Image from Angels Twitter
The Angels signed left handed reliever Alex Claudio to a one year deal worth $1.125 Million. Mike Trout can swing a bat well. On a related note. MLB.com thinks that Brandon Marsh and Jahmai Jones will both arrive in the big leagues in 2020. It’s a puzzlement. Did those guys get called up this year? Happy belated birthday to Taylor Ward.
Angels Activities For The Bored
This is a holiday wish list card for Santa with five blanks. I would write “pitching” five times, of course. Here are some Angels gingerbread ornaments. If you want to use them as templates for gingerbread cookies, here is the official Angels recipe for gingerbread cookies.
Links From Around Baseball
Major League Baseball recognized the Negro Leagues, at least as they existed between 1920 and 1948, as being Major League. Their statistics and records are now an official part of Major League history. MLB is now investigating Omar Vizquel for domestic abuse against his wife. He claims it is just a smear campaign against him because she is divorcing him. In 2016 he was apparently handcuffed and taken away in a police car after one incident, though. The Mariners signed Keynan Middleton for $800,000. Scott Boras says Blake Snell is unlikely to be traded.
Taken in the 5th rd in the 2011 MLB Draft.
We took CJ Cron in rd #1 😫 😫 😥 👎
You are a hindsight genius!!
Even the Red Sox passed on Mookie for 4 rounds. Blasphemy!
Lived in Santa Barbara mere miles from me. We never hooked up.
First round draft pick for sure!
Isabella Rose Giannulli?
Kinda looks like her….
Hmmm, maybe if he put a name under tge photo…
Just wanted to put in a plug for Victor’s Big Fly shirts. Got my Negro Leagues Barnstorming shirt today and it is extremely nice quality, not the usual cheapos you get from most places that custom print shirts these days. Really cool, with great retro artwork.
The quality and feel is amazing for all of the Big Fly gear. I even have a jacket that is really nice.
That’s my favorite of the ones I own. Those shirts are so soft and comfortable.
Just looked at the site, probably grab one. Are they true to size, or run a bit small? Cant tell from the reviews. I’m firmly in between L and XL on everything. I prefer Larges when they fit well.
They are true to size. Maybe even a little big. You’ll probably want to go L
Just throwing this out there…..what if we traded Adell for a cost controlled starter like Manning or Plesac then signed the steady Michael Brantley for right field? That way his solid, lefty bat could hit behind Fletcher and open up the running game.
Fletcher, Brantley, Trout, Rendon, Ohtani, Upton, Walsh, Iglesias, Stassi as the lineup.
Plesac/Manning, Bundy, Heaney, Canning, Barria, Ohtani as the rotation.
Iglesias, Mayer, Pena, Claudio, Buttrey, Rivera penciled in for the bullpen.
Still should have a few bucks for a backup catcher maybe another bullpen arm.
I think I would rather sign another starter than spend the money on Brantley (was suggested he would be around 2 years for 28M). I mean having him in RF, even until Marsh arrives, would be great – but more of a luxury than a need (imo). We need pitching.
14M a year gets us Tanaka/Odorizzi/Quintana and is almost enough to add both Taijuan Walker and someone like Hand.
I like Manning. I know you like Manning, as do a couple others around here, but I have questions since he keeps coming up as a trade option for us. Isn’t his arm hurt right now? He has the always iffy forearm injury going. He is no doubt an awesome prospect, but last report I read had his change up as meh and his new sharper breaking ball as a work in progress…. thus he’s a AA pitcher, all be it a good one.
But why do guys keep saying to trade for him and then put him at or near the top of our rotation like he is a proven and valuable MLB piece? I mean, I want him too. I just want him in AAA till June at least.
He’s supposedly back healthy. Detroit apparently held him out early and long enough.
There’s always an arm injury risk with a guy who throws that hard. There’s also a boom or bust risk with Adell.
Really Bundy would be our 1 in my scenario but Manning would clearly have the best potential. I think Plesac is more proven
J Up with an interesting perspective.
https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/angels-justin-upton-shohei-ohtani-not-mike-trout-is-the-most-talented-baseball-player/
He’s right from a pure talent standpoint. It just remains to be seen if Ohtani can put it all together consistently. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if he beats Trout for MVP one of these years.
