The Angels beat the hapless Mariners 2 to nothing on Wednesday. There is no game today. This Friday the 6th features a doubleheader against the Royals, with games beginning at 12:05 P.M. PST and 3:35 P.M. PST. Jose Suarez is scheduled to pitch the first game and Julio Teheran is scheduled to pitch the second game, which is a makeup of the February 22nd game.
Angels News
Griffin Canning’s elbow remains a mystery. He seeks a second opinion today. I prefer to hope they said “We can’t see anything wrong with the elbow.” and Canning said “But it feels like crap. I’m getting a second opinion.” Obviously, it could be that they told him it’s time for the knife. Billy Eppler says he is not looking to add another starting pitcher (grumble grumble)…Castro, Bundy, Teheran, and Andriese have been impressing their new teammates...Is Mike Trout’s excellence boring? Not for Angels fans…..Mike Trout is “fine,” by the way. (He was plunked twice yesterday.)
News From Around Baseball
Christian Yelich extension analyzed. Kole Calhoun is having a pretty good spring. Pete Alonso has officially used his F-bomb for March. I wonder if this will cool off the trend about microphones on players….. Trash can autographs will probably become a thing in 2020…. A little something from the Bureau of Funny Windups.
More Elbows A’poppin!
Chris Sale got a lot of opinions. Tyler Beede is not feeling so good.
Duffle Bag
Idiot gambler threatens to behead players. Meetups will fall by the wayside as the corona virus scare grows. I know a lot of people who make a living selling art at conventions and they are on high alert going into con season. The players may be a bit more aloof about autographs for the same reason. More on that here.
Photo Credit: Rex Fregosi
Angels have fired clubhouse manager for allegedly putting illegal substances on baseballs https://twitter.com/maria_torres3/status/1235726180176678913?s=21
Visiting Clubhouse Manager… wtf, he was giving opposing team’s an illegal advantage. This doesn’t sound like pine tar, I wonder what these substances are?
Our scandal is a team employee helps the other team cheat… Gesus…
Yeah I’m waiting to hear more information on this. I have a hard time believing that an employee of the team since the 80s would be helping the opposition. Weird situation.
Stands to reason that someone like…I don’t know…maybe Dylan Bundy would have known about the clubhouse manager from the past few seasons? How long could this really have been a secret?
It was Bosco.
For those who have Youtube TV, looks like no Angels this year…
https://twitter.com/BillShaikin/status/1235596912155176960?s=20
I’m shocked…
YouTube TV reached a deal for all of the channels except Fox Sports West, Prime Ticket, and YES.
https://www.cnet.com/news/sinclair-youtube-tv-strike-deal-for-19-sports-networks-but-not-yes-fox-sports-west/
Meh. Too late YTTV. I already canceled and switched over to Hulu TV anyway. Hulu is much more user-friendly and there’s a few other benefits they provide that outweigh (aside from having FSW). Even if they come to an agreement with Sinclair, I’m already gone. Hope many others do the same.
Yeah! That’s what I did to Sling last summer, the bastards. The guy was doing the pitch about “we got all this other great TV for you” and I said “I get TV for free from Pluto TV or through my antenna. What do I need you guys for if there is no FSW?”
Can I watch FSW through Hulu if I’m not in the local coverage area?
Also, does it have the MLB channel?
Do you have T-Mobile? I hear they can hook you up with out of market games on MLB.com. I still need to check on it at the source when I go in to pay off my phone tomorrow or the next day.
I’ve used MLB.tv the past couple years. The blackouts when the Angels play the As and the national blackouts are really annoying. But what really pisses me off is that every single playoff game last year was subject to a national blackout, despite the product being advertised as including the playoffs.
Answer to both questions is no.
If you’re outside the FSW territory then you would need MLB At Bat to see the Angels FSW cablecasts. You get all the game, but not the pregame or postgame shows. The lack of the latter doesn’t worry me at all, because it is usually 1am to me by the time the West Coast weeknight game ends.
How much is Hulu tv a month?
That really sucks. I canceled my YTTV after I heard the news, now it’s just a matter of Hulu or nothing. The fact that Sinclair is involved makes me lean toward “nothing” at this point. Oh well, at least I can watch highlights online.
The fact that all the RSOs *except* FSW, Prime Ticket, and YES cut a deal with YTTV, makes me think Sinclair really ran up the price tag for the two largest markets in the US.
The thing is, YTTV is maybe the most data-driven streaming service today (it *is* owned by Google, after all…). Therefore, the ownership knows to the number of minutes how much time is spent by the subscribers watching FSW and PT, versus all the other channels they offer in the LA market.
I posted the story the other day that Sling/Dish dropped the Fox RSOs last year, just before they were sold to Sinclair, and reported losing $40,000 in subscriber fees, but saving 10x that amount in what wasn’t paid to Fox. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if YTTV has the same approach. They won’t raise their monthly fee, and having 95% of subscribers subsidize the 5% who use FSW and PT on occasion isn’t (to them) good business.
FSW is important to those of us who want to watch the Angels games, but that would be a very slim portion of the overall number subscribers to YTTV. There is apparently a price at which keeping FSW and PT is untenable to YTTV, and it would seem Sinclair breached that threshold. Right now, it is the cliché brinksmanship, with Sinclair directing viewers to complain to YTTV, and launching advocacy websites to try and stir up the sports fans. There is still a month before Opening Day and a settlement wouldn’t surprise me in the meantime. But these are increasingly dark times for the RSOs, and I am certain Disney was glad it was “forced” by the Feds to sell the channels to comply with terms of their Fox purchase. Once upon a time, Disney dreamed of creating ESPN RSOs to compete with Fox’s channels, but now I am sure they realize the best days of regional sports channels are in the rear-view mirror.
