TuesdoLinks: Angels Can’t Put Forth Best Foot

It should be amusing to us all that the Angels are actually trying hard right now, and still look most feeble. Cleveland and Oakland are neck and neck in their horse race to snag the last Wild Card spot. Not putting forth whatever might possibly represent the best possible lineup would seem by Oakland to be cheating in favor of the Indians. Managerial and Front Office unwritten rules are being followed here.

So Skipper Brad put up the best lineup he had (sans an injured Mike Trout) and kept his pitching options on short leashes, all. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he gave his crew a pre-game pep talk about being professional giving Cleveland a fair fight.

It wasn’t until it was very late, and it wasn’t until it was very obvious that the Angels were going to lose, that we got to see Skipper Brad hand a Jared Walsh another tiny taste of MLB. Silly Jared. He homered.

Lest you think that a Jared Walsh home run triggered a magical rally, Angels lost 6-2.

Thus, the A’s got pasted AND the Angels failed to help them out any. Cleveland is within ¹⁄₂ game of the WC spot. Oakland still has to battle Houston while the Angels will likely keep getting rolled by Cleveland no matter what they do. That can have only one single outcome: to piss off Oakland A’s fans immensely. In other words, good times.

Dine on some Keeping-Oakland-Fans-Miserable-HaloLinks:

A Little Bit Of Angels News

Season Status Update: Wild Card Elimination number is a very lonely ONE. Only a blazing hot Houston juggernaut, which rolled the Oakland A’s 15-0 just one day after crushing the Mariners 21-1 (think about that: 36 runs scored versus only 1 allowed) kept the Angels from waking up this morning with The Big “E” stamped across their forehead. It’s like knowing that the clock hands have finally clicked into the full midnight position, and we are just waiting for the mechanism to begin a tolling of the bells. Hilariously (or perhaps tragically considering the tanking efforts throughout MLB), the 8 of the 9 teams with more losses than LAA have ALL lost their most recent game. Only the White Sox are showing signs of life. Think of it as Halo CPR. But Baltimore has lost 5 in a row, Seattle 6, and Toronto 7 in a row. Quite a fascinating race towards the bottom we have going on here............

This is the most confusing injury update I have heard. Mike Trout on his sore toe: “I’m just trying to maintain the soreness. It’s been sore for a while now. Just trying to see if I can go. It’s still sore, but I want to be out there.” So his toe is sore, and has been sore for a long time now. That would seem to me to be evidence that Mike is doing a fine job of maintaining the toe soreness.............With that behind us, we can focus in on actual information. Trout underwent a procedure to kill off some neuroma issue in his foot. Cryoblation is where they stick a big needle into some spot and then pump some super cool fluid into and out of the needle, kind of like a nitrogen-filled auto radiator. And it freezes the spot, killing the target. In this case, some irritated nerve...........

Everywhere In Baseball

Home Run Derby Update:..... Pete Alonso took over the race, hitting numbers 46 & 47 last night.....Mike Trout (45) is going to be sidelined for at least half the week and won’t be moving his needle.....Christian Yelich (44) had a quiet night in Miami.....Cody Bellinger (44), Eugenio Suarez (44), and Jorge Solar (41) all had the day off............

The Red Sox parting ways with Dave Dombrowski is not a surprise to me. The timing is a surprise, but not the eventuality of it. I have been harping on this probability since before the Red Sox did win their last World Series (sorry Dan Shaughnessy, but you are late to this game)......($$) - It’s all about the cul-de-sac wherein Dombrowski parked the Boston Lambo.....But, man, the fallout. The new management is too chickenshit to face the media that pimped their glory.....Mookie Betts and/or J.D. Martinez are already targeted as being dead men walking.....Betts, for his part, is already bracing himself for what might be his new future..........

And, ladies pay attention here, among the triumvirate replacing Dombrowski in an interim bases is Raquel Ferreira, the highest level of decision-making for a woman in MLB history..........

