The Angels have clinched yet another losing season by dropping their 82nd game this week. A sweep by the Cleveland Guardians puts the Angels in position for another top 10 pick in the draft.
A cool site I discovered called “Tankathon” projects the Angels to finish 9th in the draft.
16 of the remaining 19 games are against division opponents so we’ll need help from Cubs, Marlins, and Rockies to push up in the order. We can simply lose to Texas to make sure we stay in front of them.
And how sad is it that we’re neck and neck with a Texas team we knew wasn’t going to do anything this year?
Probably the most entertaining part of the Cleveland series was both managers getting tossed on the same play.
All it took is one good hot streak to get the trade Mike Trout articles back.
Fellow star Anthony Rendon is pushing to come back this year. That would get his suspension out of the way.
You’d think sports writers would’ve moved past the “WAR what is is good for?” stage but no. Here’s a piece saying Ohtani’s MVP case is based on WAR.
To be fair the piece is really solid on explaining why WAR might not fully value Ohtani. The headline, however, is dying for derisive comments about baseball nerds.
So how about we say we have two great players. Both are DH’s on offense and both are great DH’s. However one DH is also a Cy Young Award candidate and the other doesn’t pitch. Which DH is more valuable?
This reminds me of the Miggy vs. Trout debate. It never should have been about WAR and analytics. Both were great hitters. One great hitter also played Gold Glove caliber center field and led the league in stolen bases while the other hitter was the least athletic guy on the field.
Meanwhile, in actual Los Angeles the Dodgers clinched the NL West, which is still meaningful for many of their players.
For actual fun, take a look at the Angels affiliates.
Playoff baseball in the IE. 66ers lost Game 1 of their series and try to even the score later tonight (keep in mind I’m typing this on Thursday).
And while the Trash Pandas clinched a while ago and have to wait a week for their post season, check out this lineup.
Neto and Dichiara are 2022 draftees who are already being tested at AA and for the most part holding their own. Silseth was a 2021 draftee who was rushed to the bigs and is probably where he should be. O’Hoppe is simply killing the ball while working with the next wave of Angels pitchers.
From around baseball:
Baseball celebrated Roberto Clemente Day. I always admire off field heroics more than on field heroics and Clemente was a giant in charity work.
Fittingly on this day the Tampa Bay Rays rolled out the first all Latino starting lineup in MLB history.
I keep telling Victor we need to write a book about his dad and Cookie’s peers. They were the first wave of imported Latino talent in MLB and they are dying off. Really, they were pioneers whose impact is shown in things like the Rays lineup.
Yahoo takes a look at why it might be best to be the last Wild Card team to make the playoffs.
Getting lost in the Albert Pujols hoopla are Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright. We probably won’t see another tandem like them.
That’s it. Going to enjoy my sister in law’s wedding today and the Canelo vs. GGG 3 fight tomorrow. Can’t explain how happy I am the wedding is on a Friday so there’s no conflict ha ha.
Enjoy, be safe and maybe get out to the ballpark. I’ll try to make it Sunday. I care about the team on the field less than I do about time with my son. But I do buy StubHub so I’m not giving Arte any parting money.
Babe, wake up… Jomboy just dropped the dual manager thrown out of the game on the same pitch vid.
https://twitter.com/Jomboy_/status/1570953924105969666?s=20&t=swqzqWJDPxSF0oSOaoWx1g
God we suck
Can we use Wantz as a starter at least once this weekend
According to MLB Trade Rummors
We have 2 Big Hype prospects.
Edgar Quero
Chase Silseth
Man, after no catching depth for years, we suddenly have 2 good catching prospects…
Yah. That changed fast. I was literally a little pissed we didn’t get a catcher earlier in the draft in June…. now…
every time i hear how wonderful our new owner is going to be compared to Arte i see and think about this Sarver dude who owns the Suns.
Don’t worry though, we surely are going to get the bestest person on the planet to run the team and they will spend more than the luxury tax every year and pennants will fly!!.
If you think Sarver is the only owner in any major sports with racist or misogynist undertones, maybe you haven’t met Årte lol (don’t even have to go far for this one!)
