For the most part, the Angels pitchers pitched well against the Mariners on Sunday. The Angels won the game. Is there a connection here? I think there is. The Angels lost to the Brewers yesterday 10-9 behind some relatively atrocious pitching. Anthony Rendon seems to be feeling fine. So does Justin Upton. The Angels outrighted Gerardo Reyes, who has a UCL sprain in his pitching elbow. He’s not feeling fine. The Angels are using a 20 page book by Sam Suplizio entitled “Defensive Outfield Play” to help their outfielders perfect the fundamentals. Joe Maddon found his copy and photocopied it for everybody.
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Get ready for some additional drama as we approach the height of the CBA negotiations. The 2021 revenue sharing plan has a component where the league will advance or loan money to the small market teams on behalf of the big market teams. Representatives of big market teams say this is optics and the money will never be paid back. MLB, for its part, says the money will absolutely be paid back. Long time MLB pitcher Rheal Cormier died of cancer at the age of 53.
Happy belated International Women’s Day!
Interesting slide. I think this guy is out, not only on the tag but I am also not sure his hand really touched the plate.
Photo credit: Rex Fregosi
Odorizzi’s contract is confusing.
https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2021/03/astros-to-sign-jake-odorizzi.html
Are we paying Quintana about that much? Less? I can’t tell. As I understand the Cobb deal were paying him very little….comparatively.
Odorizzi even he doesn’t pitch one inning nor chooses to ever pitch for the Stros gets a total of $20.25 million for 2 years. If he blows out his arm that guarantee becomes $23.5 million for 3 years. Obviously he will not exercise the player option if he feels he can get over $3.75 million to pitch in 2023. If he meets all of the performance incentive clauses (90% of them are very doable if he stays healthy) and elects to opt out in 2023 (a forgone conclusion if Odorizzi pitches that effectively) he will get $30.325 million for 2 years.
Quintana signed a 1 year deal with the Angels for $8.0 million. The Angels will pick up $5 million of Cobb’s 2021 salary . So the Odor eater is getting a whole lot more money from the Astros then all of of our offseason starting pitching acquisitions combined
Thx, cowboy
It kinda looks like the Stros wanted a two year contract with Odorizzi, but added the third for luxury tax purposes.
I’ve been thinking about writing a piece on the CBA and a great way to fix baseball in general. I’ll throw out the premise here:
Each team contributes 48% of their local revenue into one big pot then takes an equal 3.3% of the money in that pot. In 2019, per BB-ref, that sum was $118 million per team.
Put language in the CBA that teams must use that money on player payroll. A use it or lose it provision. There were 10 teams who spent below the $118 million that year and many of the team names that spend below the revenue sharing amount are the same year after year.
The big market teams are already paying out this money so it doesn’t hurt them. The players would get another $300 million-ish in 2019, the only losers are the owners who constantly pocket other teams money instead of spending on players.
As for the other expenses in running a team, I understand that. Teams still get money from MLB ($91 million in 2019, but usually less) and keep 52% of their revenue.
Under this scenario teams will sign those mid level free agents, lock in a couple of extra extensions, actually try to compete. Having to spend as much money as your competitors also puts a kink into tanking.
I like that. I think that would help some of the problems. I would suggest making it so that any of the required money that wasn’t spent directly on salaries for the team would instead be redistributed to the players league wide on a per person basis.
I would couple it with a change in the draft order so that teams are rewarded for trying to win (I am in favor of the team with the best record who doesn’t make the playoffs getting pick 1). That would give teams rebuilding an incentive to sign mid-tier free agents.
No, you can’t distribute it to the players. Low budget teams need to be able to use the money to buy-out arbitration years and offer contract extensions. That would put players in direct competition with each other. If a player agrees to an extension or a arbitration buy-out, that player may be perceived as having stolen the money from his peers, as it would have been distributed among them.
I’d even let teams defer the money rather than losing it. So, for example, if a team only spends 100 million, the extra 18 million will go into an escrow account. If the team spends 136 million on payroll the next year, they get the 18 million back.
