Good morning Angels fans! Last links before Christmas Eve. Be careful out there.
Angels News
We continue Jered Weaver week here at CtPG. Remember, if you want to make a fanpost about Jered Weaver, turn it in and it may end up on the site.
Angels lost their Minor League director of operations to MLB. He will now be a director of MLB’s MiLB within MLB.
The Angels lost another minors guy, this time to the Reds, as Cincinnati signs Matt Ball to a minor league deal. He was last seen at SPring Training with the Angels this year.
Around Baseball
Hank Aaron reflects on the Negro Leagues. He didn’t play for them long, but it is something most fans do not realize.
Ian Happ slams the owners for acting poor. He is the Cubs’ rep in the players union, although it is a sentiment found by all of the players.
Phillies got a new GM. Maybe they will do something, it is really slow this offseason.
Something to look at when bored this winter, HOF vote tracking. Looks like no one is likely to be voted in this year though.
So Yu Darvish is getting Trade rumors. Would be interesting if Angels get involved.
Blue Jays are in on DJ, like they are with everyone apparently. Hope people sign already.
Anything I missed? Post below for upvotes!
So if the MLB now has the Angels Minor League director of operations, Does this mean that MLB will never develop MLB pitching again?
Actually the perfect choice to oversee the “restructuring” of MiLB…
Matt Swanson? I’ve seen nothing on him online.
Andriese signed with Red Sox for pretty cheap. He was the only nontender I kinda thought we should keep. https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2020/12/red-sox-sign-matt-andriese.html
He signed for right at his expected arb number. He was the one guy I kind of wanted to keep too.
5 Steroid players receiving votes for the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame. Andrew Jones, Manny being Manny, Bonds, Clemens and Sheffield. How do you vote to include players who cheated?
Abreu and Rollins along with Hunter are not HOF players Hunter was a fav of mine, but the HOF should be for the top 1 or 2 percent of players WAR does not take into account of how many games played and Rollins falls short.
Bring on the other side of the coin as I’m sure it will come and be fun..
WAR is a counting stat, so doesn’t that somewhat account for longevity?
Yes, WAR takes into account games played…. you just divide total War by total games by 162. Thus, if a guy plays 25 years and has 70 WAR he is a 2.8 WAR player generally and you discount that 70 a little. So milking 10 more WAR out of 5 meh seasons in a career doesn’t do much for you.
I just don’t like WAR because it takes away from the prestige of my magical eyes having seen ten thousand games and being able to tell if a player has “IT”. Still, other than Harold Baines and a big pile of old New York players it’s usually pretty obvious if a player is a HOFer. I don’t even give a shit about steroids. In an era when Brady Anderson was clobbering the ball you still had guys Like Palmeiro, Bonds, Clemens, etc who were obviously the class of a whole generation on roids. Roids will always be part of the story of their era, their stats, and their legacy, just like the spit ball for Three Fingers Brown. I’m OK with it.
WAR!….good God y’all…..what is it good for?! Absolutely nothing, say it again!!
What is this “IT”? Itchy testicles? Is that why players scratch?
I hope in my lifetime…Bonds, Clemens, Manny, Arod, Palmerio, McGwire, Sosa, Puljos, Papi and the rest of the roiders never sniff the HOF. I might soften if they were contrite but not accepting of the loud-mouthed self-denials and telling the world they are clean. Fuck-em. They made their money off of me, that is good enough. Please, let’s not dignify them.
I might have missed this, but when was it confirmed Pujols used PEDs throughout his career? Or is this an assumption?
Have you seen the pics of Albert when he arrived here for his first camp? Neck as wide as the 57 Frwy, Arms bigger than Bilko’s. And I have heard him so many times deny steroids that I started leaning towards wondering why.
So Ian Happ says the owners did not lose money in 2020. Why I asked myself (At my age I even answer, so if you are a young guy saying I don’t talk to myself, you will down the road) how could they not lose money. Happ says you can’t lose money if you count the money you did not bring in. Hmm, that is not correct imho. Teams still have fixed expenses with the only income is from TV, radio, and signage advertising. Even in laying off or furlonging there is still bills to pay. With that said a hand full of teams collect a lot of TV and radio income.But MLB no doubt lost money and a lot of it, especially when you pay Billions for a team.