Ah yes, the always illusive racist undertones. Who needs actual racism when we can have secret barely detectable possibly not even really there racism from the first Latino owner in major sports? Plus misogyny! If only I had a dollar for every time someone I don’t like appears to not like women to me. I could start a hillside retreat for sports fans with sports PTSD.
Look! Over there! Is that Dave from marketing? He sucks. He is a racist and hates women. You know what? I bet. He’s. Secretly. A Nazi. He probably wakes up every morning and shakes his fist and verbally threatens democracy too. Would it be so bad if someone just snuffed him? Probably be for the best in the end. At least we could build some camps and send people like him to them. Maybe someplace very cold, or very hot. Someplace where we can teach them about all the things they are wrong about…. you know, to protect our democracy and freedoms and shit?
How could anyone NOT take racism and misogyny seriously with people like you around?
Also, politics. Yeah fun.
no need to snuff Dave nor send him to camp
He’ll just get cancelled like is happening to sarver now.
Man… Sarver. If the stories are true, that dude’s gonna need to just move into a hotel penthouse and stay out of the public eye for a few years. Just be rich, take meetings via phone, and pee in bottles.
Amazed at your ability to write paragraphs on everything. Gritch has spoken so let it be as it’s always been!
I have spoken.
The light of righteousness has shown down.
Joel Osteen ain’t got nothin on you!
Osteen’s a hobo.
Though I hear his wife has special message just for you and needs you to call her.
Hey Dave is going to be the POBO, and will suddenly transform into a unicorn-like amazing Mr. Wizard. We will win many championships just because we have a POBO!
Out of curiousity, what has Arte said or done that has racist undertones?
I’m looking for the misogyny myself.
I think people are hopeful we get a *better* owner. It’s just hope.
No one gets to be a billionaire by being a good, moral person.
If he’s willing to hire the right people, open his wallet, and then fuck off to his mansion, that’s cool. I don’t need him to be a good person.
I don’t think anyone would call Ballmer a good person, but he sure is better than Donald Sterling!
I agree and disagree. My first billion was made being a kind, just and understanding person. But I am not proud of my decisions and actions involved in that second billion…..
Hmmm. Not sure why you are so down on Ballmer. Though he is like everyone in his imperfection, people who spend time with him and know him personally say he is incredibly humble and down to earth. Apparently he doesn’t even drive a high end car… He dresses casually. He is supposedly very low key about his money. He sounds like an ordinary dude to me.
Having money doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person. But I would agree that people in positions of power (and with alot of money) quite frequently are ruthless and selfish in their personal and business dealings (Jeff Bezos comes to mind). I don’t think all super wealthy people are this way however.
“So how about we say we have two great players. Both are DH’s on offense and both are great DH’s. However one DH is also a Cy Young Award candidate and the other doesn’t pitch. Which DH is more valuable?”
Well, obviously the DH that pitches. But that’s not the situation we have with Judge, he fields a position pretty much every game and isn’t a negative doing it. We can actually see this with former Dodgers prospect Yordan Alvarez. He is a DH who sometimes plays OF. He has 6 WAR to Ohtani’s 8.1 WAR even though he’s got an OPS+ almost 40 points higher.
The article does bring up a good point though about Ohtani’s effect on a roster. You can’t DH anyone else. That’s a problem. You also have to have a six man rotation, which can be a problem too.
If you take both the ZOMS! Ohtani! and the ZOMS! Yankee! out of it but you still want Ohtani to somehow be better by the numbers you have to start playing the maybe game pretty hard and finding ways that Ohtani being a 26 starts a year pitcher is undervalued compared to 140 games in the OF… because feelings.
I just don’t know how far that’s gonna go with writers in Dallas and Detroit, especially since an adjusted OPS+ over 200 pretty much locks up an MVP.
Also of note, looking at the all time OPS+ list, Barry Bonds had a .268 OPS+ in 2002. WTF! Also, I forgot that there were players with names like Mule Suttle, Turkey Stearnes and Heavy Johnson in the Negro Leagues. Names were better back then.