The escrow idea is a decent one. However, you don’t want teams rolling out $60 million payrolls for 4 years then going nuts for a few years.
Limit the escrow amount to say 10% of the total take and give teams a deadline of 3 years to spend it. That way a team like KC could, theoretically go from $100 million for a couple of years to $150 million for a couple and keep a competitive window open a little longer.
That would be a decent limit on the Escrow. It would also allow teams to structure contract extensions over time.
The escrow idea is Ok within limits, but I don’t buy your premise that players would be perceived as having stolen money from them by taking a contract extension. Would Kurt Suzuki be that upset about not getting $6,400 because Ke’Bryan Hayes signed an extension that pays him $5.5 million in 2021?
Beyond the escrow, what do you think should happen to any unspent money in Jeff’s proposal? Should it go back to the owners?
The Escrow idea is interesting. I just wouldn’t want it to prevent or encourage teams from putting the best team on the field.
Great ideas. Most importantly, teams need a minimum floor they cannot go under in spending. Need to stop that before the sport is further destroyed.
Agreed. And this would create that floor without any additional expenses to the big market owners, who are pissed at they way their money is currently handled.
I wouldn’t want to kick in cash that ends up in Nutting’s pocket year after year. To then have my stadium half empty because nobody wants to see the dog crap team he’s assembled while pocketing my money.
Another thought, the minimum should be determined after-the-fact based on the higher of the prior and current season’s revenue. If you tell the Marlins the salary floor for 2022 is $118 million, the concern is they will target exactly $118 million and not a dime more. If you tell the Marlins the salary floor will be based on revenue in 2022 but will be no lower than $118 million, the Marlins might go a little higher to account for estimated revenue growth.
Joe is a pirate. That book is still under copyright. /s
Sheesh, Red. Derek Shelton is a Pirate. Maddon is an Angel.
Can’t believe we gotta spell this out for ya…
I hate to say it, but my spit-balling impression is that Andrew Heaney has never been particularly good, has never given us any real reason to believe he’d someday be good, and that at this point his ceiling is mediocre and his floor a midseason demotion to AAA. I hope I’m wrong, as he seems crucial to any small hope the Angels have for this season.
Yeah but he’s left handed and he likes dogs.
Heaney has good stuff, the issue has been health. However, the last two years he has avoided the DL. Career WHIP under 1.30 is worthy of a starter. Spring stats has never been Andrew’s focus.
He’s given us plenty of reason, just that he took them away so often within the same game so many times, too. In aggregate, I think Heaney’s been somewhat above average (sorta in line with his career stats), just that he’s been such a Jekyll and Hyde that he’s hard to make sense of.
He’s massively inconsistent. Granted a Spring Training game this early isn’t a good gauge of a guy, but when a guy has a career ERA+ of 95 I’d at least hope for durability.
We talked about this last night, you still trade 1 year of Howie for 6 years of a high floor/mid rotation projected pitcher every day of the week. This one just got hurt a lot.
I’ve never been a fan of Heaney. He a is a crack in the WAR formula. He is so equally inconsistent that it comes out to average. However his average is not the kind that keeps you in every game. Throw in a 50/50 offense and our chances to win when he pitches are like 25% of the time. I don’t know the WAR way to factor this but the only way we win is when both our offense is clicking and he’s pitching very well. If he’s shaky it’s over.
Trading Howie for him was fine because he provided 6 years of this average-ness, but I don’t see a reason for a major financial commitment due to his injury history.
Twenty page book on defensive outfield play is being introduced by Maddon. That basically is admitting that the coaching in the minor leagues is not even on par with top high schools coaching staffs.
‘A’ is for attack the ball. ‘B’ is for get a good break off the bat. ‘C’ is for cut off the angles. ‘D’ is for defense! Etc.