He might have a very good point. There is a difference between fewer profits and actual losses. It’s obvious the owners had less revenue, but unless their expenses exceeded their revenue, they didn’t have losses. Even if they did lose money, they might be exaggerating the amount.
Assume, 2020 Expected Expenses $200 million, 2020 Expected Revenue, $500 million, 2020 Actual Expenses $100 million, 2020 Actual Revenue $80 million.
The above would result in actual losses of $20 million, but if the owners are claiming losses of $420 million (which is actually just unrealized revenue), then Happ is right the owners are full of ****.
With no revenue sharing or live gate I’m sure most of the small market teams lost money. I do wonder about the big market teams, though. Those TV and radio contracts appear to be big enough to cover payroll. We have no idea about other costs such as stadium payments, but still, the Yanks, Dodgers, Cubs, those teams took in a ton and didn’t have to share any of it.
Slow off season, let me take a guess…
Owners don’t know how many games or expected fan revenue. Makes it pretty hard to set a budget.
We STILL don’t definitively know if there will be universal DH. We’re supposed to assume not, but successful people don’t generally operate off of assumptions.
The supposed ace of the class generally hasn’t pitched like a true ace.
Realmuto’s market is who, exactly?
There are tons of meh starters and right handed relievers who are very similar. No need to set the market.
Not to be a downer but I see far more reasons for the market to be slow than hot.
It’s like I’ve been saying for four years now. If you are all that good, especially if you are a good pitcher, you get extended early most of the time. Add to the the fact that, apparently, modern muscles and tendons are made of paper (some day in the future scientists will discover that protein shakes create “dry muscle” or something) and you wind up with total crap FA markets.
I still contend that the Angels got caught the most flat footed by all this back in 2014-15. They seemed to be working under the assumption that good 28-30 year old pitchers would be hitting the market every year like they always had, that they’d land Chris Sale when the White Sox couldn’t pay him, etc but that model went away fast. I still can’t believe how hyped everyone was for all the pitching that was going to be available in 2017 back n 2015….. then by 2017 it was a pile of guys who weren’t on the market any more and guys who had broken down like Jake Arrieta. Now days everyone is left guessing whether Lance Lynn or Dallas Keuchel (or Trevor Bauer) will be their better selves or not. Garrit Cole was an outlier because he was inconsistent on a cheap team till he went to Houston and blew up as a soon to be FA.
This is why, every time PTP signs up a new FO guy I take note. Any team that wants long term hope is going to have to go the Tigers/Padres rout and have 15 good to solid pitching prospects in the pipe so they can produce 4 good starters on their own.
I have to agree completely with this perspective. There hadn’t been many actually good pitchers who got FA last decade precisely b/c teams hoard good pitching, esp younger ones, like crazy. The most of those who become FA are seriously flawed in some fashion or, if not, command ridiculous sums of money. The only solutions are spending oodles of money on pitching (a losing prospect in the long run), get good at fixing and/or artfully using flawed but interesting pitchers, which seems extremely difficult–I think this is what Eppler tried and failed–or developing pitching from within the organization, which hasn’t been tried in some time.
I think part of it was a big swing away from spending on pitching by the late 2000 or early 2010s. Teams realized that it was better to extend a 25 year old a couple years past his FA season for a solid chunk of money rather than give out the contracts they used to. The Yankees/Kevin Brown, Doyers/Darren Dreifort, Rangers/Chan Ho Park, RedSux/Doyers/Josh Beckett, Orioles/Scott Erickson, Reds/Homer Bailey, Rockies/Mike Hampton, Padres/James Shield, Giants/Barry Zito and so on all taught GMs not to load up on one pitcher and conversely taught pitchers to sign extensions while the money was good.
That really started to show in the market by 2013-15, right when replacing guys like Weaver, Wilson, Greinke and Richards became an ugly problem.
Or flipping a few for Dylan Bundy, Andrelton Simmons, Jose Iglesias et al.
I’ve heard of the Artful Dodger, sadly not the Artful Angel. There is though, Cheap Arte.
Mr Potter from “It’s A Wonderful Life”…….Arte