Inside Pitch

Eppler did a fantastic job of finding undervalued pieces for the pen last year -- then he dropped the ball and failed to resign any of them. Anytime a guy goes too hard in any one direction it tends to come back to bite them in the ass.

So does his Mom...

He got them extra money for Ohtani -- he's served his purpose.

Makes even the bad games bearable. Hopefully that play fires up the offense.

Fifty save closer showing Cam he isn't going to let some whippersnapper show him up. You gotta love how these guys in the pen compete with each other.

Telling himself.. "well at least Im not Calhoun's Dad"

Or lengthen enough to tie it around his neck and then kick the chair our from under him.

You gotta give Cam credit -- he doesn't waste time. He gets right to shitting the bed like the pro he is.

Would that not be defeating the purpose of the whole workload management?

So who had May 30th 2018 as the date Angels management gets called out for not successfully predicting the weather? Please email @Chuckster70 so that he can give you your cash and prizes. Congrats!

So... Which MLB team bites the bullet and drafts this kid... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/07/sports/luke-heimlich-sex-crime.html The entire situation is pretty sketchy... Here are a couple other links.. https://deadspin.com/mlb-prospect-luke-heimlich-denies-molesting-his-niece-1825831942 https://www.si.com/mlb/2018/05/16/luke-heimlich-oregon-state

Somehow he has an DRS of 1.... Even better he leads LFers in OOZ (plays outside his zone). But then just for shits and giggles he's among the absolute worst when it comes to FG's Def stat at 2.7. The metrics are ALL over the place on him. Check this crap out https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=lf&stats=fld&lg=all&qual=50&type=1&season=2018&month=0&season1=2018&ind=0&team=0&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=0&sort=10,d Some of this has to be the way teams employing the shift are impacting defensive metrics...

So long as the guy hitting .350 is the DH -- sure....

Smith and Meyers didn't have TJ surgery.. One's got a torn labrum (shoulder), the other had anterior capsule surgery on his shoulder.... https://www.si.com/edge/2015/07/30/examining-tommy-john-surgery-youth-baseball-mlb http://grantland.com/the-triangle/tommy-john-epidemic-elbow-surgery-glenn-fleisig-yu-darvish/ This was a problem for MLB before it became a problem for the Angels...

All of June would have been 8 weeks... 6 weeks mid June -- it wasn't that tricky... Does it really matter though? Your initial suggestion that you wanted him gone at the deadline is moot -- he was on the DL and untradeable. Escobar was so in demand and people think so much of his hitting that nobody bothered to offer him a contract at even league minimum in 2018. Bedrosian had his stint on the DL, came back with reduced velocity and in the 14.2 innings he pitched after returning from the DL he put up an ERA of 6.75. He was expendable only because he was pitching poorly, and few teams in contention are looking to trade for guys pitching poorly. When it's all said and done the one guy you can successfully point to as legit trade bait was.... Calhoun. If only reality were at all a factor in your thought processes. The Marlins traded Yelich only after their sale and only after he demanded to be traded -- prior to that they claimed they wanted to keep him. So, despite his having made every attempt to burn every bridge and demand out of Miami, the Marlins still managed to get THREE top 100 prospects and a SP coming off a 2.51 ERA season where he K'd 113 .vs 30 BB over 111 innings. We didn't have a single top 100 prospect in the system at the deadline much less 3 plus the SP... More importantly Yelich at that point had no desire to be traded and the Marlins weren't looking to move him. In short, "Nope".

Yeah, I couldn't imagine him NOT having a cannon but the artistry with the glove was so ridiculous it has overshadowed everything I remember. I remember watching games on WGN and TBS while on summer vacation as a kid and my brother and I both audibly saying WOW while watching him play defense.

Yep, he's been better than people realize - even when he's been viewed as being less than stellar. Dude just isn't really flashy..

It's funny because for the life of me I can't remember Ozzie's arm at all. Maybe it was due to the stuff he did to even get to the ball, but every mental image I have of him involves his glove. I'm fairly certain he had a cannon but his glovework was so amazing I genuinely have NO recollection of how his arm played.

Man -- that contract looks ugly and I think the narrative is that he's pitched poorly but, Grienke's ERA+ with Zona is equal to his career ERA+ overall. He's not fallen off from his career norms, in fact he's doing better than his career averages in H/9, K/9 and BB/9.... but he hasn't come close to that ridiculous final season in LA. If anything Grienke may end up being the poster boy for a guy putting up a salary drive season and cashing in. 1.66 ERA, 0.844 WHIP.. Just nutty.

Pitch framing tends to use pitchF/x data so while it's still subject to poor umpiring the zone it's being measured against is pretty static. He's been a bit jittery back there, but the numbers probably paint him as having been worse than he really has because of the sample size. Basically, you're right to not really worry about it.

He's definitely been moving a bit too much back there. Other than Richards who's movement even Richards has no idea where it will end up and maybe Ohtani who was still learning how to tinker with MLB baseballs early on, the Angels staff doesn't have a lot of guys with the sort of movement a catcher would really struggle with. Pitch framing like other defensive components tends to need the largest possible sample size to really tell us anything. So, while his framing has been off where he's been in the past it's early enough that it may just be noise and could still even out.

AL West SoS Oakland - .522, 4th toughest Texas - .516, just below the A's Angels- .516, see above Astros - .503, 16th toughest Seattle - .486, 25th toughest Nobody in the AL Central has played a SoS above .500.. Cleveland's over .500 thanks to a 12-5 record .vs the AL Central. Seattle has played a lot of games .vs the Central but nobody has done better than the NYY's record of 10-1 against them. Boston has only played 3 games .vs the ALC -- they are 24-10 .vs the AL East, the Yanks 11-9, so their relative stregth of schedules may end up being HUGE factors. Oakland BTW is 15-6 outside of the AL West.. 10-19 in division. There have been some really weird W/L figures this year. At the end of the day. The AL West has three good teams, one great team and a last place team that's only 4 games under .500 outside of the division.

Catchers have always had the lowest success rate of any position player in the draft -- HS catchers are even worse. Yet another reason Jeff Mathis despite his being considered a failure is a massive success story.

Yep -- they had the money -- they spent it poorly.

People used to say that SS saw it's golden age during Nomar/Jeter/Arod era -- but, things dropped off pretty massively after those three. Lindor, Correa, Machado, Simmons, Segura, Trea Turner, Seager, Brandon Crawford.. lots of guys putting in a lot of fine SS play right now -- and you still have guys like 80 year old Asdrubal Cabrera tearing it up. If JP Crawford, Addison Russell, and Dansby Swanson live up to their hype -- it's gonna be hard for anyone to argue this isnt the best era of SS ever.