Trout’s a fifth place bum
LOL So that’s the problem.
From my perspective, a strong bullpen is the #1 predictor of success in baseball over the last 20 years. Have there been any teams that went deep into the playoffs without one? The bullpen is the key to preserving those 1 and 2 run leads in the 6th inning. It can make the difference in winning or losing 10+ games in a season which is 20 games to .500. Additionally, winning those games rather than giving up leads close-and-late is huge for morale and momentum.
Eppler never ‘got’ the importance of the bullpen. He let key guys leave and stuck with mediocrity such as Bedrosian and Noe. As a result, over the last 5 years the Angels have lost 50-60 games they should have won and that is 100-120 games to .500. That right there is the difference in playing in the playoffs and watching them from home.
As another example, while Salmon and Erstad and Glaus and Anderson and Spezio were certainly important to the 2002 club, it was KRod and Percival and Shields and Donnelly that held the close-and-late leads and led to the Championship. I would argue that KRod was the single most important September call up in Angels history.
In his first two moves, the Platypus has revealed that he understands (way more than Eppler) the critical role of a shutdown bullpen. That gives me some hope.
A lot of the blame for weak Bull Pens has to be laid on Arte too. When KRod was set to become a FA Arte said he would never pay that kind of money to a relief pitcher. If memory serves KRod was asking for $7.5 mil and 5 years. But historically relief pitchers do not put many back to back to back very good to great seasons together. But KRod was one of those that could. A few years ago the Royals had maybe the best Bull Pen ever and the good ones all left for big paying jobs and they never could repeat the great year or for some two years they had in KC. Notice how many teams Smith played for and how long it took to put him in the HOF. The reason was because everyone thought that the next year was when he would crash and burn. Relief pitchers and Bull Pens are tough to put together and there is a lot of luck involved. Currently there just is not enough good pitching to support 30 teams.
You could also just use our past 9 seasons under two different GM’s.
Dipoto
Dipoto signed setup Joe Smith in Nov 2013 and traded for Huston Street in July 2014 for the bullpen. Also in that 2013-14 season, traded for pitchers Salas, Santiago, and Skaggs.
Eppler
We traded 2019 1st rounder SS Wilson to help facilitate a salary dump of Cozart’s contract last off-season.
It seems odd that after the first two losing seasons under Eppler that he wouldn’t amend his ways. It took his last year as GM to finally draft a pitcher in the first round.
The first step to becoming relevant again would be to have a positive run differential. And a good barometer of that would be to get RA under 700 runs.
Although very unlikely, a different FA route could be signing a Rosenthal/Hand + an O’Day type “different look” RP and only buy one “FA or trade” SP with the available budget. If you can shorten the game with the bullpen, you can still use P like Sandoval/Barria for 5 innings.
Again unlikely but if the SP market is not to Perry’s liking… maybe.
BLASPHEMY! You like tired ideas and don’t love to win! We need to trade Justin Upton for DeGrom and then sign away Beiber from the Indians via a hostile stock purchase! Then retroactively draft 2012 Chris Sale with the time stone. DO IT BILLY! I mean Perry!
Good Morning to you folks on a cool and cold day, so whatta ya say to warming it up and ask Santa for 5 things with names and money notwithstanding Ok,
Didn’t see Marsh, but Jam Jones put up some good numbers in 3 games and 7 at Bats.
AVG .429
OBP.429
SLG .429
OPS .857
you can see from those numbers that every time on base was a single since the three numbers are identical. So was that 3 for 7 or 6 for 14? One of those.
By the way, I love what happens when you have something divided by 7. It’s a repeating pattern so those are all rounded. Carried out they’d be .4285714285714 etc. and then the OPS, which is twice that, is .8571428571428 etc.
As Billy Preston once sang, nothin’ from nothin’ leaves nothin’.
Even when divided by 7.
3/7. It was 7 AB. per GP.
And on the Athletics, Angels page they show Jones avg. leading the club with that small sample size
Sure, those numbers mean nothing, but it does bring up the fact that it would be awesome if it turned out Jones was a good MLB player in 2021 like Walsh last year.
That’s been in the back of my mind too. Maybe found his stroke after all of the tinkering. Wonder if anyone is asking for him in trade wanking.
Still looking for his first major league walk. Thats not a good sign.