How much value would Shohei provide to a team if he was able to play the outfield on more days? Say, playing right field 3 of 5 games between starts and DHing the other 2 games?
Specifically, how much value in WAR terms would he provide over the course of a season?
Ummmmmm…. ouch. Too much math. I’m sure that can actually be figured out, you know, add the value of 100 games of league average outfield.
Trouble is, you then probably have to subtract all the value of the games he misses because he sprained his entire body.
Rectum? It nearly killed him.
I get that. But given that he’s already an aggressive baserunner, how much more dangerous is it for him to take the field?
It’s just fatigue. That’d be a TON of work for his body to do. Fatigue = injury.
Get him a foldable chair and throw him out there. He’ll be fine.
If Ohtani played 3/5 of his games in RF, he’d have about 0.5 more WAR right now.
Positional adjustments are already included. Over the course of a full season (162 games, 9 innings per game) the difference between DH and RF is typically .9 – 1.0 WAR, depending on the the specific value of “Runs per win” for a given season. You can read about it here: WAR for Position Players | Sabermetrics Library (fangraphs.com)
So he’d be pretty close…. close enough I’d understand a guy voting for either one of them, wouldn’t be too miffed if either won, etc if I was just “baseball fan”.
There is no way to quantify how little I like Yankees fans though, so they can’t factor that in favor of Ohtani.
Is this assuming he is an average fielder?
I will admit I barely watch any games nowadays. Mostly I just read box scores.
Is Shohei any good in the field? I’m sure he’s not on the level of Adell, but it would be unfair to expect that level of defense.
Yes. Right now he’s technically a 0.0 WAR fielder with a penalty for playing DH.
The move to RF would reduce the penalty but allow him to earn/lose additional WAR for defensive ability.
The question remains. Is Shohei as good as Adell in the outfield?
Ohtani simply hasn’t played enough OF to be able to tell.
I guess the idea of putting Shohei in a non-DH position is that it then frees up DH for someone else a few days a week.
By my count, if the season ended today, the Angels would be 9th in the draft. I wager the Angels will end up 11th in the draft because they’ll beat Texas and the Rockies will manage to lose.
9th is good . That means we still have a 2.7% chance at the first overall pick and with our luck…. Oh never mind.
Were they really not expected to do anything this year? I don’t think a team signs two players for $500M with the thought that the signings will eventually pay off in 2025, not in 2022.
That’s the consensus for what they did.
Lock down two studs now, let the pitching talent matriculate to the bugs over 2022 and 2023.
jon daniels got shit canned for a “welp we were expected to tank” ?
Maybe new owner will sign Jon Daniels up. He’s an actual POBO.
Or maybe the new owner can promote Minasian to POBO. The title alone should make him better at his job.
If this were to happen with NewOwner I’d probably die from laughing too long.
And Jon Gray…. but the actual point is that, while I expected the Angels to be better than this (if Trout/Ohtani/Walsh/Rendon were healthy) those guys were not healthy. Even if they were it’s not like I was expecting (or “demanding” like an idiot) a play off series. I think most of us were shooting for slightly over .500… and with Trout, Walsh and Rendon all having problems, yah, we will miss that by (shocker!) just about the amount of WAR that’s been lost by core players being out (plus Adell/Marsh not working).
So no. Once the injuries set in I wasn’t surprised at all by being about even with Texas.
Manfred has been rumored to be considering a new pitching method:
https://www.mlb.com/video/alex-goligoski-sends-first-pitch
Was vacationing in western Canada last week (sans pants, of course), and I took inventory of the number of baseball hats spotted. Beyond the usual Doyer and MFY (not real fans since they’re the colorful hats), the most frequent hat I saw were Angels hats.
I struck up a conversation with a three people and all were not from SoCal, or had roots in SoCal. They just loved Trout and Ohtani, hence the love for the team.
I wonder how much money Arturo made off those hats. Way more important for him than having a good team
Hat money is split among all the teams. But we get it. Arte is rich and successful. He’s pretty much better than you in every way. We need to hate him for that. So carry on.
