It is always great to honor a great man and that is what we do this weekend. As we take time to reflect on Dr. Martin Luther King’s great work, let’s catch up on baseball a bit.
On Wednesday I was hopeful of a meaningful conversation between the owners and the players union. The two sides are just weeks away from sunny skies, money rolling in, and afternoons on the golf course. You’d think that would motivate them to make a deal.
Well, once again the owners came to the players with a proposal. And once again the players didn’t like it. The players then responded with…nothing.
I didn’t expect a deal to be made at one meeting. I did expect a conversation to begin. See, conversations lead to understanding which leads to deals. Thus far the owners have presented numerous proposals. The union has presented zero. This is a one sided conversation and those solve nothing.
However, look at that second to last sentence. A counter proposal from the MLBPA would make this a real conversation. Once that happens, I’ll feel like we’re on the way to a season.
I’ve been looking at the Cactus League schedule for weeks now waiting to plan my trip. Once I take my Dad to the Cubs ballpark we’ll have hit every one together. Don’t screw this up, players and owners.
If they you’re thinking of a later trip to Spring Training, March 24th looks like a great day. Catch the Angels at Camelback vs. the White Sox then cruise down the street to watch a nightcap of Brewers at the Padres. Lots of food around the Padres ballpark to fill in the time.
Lockout, smackout. Perry isn’t letting some work stoppage get in his way. The Angels signed Magneuris Sierra and Kyle Barraclough to minors deals, cornering the market on difficult to type names.
Kyle has a league average fastball with an above average spin rate. His problem has been the long ball.
Once the season does resume (I’m typing it into existence) some players coming off very disappointing 2021 seasons need to rebound. But can they? Anthony Rendon made that list. Very nice read and your longform reading this week.
Conversely, several players had unexpected stellar seasons last year. Can they repeat?
Wasn’t I talking about Patrick Sandoval as a solid rotation piece a couple of days ago? The Athletic named him as a potential break out candidate in 2022.
Want to hang out with David Fletcher and support a great cause? You can do that next Thursday at the very nice Seal Beach Country Club. There are other VIPs attending but not yet named. Probably a few Angels. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting David a few times, you won’t be disappointed.
Who will be calling those games? We have an answer.
We write a lot about numbers here. FanGraphs just found a platoon split I’d never heard of and I bet you haven’t either.
Ever wonder who the WAR leader is by position? I found it.
I can’t let this links segment go without discussing the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. His work made our nation and all our lives better. We honor his life and work on Monday.
Dr. King was inspired by Jackie Robinson. The two were friends and civil rights icons. If there’s one thing that should stand as baseball’s enduring legacy, it should be the positive impact it has and continues to have in bringing people together.
You can be any height, weight, color, gender, or nationality. Either you can hit the curve or you can’t. Maybe you can throw one. Baseball is the great equalizer and families spending time together playing and watching the game is a beautiful thing.
Enjoy the long holiday weekend. Thank you Martin Luther King Jr. for all you did for this great nation. We are all better for your life and service. RIP.
I am worried. As I remember, the Atlantic League is where MLB “tests” all the stupid new ideas. Well get a load of these!
“The Atlantic League will continue to use larger, 17-inch bases; anti-shift rules; and a change to extra innings that puts runners at first and second to begin the first inning after regulation and then loads the bases for innings after that.”
So they’re going to make the runner on 2nd even worse. And then in the 11th inning make it horribly awful. Hideously awful.
Classic Manfred. Doubles down on his idiot ideas.
I got this hat. Now I can really confuse the crap out of all the Doyer fans I work with.
Nice. is this is a replica? How did you acquire it?
yeah, I think it’s a 1935 Angels hat… it’s American Needle.
Its international signing day So far we’re up to
1011.https://twitter.com/TaylorBlakeWard/status/1482439261374717952?cxt=HHwWgICp9eyp15IpAAAA
https://twitter.com/JeffFletcherOCR/status/1482448276578205697?cxt=HHwWgoCstc2225IpAAAA
Doesn’t Perry know he’s supposed to be focused solely on hiring a PoBO?
Acktully that’s Arthur, John, and Denny’s job, since a POBO would outrank Perry……The Arthur Cabal wants it that way!
👍 💪 💪 👍 👈
Daaaaamn!
You tell her 2002
He ignores everyone calling him out for months on end, and then pounces on what was meant to be a joke with a serious response.
Oh man, he sure got me. I should delete my account in shame. 😂
Can we all just agree to ignore him?
Unfortunately, Its like a multi car pile up on the freeway. No matter how hard you try you just can’t ignore it.
Except he wants you, needs you to look and comment. If we all just ignore him, in time, he will find others to annoy.
Where’s the fun in that?
Does anybody know how we did. The LA Times is acting like the Doyers got the higher ranked prospects, even though they had a lot less money to spend. Or is it the Doyers bias toward the Doyers?
This is another area where, unless we’re talking about top 10 Intl prospects, who cares? For example, Kevin Maitan was THE #1 PROSPECT a while back. If there were articles blubbering about how the Angels pile of 16 year olds is the bestest ever signed I’d still put very little stock into it. It’s great that the Angels are obviously scouting in Latin America and signing players but it’s still a total crap shoot. We didn’t sign any 2M dollar bonuses so none of them are Juan Soto, etc but maybe a couple of them will be good.
Go to BA or MLB.com
Besides it’s about quality, not quantity. Drafting 20 pitchers doesn’t matter if 90% of them suck…….. USC football usually outrecruits Oregon every year and yet they’ve done way better than USC.
well, first of all, USC does NOT outrecruit Oregon. Check the recruiting rankings. 2019, Oregon #7, USC #20. 2020, Oregon #12, USC #63 (!). 2021, Oregon #6, USC #7. Secondly, your post is different than your hindsight trolling. Now you’ve added foresight trolling!
