TroutBaseball

Darth Mahle

"Billy Ray Butler (born William Raymond Butler, Jr.; April 18, 1986), nicknamed "Country Breakfast", is an American professional baseball designated hitter and first baseman for the Oakland Athletics of Major League Baseball (MLB). He previously played in MLB for the Kansas City Royals from 2007 to 2014." From Wikipedia

Watching the game this afternoon I'm reminded that in KC Billy Butler was known as "Country Breakfast". What a great nickname. In the same vein, I propose that we give CJ Cron the name "Bacon Boy"

Angel fans talk about 2002 the way Republican candidates talk about Ronald Reagan.

It was a FB ad to a Chinese site that sells knock offs and ruins credit reports. I saw it too.

I'll give you a reason they don't start on Friday -- No one wants a home weekend series at the start of the season. April games are low attendance and most of the teams still have a serious threat of bad weather. If you have the opening weekend games in Southern states, those teams all get penalized in annual attendance because they always would have more April home games than the Northern teams. By starting on Monday it gives the opening weekend a better chance of playable weather.

I'm happy with anyone who takes an open job away from Harold Reynolds and Tim McCarver

Awesome!

Have you noticed all of his social media still has him in Angels gear? Should we take bets on what date he either deletes those accounts or changes the pictures?

I'm teaching myself how to use After Effects and created this Trout highlight video. Enjoy!

Only SSH got them. They look like the life size Mike Trout Bobblehead at the stadium. . . except not life size.

The Angels and the Orioles are basically in the same spot. Lots of holes, terrible farm systems and time running out on their best players. In the same situation the teams chose different paths. The Angels buckled down spending, the Orioles decided to go all in as best they could on the next two years. I think the thing that caused them to go in different directions is that the Orioles don't think they have any chance to re-sign Machado and Jones. If they're both going to be gone in 2018, then the team better do what it can now. The Angels on the other hand have Trout for at least 5 more years with high hopes of keeping him longer than that. Expect to see the Orioles tanking/rebuilding in 2-3 years. We'll see if the Angels have found a way to avoid it.

Yes, I'm only 60% sure the question used the words "betray" and "absent the secret sauce" (the second use of secret sauce). It was a longer question but it was for sure in that vein. It was harsh. I added black pepper not chili pepper.

I don't know what to tell you. That's really how someone asked about defensive replacements. Take it up with them. Eppler gave a very diplomatic and honest answer regardless of how you think the question could have been better phrased.

to clarify: I didn't submit any of these questions. They all came from season ticket holders who were allowed to submit their questions ahead of time. I recapped from memory and telescoped the questions and answers so you could get a general sense of the tone of each question without the 5-10 minutes that were devoted to each one.

I didn't ask the questions. I agree. This particular question was a really bad question. I wouldn't have asked it but someone else did and Tim Mead chose to pass it on to Eppler. In this particular case I didn't really skew the question or the answer. That was pretty much what was asked and how he answered.

The question wasn't asked exactly like that. I added some pepper to it. . . .but it was strongly worded

Notti, I agree he's made the team better than last year's.

You know I can't remember the fifth. But he for sure said 5. He did say that the Yankees had been targeting Ortega as well.

His answer didn't come off as arrogant in his delivery. The question was posed in a way that there was no other answer than this or "dumb luck"

Oh, also He likes defensive shifts and will keep using them as long and the rules committee allows them and he doesn't foresee the NL using the DH anytime soon.

Today the Angels hosted an open house with a Q&A time with Billy Eppler. This was our first opportunity to publicly interact with Eppler. The questions were preselected by Tim Mead and fortunately he mixed in some of the questions I wanted answers to. Edit to clarify: I didn't submit any of these questions. They all came from season ticket holders who were allowed to submit their questions ahead of time. The first question was Why did we trade our two best prospects for a position we didn't need filled? - Looking at the free agent prospects for SS over the next 5 years there was no one better than back up level. We had to take the opportunity because it presented itself. SS and C are the two most important positions on the field and I wanted to lock it down. Simmons is an example of me building around Mike Trout. Here are the other questions that I can remember, I might mix some of them around just to supply the info he provided. I'm not going to give either the question of the answer with the exact words but I'll try to convey the general attitude. Are you going to re-sign Weaver and then convert him to Closer after Street leaves? - That presumes he'd be willing to switch to a different role and I for sure haven't talked to him about it. What are the biggest impacts you've made on the club? - Bringing in Simmons, setting up a Quantitative Analysis department headed by a physicist who used to work on missle defense, changing my office from "the General Manager" to "the office of General Manager" where decision are made in team and are never unilateral. Are we going to stop putting in defensive substitutions late in the game and removing Giavotella's clutch hitting from the line up? - That's up to Sosh, but I want to provide a diversity of tools for him to use so that he has what he needs in any late game decision. Why didn't you sign Jason Heyward who is awesome in every way and now we're screwed without him?. - I had many conversations with Heyward and we just couldn't make the financials work without putting the team in a bind in future years. Same goes for Upton, and Cespedes. Are we going to spend more money internationally to redeem our woefully awful farm system? - We can't spend more the $300K per player for the next two years and no more than $1.8 million per year. We will for sure spend all that money, but I'd rather shop in the $100K- $400K range when talking about 16 year old Dominicans. I'm not comfortable giving a kid several million dollars. What analytics tool do you rely on most? - I'm not telling. . . ever. But I also rely on the new statcast metrics. I also watch to see how quickly a batter relaxes his shoulders after the ball is released. It tells me how well he sees pitches and how comfortable he is. Arte has betrayed the team and the fan base by not spending money any more. He expects you to win with nothing but secret sauce. How are you going to win minus the use of secret sauce? - We're going to use secret sauce and make better decisions than everyone else because we'll have more information. [personal reaction: This is the most important question of the day. Great, you've started a group of people to analyze statcast data, but you're by no means innovating here uniquely than any other team and we still don't trust Sosh to use any of this new information when he wasn't even willing to use very traditional advanced scouting information. We're screwed] Who is playing left field? - We have 5 guys trying out and 6 weeks to decide. All of them display quality defense, speed, and OBP. From 2003-2009 similar players kept beating us when I was at the Yankees and I want to get more of those types of players on the roster. Are we going to trade a pitcher before the start of the season? - It's technically possible but not very likely. We need all 8 guys to figure out our best strengths. Some of them will be move to the bullpen. Is fan reaction a factor when trading away a player? - Yes but everyone prefers winning to loyalty. Other info: Ward has the best offensive potential in the farm system of anyone else (a catcher, yikes!). Kowart and Kubitza came to camp early to work out at 2B. It's still an open position.

There's a part of me that still doesn't believe him when he says he has budget concerns. I'm glad he has appeared to learn the lesson after Matthews/Wells/Pujols/Hamilton. But it doesn't add up that Eppler would want this job if he knew he would have to cut salary and have no farm system.

In this podcast Jonah Keri makes a salient point that "winning the hot stove" doesn't usually work out. The Padres and the White Sox did squat last year. The Marlins a couple of years ago fell apart by May. He explains that making big splashes usually indicates that there are some endemic problems in the organization and the team is trying to cover them up very quickly. He says you should always bet the under on their projected win total. That doesn't mean anything about the 2016 Angels, but I thought it was an interesting observation. http://www.si.com/mlb/2016/02/05/strike-zone-podcast-jonah-keri-power-rankings-royals-mets