Remember too that 2020 is the season that MLB is allowing the teams to sell the streaming rights to their games. Maybe Arte will go for another revenue stream, or maybe he will protect FSW. But if he makes a move for the cash, you may soon be able to stream the games through an online service, paying only for the access to the game and not for a 24-hour channel of LA sports.
There will still be interesting developments on this story to come over the next month or two.
Of course it is only us that gets screwed.
OUCH!… Did anyone else notice how far and fast that baseball bounced off Troutys knee? “I’m Fine”, “that sounds like something someone who is not fine would say!”(cornzzz)
Well, let’s hope so.
So you’re saying Trout will need TJKS?
Hmmm…
Eppler has to be putting up a smoke screen. If you aren’t concerned about our pitching, you are oblivious and/or delusional. A pitcher is going to cost us Marsh at a minimum, I’m thinking. Anybody else happy about Dylan Bundy? Didn’t get to see yesterday’s game but he has been pretty decent. Apparently a nice pickup on Eppler’s part.
Of course he’s smokescreening it… if he publicly comes out desperate to acquire another pitcher, other teams’ trade prices will be driven up even more. Other teams already know starting pitching is the Angels’ weakness, so that’s probably already limited their trade options to this point anyway. Let’s hope something materializes, and soon. Just assume Canning’s season is done already. UCL “changes”? “irritation”? Yeah, this is going to end with him under the knife with TJs. Let’s just hope they don’t delay the inevitable too long, or else they’ll be without Canning for a significant part of 2021 as well. 🙁
I’m not so sure. It’s not that Eppler wouldn’t like to acquire a new pitcher, but I suspect at this point he has explored the potential trades and perused the remaining free agents and determined that there isn’t anyone worth acquiring at this time.
Canning will already miss a significant part of 2021 if he gets T.J. surgery. It is a 1.5 – 2 year recovery period. If Ohtani pitches in May, it will be 20 months for him. If Canning gets surgery in March, 20 months puts him at November 2021. In other words, he’s likely gone for two seasons.
I’m with @TheOrangeCurtain on this one, other teams know the Angels are already desperate for pitching before Canning went down. Meanwhile, Eppler doesn’t want to part with Marsh until justified (and for good reason). Even before the Stripling nontrade, Eppler’s put himself in a huge pickle with no way to get out.
Yeah. This is yet another ugly situation where the GM doesn’t get to live in a fantasy. I would guess he’s been worried about pitching for 3 years. Does anyone really think that the GM of THIS pitching staff would have stopped worrying about pitching even if we’d signed Cole? Or Keuchel for that matter? He knew Canning was a dice roll and Ohtani was gonna be late to the season. Still, he’s trying not to panic and bury a bunch of money into a bad contract or trade away really good prospects just to “do something”. It’s a pretty rough stance to stick to…. maybe the team will (gasp!) actually have some good luck and a guy like Sandoval will turn out to be solid this year PLUS he’s eventually able to get a decent trade together. I just don’t want him to trade Marsh and then watch him be Jim Edmonds for some team for ten years so that we can have Kent Bottenfield and barely move the needle for a couple years because we got desperate.
You can’t/ don’t do TJ for irritation. The whole point of tommy john is to replace the damaged ligament… if the ligament isn’t damaged tommy john wouldn’t do anything.
The doctors are probably looking at something to numb/ treat the pain at this point, whether that is cortisone, PRP injections or removing a little bone (unless there is underlying damage they didnt reveal earlier).
This week they said they have been trying to see if there is anything wrong inside the joint. If he’s just grinding bone on bone, Tommy John won’t fix it. That’s what cortisone is for. I’m glad they are working to understand just what is going on. I’m sad that the mileage on that arm is really catching up to him.
Thank you for the uncommonly thoughtful response to a situation which is making Angels fans nuts.
The number of folks who are begging for Canning to have UCL surgery is just unbelievable, especially since while (A) HIPAA laws mean we don’t really know shit about his condition, and (B) it was said last week that this was an irritation and not a sprain/tear of the UCL.
On the face of it, this is very good news. Had it been a sprain of any stripe, then we would be looking at either PRP or UCL processes, with rehab times of 6-9 months for the PRP and 12-18 months for the UCL. Instead, this is a rest/no surgery prognosis, which is time on the IL, but still an indication you will have the pitcher on the mound sometime during the season.
Still, Canning seems to think something isn’t right. He is doing the intelligent thing, which is not to tough it out, but instead to have another doctor review the results and run any additional tests necessary. One would imagine the Angels would be in full support of this, since Canning is a long-term piece of the Angels’ plans.
Instead, fans are pissing and moaning about how the Angels should stop dawdling and get Canning into a surgical facility tout de suite. This is irrational, ill-informed, and just plain fucking (May, 2018) stupid. If nothing else, it completely misses the point that the player is the one driving the train, not the front office. Eppler can’t demand any player get a medical procedure done. There is this small matter of the Players’ Union…
Angels fans should take the win when it is presented. Should Doctor #2 find something disturbing, then the story could take a darker turn, but in the meantime Angels fans need to have a Coke and a smile.
“Is Mike Trout Boring?” Now if he could only learn how to play the game l would be more impressed with him, and his attitude is atrocious. Seriously l read somewhere recently that a writer wrote that this year Trouty will start to decline! l do not see that happening as l see this as Mikey’s biggest season coming yet with close to 400 Total Bases and setting Angels team records all over the place.
I am a bit disappointed with the team saying that they are fine with our starting pitching though, but l do not think Billy Boy would tell us anything if he was trying to trade for a starter now, such as a Boyd, hint, hint.