Also, Anthony Rendon. Hell of a guy.
The red Angel hat is definitely trendy, obviously not for on-field performance but that it’s a cool look. And the retro logo’d hats are great as well.
I hear that the Canadians are much more relaxed aboot the pants-optional lifestyle.
I assumed they meant pants when they said, “Take off, eh!”
i hope you at least had a toque on
And it was strategically located.
Absolutely. I didn’t want Canadians thinking I was some brash American tourist, so it was perched ever so delicately on the top of my cranium.
Well, it is the largest sex organ….
You guys are such hosers, eh?
Cool piece on our trio of young lefties.
https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2022/09/angels-pitchers-breakouts-reid-detmers-patrick-sandoval.html
Now if we can keep Ohtani and find a very good RH we will be looking good. Good to see someone who noticed what we have here that is not Troutani.
Or trade Ohtani for May, Lux, and a prospect that is close.
Either way that’s a nice top 4.
If we can snag Miller thars a cost controlled top 5.
If we can trade Ohtani I would very much like to get away from the six man rotation as much as possible.
It gets a little bit complicated, but you can still accomodate Shohei on a 5man if you need to.
And although the 6man is certainly not the biggest reason for the enhanced performance from our SPs, it IS part of what’s working now.
Maybe it is slightly lessening the dreaded 2 letter surgery, who knows.
At least the health seems better than the late 2010s.
I think we’d avoid a lot of the starts that so many on here whine about if we just had an ace who started 30 or 35 games a season. The Wantz starts, etc.
It would be nice to have a staff of:
Good Pitcher Traded for
Sandoval
FA (Jamison Taillon)
Detmers
Suarez
Everyone else like Canning/Davidson depth.
Looking Good? WTF is that? I would like to compete with the upper echelons of franchises and in order to do that we need a catcher, shortstop righthanded hitting outfielder a 5th & 6th starter and a lock down bullpen.
Some of there pieces can be obtained from our resurgent minor league system but not all.
Good luck filling all those voids with a short timer owner though.
NO! EVERY ASPECT OF ARTE BEING HERE SUCKS! EVERY ASPECT OF HIM SELLING WILL BE AWESOME! WE WILL WIN ALL THE TROPHIES! I WILL FEEL LIKE A MAN AGAIN!
I would love for Ohtani to be an Angel for life, but I do think trading him for pitching talent is probably the smart move.
Trout and Rendon are going to need more games at DH as they age. Locking up Ohtani long term takes that option away.
I don’t see why Ohtani can’t rotate out of DH and do rest days to accommodate Trout and Rendon. If he really wants to do this 2-way thing for a long time, he has to manage his work days, and that eventually includes accepting off days so he can have a longer career doing this 2-way thing, rather than doing it for a couple more years and then eventually settling on only one because it has taken too much toll on his body.
I’d like this too, just cause I’d like to keep Ohtani and still have a good team… but man, at 50M a year that’s a tough sell. In fact, that’s mainly why I don’t want to sign him to 10/500 or something huge… he’s a 50M player because of what he does NOW…. which he may not be doing even two years from now.
Does the $50 million/year projection take into account his value outside of the field?
Perhaps his value outside of the field can offset that future risk of him becoming just a pitcher or just a hitter.
That was the Pujols argument, he would give the Angels so much cred, the famous “East Coast Bias” would melt away. Arte would recover all the cost of his salary and waaay more, to invest in players because marketing!
Establishing cred with the East coast crowd is different from attracting casual fans into the stadium.
I never saw Pujols as a potential ticket seller.
Eh. No. How many dollars do you think “former extremely good two way player” will bring in…. especially five years after his “mania” happened?
In this scenario the dollars would dry up after he is no longer the same guy, but money could be recouped for as long as he is that guy. The question would be how long would he remain that guy.
IE 66ers swept by LE Storm…trAdition.