There is a lot more to the defensive teaching and the Angels coaching from rookie ball and up are clueless in just how to coach this. For the last seven years I have said that there is no team wide structure of coaching the Angels way of teaching. Currently each level is the coach at that level wants. The kids could in theory be taught 4 different approaches to hitting, fielding or pitching by the time they make the Angels. Look at Adell who is just lost defensively at age 23. That is something that just should not be happening, he is just the latest in a long line of minor leaguers to be promoted who are not displaying basic playing major league skills.
The reality is that if the Angels’ minor league coaching is that incompetent, then we are fools to be rooting for this team. It can’t be that bad. I mean, if it is, it would be worse than an average little league coach. Outfield defense is not brain surgery. It’s pretty basic techniques that get repeated over and over.
With Adell – I think he is missing the ‘natural’ ingredient. Great defenders have an instinct for defense that can’t be taught. It gives them an extra split-second that makes all the difference. They make it look effortless. An example from another sport would be Rodman rebounding. That’s not coaching (although coaching can help) its instinct. From what I’ve seen Adell lacks that instinct which will always limit his abilities.
There’s definitely some truth with Gramps.
Look at Jam Jones. Kid had four different swings over two years. When the Angels weren’t screwing with his swing he tore up the AFL twice.
Perhaps some of those tweaks helped, but don’t take a kid fresh off tearing up the AFL, bring him to camp, then immediately start changing his swing.
Thaiss was a supposedly high floor, quick projection bat. Countless swing changes later he looks like a bust.
Good coaching staffs take what a player does and helps that player do it better. Our coaching staffs seem to take what players do and change it to what the staff wants.
For over a decade the Angels have been frustratingly lacking in understanding the fundamentals. Most Halo players have had no clue how to hit the other way, execute a bunt, steal a base, or understand that you’re supposed to take the extra base while the runner ahead of you is trapped in a rundown. Here’s to hoping that Maddon will finally fix this entirely fixable problem.
True. Odd because doing the little things was a trademark of the early Scioscia years.
It has really gone downhill.
Sosh is not in the equation here as he also had to deal with kids nor really because are coaching is so poor in the minors.
Considering there were no MiLB games really last year, teams could somewhat consolidate coaching/philosophy at their alternate site during the COVID year. Now that the MiLB structure and number of teams has been pruned back as well, I’d hope the Angels (and would expect most teams) would use the opportunity to coordinate and re-consolidate a cohesive organizational philosophy in all their coaching styles. You can and should coach a hitter’s swing based on his natural skills (i.e. Jam Jones) but there are a lot of other game aspects that are common to all players, baserunning, defense, etc. Top down, so at least the up-and-coming prospects aren’t getting 50 different opinions on approaching the game. Maybe this anecdote is showing a bit of the weakness of the Eppler-run organization for how it ran for the past 5 years. Watching Jo Adell’s outfield play in 2020 was a bit shocking. It was if he was totally unprepared fundamentally. I give the kid a pass on hitting MLB-caliber pitching consistently (that’s tough) but baseball defense doesn’t change much from the minors to the majors.
Great comment.
Yeah, I saw Adell in ST in 19 and he looked a lot better than he did in MLB in 20. Decisive first steps, on balance under the ball when he caught it, in good throwing position. He looked ready for the field but on the batters box.
I saw him in Lake Elsinore in 2018, playing center field and he looked good defensively and showed a lot of range.
Yeah, but then some old guys on the internet who have done squat in professional baseball explained how real men play baseball, he realized he actually sucks, it shook him to the core, and he morphed into a crap outfielder.
Plus a couple more years of listening to rap music and being plagued by ghosts.
What I am trying to figure out is how many Angels OF actually suck? I mean yeah, there’s Upton. Adell is just a mess, I think all this deep down probing of his foundational childhood baseballness is bullshit. He’s just got the yips sort of, but he’ll likely be fine. Fowler’s old and washed up but how bad has he been thus far for us? Marsh? Adams? Schebler? Ward? Who are we talking about, other than Adell, when we start our blusterfest about Angel’s not teaching OF to OF?
I blame rap music and ghosts.
If nothing else, Alec Baldwin taught us that ABC is:
A – Always
B- Be
C – Closing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elrnAl6ygeM
Put that Coffee Down.