One could say that a Christian Yelich owns September. Games count the same in September that they do in June, so we can be dismissive. But being the kind of player who gets hot in September is a lot more comforting should the chance ever come to be playing in October. Yeah, I went there..........

I’ll say this for Mike Scioscia, there is no damned way he would refuse to pair a future Hall of Fame pitcher with the particular catcher that said pitcher prefers. And any offensive deficiencies that come from starting that catcher wouldn’t mean shit, no matter how high up in the organization came the pressure. Not so with future Mets ex-manager Mickey Callaway, future Mets ex-GM Brodie Van Wagenen, and future Free Agent happy-to-turn-his-back-and-become-an-ex-Met Noah Syndergaard..........For his part, Callaway remains pretty sure of his footing on his journey to being jobless..........

When one celebrates the combo of power and speed that Ronald Acuna, Jr. and Christian Yelich are displaying - Acuna with 37 HRs and 34 SB’s, and Yelich at 44/30 - it’s easy to overlook Mike Trout in the conversation. Trout’s had some good combos too. 30/49 in 2012, 29/30 in 2016, and even 39/24 last year. The opportunities, though continue to favor Trout. Acuna has drawn only 66 walks this season, and Yelich 78. Trout is at 110, and was 122 last year. Trout is still fast. All he needs to do is take his shot more often and steal a few more bases............

It’s The Argument again. The difference between being The Best versus being The Most Valuable. Since most writers and most fans seem to be incapable of discerning how team sports function in their admiration for individual achievement, maybe we should help them all out and stop using the “valuable” adjective completely..........

($$) - Here is new meaning to “suit up” in baseball. A pay it forward tradition..........

Major League Baseball might be looking to wait out the Minor League Baseball pay exploitation problem because they are on a journey to gut the Minor League system anyway. Why waste time and money on guys who have no chance to make the Big Leagues in the first place? Why have your guys spend effort working on their craft by honing skills against meaningless talent? “At any affiliate, there are three players who have a chance to play in the majors. The rest of the players are there so they so they can play. I don’t think that’s fair,” [Dodger pitcher Walker] Buehler told FiveThirtyEight. “You are preying on their dreams.” Ok, so let’s do this. Let’s let the MLB teams cut their organization back to 40 players period. The MLB 25-man and another 15 from all the other levels of their MiLB system. With those 40, MLB teams can save lots of money and have fancy-assed training programs loaded with lots of analytics and technology and create a Grand Unified “The [insert team name here] Way”. Every other MiLB player is cast off. I’m good with that. Great, actually. Because that makes every other MiLB player a Free Agent and they can sell their services to the highest bidder when some team comes calling. No more options bullshit, no more arbitration bullshit, and no more service time manipulation bullshit. MLB teams are only going to need two or three draft rounds each June. With only 3 amateur picks as a reward and no prospect haul to get back by trading away your MLB talent, no more tanking bullshit. And while MLB franchises lock their 15 non-MLB prospects up in their Spring Training centers where they can conduct simulated baseball masturbation for the benefit of high speed cameras, the other couple of thousand players can continue to figure out how to excel at a game of unpredictable events against living, random, hungry competitors............

Keep in mind that hedge fund managers are a cancer upon society, producing nothing of value and elevating themselves as a function of short-term strategies that tend to be terminal to enterprise. Now know that Elliot Management is a hedge fund that is seeking to blow up AT&T’s sports content investments as a means of diverting more capital into Elliot Management...........

The Duffle Bag

Umpires don’t need to be able to PLAY baseball in order to OFFICIATE baseball. Clearly.............Listen to your catcher..........The Red Sox got eliminated from AL East contention (they are still hanging on for a WC spot but that ain’t happening, either). The team that cut the Divisional cord was the rival Yankees. And after doing the deed, somebody within the MFY staff decided to troll the loser BoSux post-game clubhouse..........