Is there any way we can make sure that our Low A team’s players understand that we disapprove of their performance and that it’s part of a long long long long long long long long long long long long history of basically the same four complaints that they are now part of and will need to fix instantly or we will turn on them like starving house cats with a dead grandma? Do they realize that we can already see that none of them are MLB quality players and there is no chance they will develop because Arte and NOTPOBO + Lunch meat? Someone should probably make sure they are told about this. Can’t have them thinking positive and shit.
Anybody up for figuring out how CtPG can get this important mission accomplished?
A few more “longs” and maybe mission accomplished….but just maybe.
Those piece of shit 66ers must have a group chat on some SoMed platform that we can get onto and make sure they aren’t drinking Kool-Aid and focusing on possible positive outcomes. We can save them.
Sorry Fail…you didn’t use the word long.
We can save them from a LONG fall into the canyon of delusion.
Time for the Angels to ruin our Draft position and Sweep the the M’s
I prefer to sweep The ms and not worry about the draft
We can sweep the M’s and still not change a single thing. Best to be sweep for our own long range good, but that’s just me. You are not wrong though; at game time I’ll be thinking win and sweep because I don’t always think the same before A.M. coffee (Now) and at game-time (Later) 😀
“Just Win Baby”
Sweeping the M’s could crush their playoff dreams, I’d enjoy that.
Or rather, it could knock them into the 3rd wild card and make them have to worry about missing the playoffs.
The O’s are 5 back. The draft is a crap shoot, top 5 pick or not. I will enjoy the O’s in the play offs so much more than the Mariners. If my enjoyment is the primary concern, as it should be, then I say go ahead and pick 9 in the draft if it means sweeping the Mariners, so be it…. but then we have to root for them to collapse against some pretty bad teams, they don’t play anyone good for the rest of the year.
Sadly, the Happy Birds have to take on Houston, Toronto and the Yankees still.
That’s pretty much my thought. A 4-game sweep of the Mariners gives the O’s and White Sox a fighting chance at a playoff spot. I’d take the Mariners being eliminated over a 1-2 slot increase in the draft. And that’s with the Mariners being my least disliked divisional rival.
I’d much more prefer the highest draft pick possible. I disagree that draft position makes no difference. Wins right now change nothing about our team. And sure, it is good and fun to play a part in deciding who makes the playoffs, but I’ve got to value the draft over knocking off one of our rivals.
Dude. Shit-canning the M’s also helps mute noisy troll from this site. GO ANGELS – SWEEP THE COFFEE-DRUNK TURQUOISE FREAKS!
Jer has made the playoffs but he hasn’t won a playoff game – that’s the streak I want to see continue
Said troll makes me wish for the days of Halowood and Johnsamo.
Halowood misses us too bruh….
Oh, draft position makes a difference. Top 5 players have a better shot at making it. Trouble is they have a better shot at “making it” the way greats like Adam Loewen, Tony Sanchez, Nick Gordon or Corey Ray. Not to mention you still pretty much have a 2 in five chance of getting someone awesome like Christopher Gruler, Dewan Brazelton, Tyler Kolek, Riley Pint or Christian Colon.
But you will be 100% sure to enjoy the fragrant and delicious tears of Mariners fans if they fail to make the playoffs. ESPECIALLY if they fail while a team that has been in, rebuilt, been in, and rebuilt AGAIN and then AGAIN! since their team was a contender…. guaranteed joy.
Besides. If we draft 5th it just means ol’CheapnEvil will try to pay him 200K so he can pocket the rest of the money, then starve said player to death in the system we have where he would not develop anyway because all our coaches are old liquor store standies of Brook Burke.
Although, I read an article that said because they don’t reseed, the 3rd WC is actually better than the 1st or second WC. Kind of like being the #6 seed in the NBA and beating the #3 seed, you get to play #2 instead of #1 the next round.
Well look 👀 Red
A Kings hockey game https://youtu.be/IQuKkgqWGwk
And Taylor Ward just scored a goal to tie the game!
Seeing Kings in action for the first time this year eased the pain of the Angels baseball season for about about two periods. [geez QB, you should b dominating these guys]
Could be an ugly hockey season
When do P and C report again in February ?