Epic scene. One of my favorite sales scenes.
Boiler Room also has several.
If I have granddaughters, I plan on showing this to her Girl Scout group when they start Cookie selling season.
I think Grandpa is right here. I’m reading the basics of Sam Suplizio’s ideas as taught my Maddon, and I am recalling having learned this stuff in High School. So either my HS coach was on top of cutting edge teaching 25+ years ago, or the Angels’ system is lacking greatly in consistency. The stuff I see in the article is nothing groundbreaking, just basic stuff you’d think these players should have learned already. Or maybe they haven’t and Joe has found another organization-wide defect that needs to be fixed.
For all we know Maddon just brought it out to shit on all the outfielders for a couple lazy practices.
If you want to understand Maddon his Angel Legacy and why he bleeds Angel Red, I recommend watching this video he took last year when he toured the Angels old minor league practice facilities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwR_8Mv4elg&list=RDCMUCS7H_WWPj5_qfD-zoUzuX2A&start_radio=1&t=2494s
He doesn’t get into the meat of the Angel player development process until about 6 minutes in but he covers a lot of ground giving insight into the Angel Player Development way from the early 80’s through 1994. What’s obvious to me is Maddon is, first and foremost, a baseball coach not just a manager.
Despite their mediocre field success I think the Angels had a vast history of success with their minor league program from the late 70’s up though the mid 2000’s There are many unheralded coaches from this period that were instrumental in the development of many future major League players including the core of the Angels lone world series team. Guys like Bob Clear, Howie Gershberg, Marcel Lachemann ( even though he was a manager ) our current first base coach Bruce “Jeter” Hines and of course Joe Maddon.
I’m not sure why the Angels have got away from the approach teaching fundamentals, making baseball fun but trying to be innovative. ( The Angels used a sports psychologist?) Its obvious to me that some where along the way Reagins (who came up through our system) DiPoto and/or Eppler all got away from what appeared to be a very successful program. Maybe part of the problem was Sosh since he had so much power in the organization after Stoneman left but he was a player turned manager that probably knew very little about player development.
I’m glad Maddon dug up Suplizo’s book. Lets get the whole organization back to fundamentals while still utilizing the latest technique development software and pitch spin recording machine.
I watch a lot of other teams play. It’s actually pretty common across the board for actual basic fundamentals to kind of suck now. The Angels aren’t even close to the worst I’ve seen and even giant balls of talent like Tatis Jr and Eloy Jimenez give old white guys plenty to complain about when it comes to what we all learned in 6th grade about fielding position and catching with 2 hands etc etc. It’s just a guess on my part, but I’d bet it’s harder to get a really talented kid to focus on this stuff now days. Add to that, plenty of teams/players get away with sloppy fundamentals and win/get paid now.
Much like learning pitch location and velocity changes instead of just hurling the ball, fielding and hitting fundamentals are a neglected aspect of the game that I am surprised more “fringy” players don’t focus on so they can succeed and get paid. Guys like David Fletcher, Brett Gardner or the hated Dustin Pedroia can go far with just executing reliably.
I have a nagging suspicion that the Angels will regret not signing Odorizi. 2 years – $20 mil seems very much like something the team could have done. Not only would it keep him from going to the hated ‘Stros but the Angel rotation would have received much needed depth with an experienced, quality arm. I think that was a mistake. We will see.
I already do.
Bundy, Odorizzi, Heaney, Quantana, Canning, Barria with Ohtani as a flex in is a pretty nice rotation. Not in line with the Padres or Dodgers but probably the best in the AL West.
Plus Houston doesn’t get him.
Pretty much a guarantee that Odorizzi will pitch better against the Angels than he does against any other team this year.
Out on the tag (hard for the ump to see that though) and we have the wrong angle on the plate. He might get a tiny piece of it (but I doubt it).
Definitely. The tag on the thigh beat the hand on the plate/ground.
Saw it too. The tag was there about four inches before he got the plate. Pause button doesn’t lie!