Daaaaamn!
You tell him Eric.
Better make it
1112. The Sequel.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcRvN2gtPiw
https://twitter.com/Jared_Tims/status/1482498088581304321
Five pitchers, two catchers, two shortstops. That should just be our standard order every time PTP goes out to get players.
Better make it 16. Even more on the way.
https://twitter.com/TaylorBlakeWard/status/1482524325244637185/photo/1
A 100 overweight National Guardsmen still isn’t equal to 25 Green Berets or Navy SEALS.
💪 💪 💪 👈
Why don’t you just be patient and wait to see if they’re any good (total crapshoot just as Gitch claims?). Cody Webster (the star fat kid from the 1982 LLWS never played a game of MLB).
PON and Gubi in the broadcast booth with Matty V kicking PON out here and there, so… are they getting rid of the 3 man booth? Haven’t heard anything about Mota echoing in as the 3rd man. Are we back to a 2 man booth or what?
Probably 2 man in the booth with Mota support on the field.
CTPG needs to temper their optimism for Patrick Sandoval (ask the other guy who had a nice first year with us in 2018 in exchange for Ian Kinsler).. 💪 💪 👈
Hey Toots See Red’s COT comment below. Since you don’t listen to us, do you think the AL West division was trying to tell you something?
Completely off topic
On April 24, 2021, the AL West team logos (mis)spelled out, “Asshat”.
Coincidence? I think not.
yep……..don’t care actually.
Teams in three states come together to tell Manfred what they really think about him.
One of the few things Texans, Californians, and Washingtonians can agree on.
“Ever wonder who the WAR leader is by position?”
Nope
There have been quite a few notable minor league signings in the last day and a half. The optimist in me thinks there’s enough traction on a deal for teams to start preparing for Spring.
The pessimist balance to that is the owners are putting pressure on the major leaguers by conducting minor league business. A leverage play so to speak.
Or they want the fans to believe that they are planning for Spring to keep folks from canceling season tickets.
Or that this is typically the time a year when minor league contracts are doled out with an invitation to spring training. Only this year, with no other news to report and no major league contracts to be given out, all of these signings become that more magnified in a slow baseball news cycle.
VERY possible
I like to say MLK Day isn’t a African-American holiday, it’s really about civil rights – and that’s all of us.
But tody, i just want to send out a shout out to Chili Davis- he was underappreciated here i think by fans and was a good player for us back in the 90s.
Yeah nobody thinks of that dude
Chili was also very cool when I met him. That big smile and laugh are genuine.
He also had a really good run as a hitting coach.
I expect the MLBPA will come back with their proposal between Saturday and Wednesday, and then another round from ownership. Stirrups alluded that this was not going to be clean and simple, and some of the blame is on Clark and the MLBPA for the last CBA they agreed to. 2020 should have given both sides time to work this thing out and have a basic agreement in place with merely a few minor issues that could have been ironed out before the end of the 2021 season. But for whatever reason, both sides decided to kick the can down the road until the lock out.
I’m always on the side of the players but I think their leadership is “woefully” unprepared. Both sides saw this coming. I mean, in short, you’re exactly right.
Who’s this Stirrups you speak of? Is he a Cowboy? Does he stir up shit?
I don’t really know, but I like to use the word Stirrups in a sentence now and then because, frankly, the word isn’t used very often these days. A totally untapped word for a Hip Hop artist to work with.
Hard to rhyme though.
My son is in first grade and I was thinking about teaching him about MLK Jr. Then I realized he has absolutely no concept it is even possible to dislike someone because of their skin, so I thought maybe I should wait a few years and let his natural instinct to treat everyone equally cement itself.
Naturally, he brought home school work about MLK, so I guess that decision has been made.
It is such a bizarre concept. When we started learning about MLK it seemed unreal to my group. In a small town we had one school district, one Little League, one AYSO, one baseball park, etc.
Our parents were all friends, too. So race was not something we were ever told mattered. You were either from Wasco and part of the small town family or not. And if you weren’t we treated you like a guest (guests in a small town are pretty rare).
Now I have a mixed race son to raise. He treats everyone great and everyone loves him. But at some point we’ll have to have some talks about the handful of people who still don’t get it.
I first learned about racism while following Henry Aaron. I was in the fourth grade when he broke Babe Ruth’s home run record. I was buying books about Aaron to read and one mentioned that he was getting hate mail because he was going to break the record of a white man. I asked my dad what this was all about because I did not understand why anyone could dislike Henry Aaron because he was black. My dad tried to explain racism to me. Aaron always had a special place in my heart.
So to catch Willie Mays as the CF WAR leader, Trout needs to generate more WAR (80) in the next 10 years than he did in the first 11 (76.1).
He’s probably lost around 15 WAR to injuries and COVID, what a shame. If he only needed ~60 WAR over the next 10 seasons he’d have a chance.
One of many reasons I’ll always consider Mays to be the GOAT. Ruth was clearly the best of his era, but his era sucked. Pay sucked, minor leagues didn’t exist, talent was based on skin tone.
At minimum, 25% of the guys Ruth faced wouldn’t have made and MLB roster in Mays day. Probably more like half.
Ruth, to his credit, played against black players in barnstorming and did quite well. But when at least a quarter of your hits, HR, etc came off guys who flat out didn’t belong in MLB, I have a hard time considering you greater than a guy who played against integrated, fully developed competition.
All snarkiness aside, it’s great to hear that Perry has not been idle this lockout season in the minor / international markets. I really hope that these signings turn into something useful for the Angels in the coming years.
Went searching MLBTR for Bear Claw. Was not disappointed.
You probably could have gone to Dunkin Donuts for that.