pretend that he is the one flipping with Barria, who might go right back down shortly after his start last night) and Tovar is DFA’d (to open up a longer-term roster slot for Cahill..........

By now you know that Shohei Ohtani pitched off of a mound. Not the mound. A mound. We...have...lots...of proof.....And we have Mike Trout busting Ohtani’s chops..........

Shohei Ohtani is really really good for the OC economy. Something the Anaheim City Council might want to keep in mind.........

Which brings us to Ohtani Porn! Now that Shohei is killing it again, everybody is getting re-energized to figure out how to keep up with his true value once he becomes a two-way player again..........

Congratulations to Taylor Ward, named to the PCL All-Star game..........

Over in the medical ward, we have lots of updates:...........($$) Zack Cozart is nearing career-altering decisions as nobody can figure out how to heal him..........JC Ramirez has agreed to extend his rehab another month and considering how he got taco’d in his most recent outing that might be a net-positive..........Keynan Middleton is tracking to be back at a time that now lines up with Ramirez..........And Andrelton Simmons is maybe activated today for the Oakland series..........

A little plug by the Angels PR department focusing on a select few to promote the LA bullpen of late. I mean, technically we could pick on Felix Pena because he has not been a ‘starter’ since late April, but that is only because of using an opener in front of him.).........

Everywhere In Baseball

It might be the case that I slip on this far more often than I recognize, but I truly do pursue a path where I want to be the person who seeks ways for things to succeed rather than seeks ways for things to fail. But when an idea comes along that appears to me to not having been thought about in the slightest in order to overcome the most obvious challenges, I cannot help but call those obvious things out first. Such is the case with the Montreal Bay Ex-Rays. The Washington Post does the best job I have found so far for pulling the threads of this poorly knitted garment, (and, to be fair, Jay Jaffe at FanGraphs has the best single sentence summary of the idiotic economics: “...convincing two cities to build ballparks for roughly half a season of usage per year is in no way going to be easier than convincing one city to build a ballpark for a full season of use...”), but there are still multitudes of things wrong that are not being considered. Things that impact you and me, for example. You probably didn’t even think this mattered to you, personally, did you? Well, it sure as shit could. Pretend the Ex-Rays and Angels make the playoffs and are opponents in the ALCS. You want tickets to each of the first 4 games. Games 1 and 2 are in Anaheim, which is easy enough. Where is Game 3? Where is Game 4? These are typically back-to-back days so that we don’t end the World Series at Christmas. Are you flying to Florida on a Thursday for a Friday game, and then dashing off to the airport to find a red-eye flight from Florida to Canada for the Saturday game (I’ll save you the clicks: no such flight exists)? You think the players are going to like this, or the umpire crews? You think FOX is going to want to contract with a complete 3rd production crew to deal with the 3rd venue in the series, without compensation from MLB for their additional overhead? Everybody in the AL is impacted in numerous ways were this idea to be implemented (PPD makeups?), ways that only get worsened in the playoffs. And if the Ex-Rays were to make the World Series, the threat then extends to the entirety of the NL. Clearly, for Rob Manfred to have signed off on this he is thinking only about the stadium money...........(P.S. - This review is somewhat informative, but I am going to link to it simply because it includes the word “cockamamie”.)

Wow. Talk about tough luck. Giancarlo Stanton already re-injured himself. That was in only his 6th game back from the IL, which he first went out on way back on April 1st.............But that won’t impact his ability to snag a free trip to London..........

The Dodgers had three kids give them walk-off wins on three consecutive games and they celebrated. Now they have three kids caught walking onto their field of play in three consecutive games and they are getting pissy..........

In the Tommy La Stella versus D.J LeMahieu All-Star voting race, Matt Birch calls B.S. on LaMahieu’s Yankee Stadium Little League park home run. He’s got a point, but that La Stella inside-the-park homer on Tuesday was not exactly pro-quality outfield defense...........LeMahieu, by the way, was a bet that is paying off in spades, which Billy Eppler missed out on..........Meanwhile, Mother Nature sent an envoy to Yankee Stadium to assist officials with their eyesight on the measure tape used to determine the home run fence distances (because there has long been serious reason to doubt!)..........

This update on a young girl getting hit in the head with a foul ball at an Astros-Cubs game was all over the Internet yesterday. She suffered a fractured skull, bleeding, brain contusions and seizures. I would be remiss to ignore the update, even though none of that comes as a surprise to me. A baseball off a bat is faster and more harmful than a baseball thrown by a pitcher, and batters already wear protective head gear because of what a pitched baseball might do. I guess if a parent is going to park a 2-year old child in a premium seat so close to the action then, yes, we will end up with protective netting everywhere to protect that child from their parent’s lack of common sense (And I speak as one who as an 8-yer old pretty much grew up in the first row behind home dugout in Angel Stadium - no netting. But my parents always sat ‘‘upstream’ and we were trained to be alert and trained to duck and admonished if caught not following those rules.)...........

The Braves build a new stadium, their new stadium has a faulty new walk-in beer cooler that winds up killing a contractor, and it takes a whole year for the widow of that contractor to find a lawyer willing to sue the ass off of the Braves? I thought our streets were flooded with unemployed law school grads begging for a chance like this? It seems like such a no-brainer I would have expected the Braves attorneys to counsel the franchise to reach out to her immediately and be pro-active about this..........

The Red Sox and Yankees playing in London this weekend is a logistical nightmare..........

MLB players who receive a Minor league contract during the offseason get to enjoy the nostalgia of MiLB exploitation all over again. I guess if this starts happening to enough of the MLBPA union membership, maybe that membership will push their union to finally address the issue?..........

It’s all over. Vanderbilt crushed Michigan 8-2 to take the 2019 College Baseball Championship..........

The Duffle Bag

Joey Votto needs to work on his game............(h/t reddit) The Onion continue to own all the Internet..........Lloyd McClendon with some truly old school arguing..........Never take your eyes off the game action, because you never know when you will be rewarded with something amazing..........(h/t UniWatch) More Negro League throwback swag. There can never be too much!.........So you think you could hit off a Major league pitcher? You silly sill fool, you...........