Inside Pitch

Edmonds and Salmon

Scully jumped the shark a long time ago. Age is a mofo....

.280/.357/.520 - .877 OPS..

Nate Smith is making it seem like his late season fade was in fact due to fatigue....

LOL.. Funny only because I can see it.

http://ftw.usatoday.com/2016/04/mike-trout-warriors-angels-draymond-green-steph-curry

Maybe doubting the team has tremendous SP depth = Tropeano hate. I've seen Weaver hate, I've seen Shoemaker hate, I've seen Santiago is Nibs II hate, I've even seen Garrett Richards has no balls hate, but I haven't seen any Tropeano hate.

Am I reading you wrong or are you arguing that WAR overlooks defense? A lot people believe that one of WAR's weaknesses is that it gives defense too much credence.

http://www.scout.com/mlb/angels/story/1618081-prospect-countdown-80-ronnie-glenn

He was 17-18, and played with a bunch of black kids so he used "urban" language as a white guy...... Then was crucified for it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/nationals-journal/post/zach-houchins-says-he-is-not-a-racist-nervous-about-future-with-the-nationals/2011/06/10/AGdkNyOH_blog.html

Its good to see Houchins doing well after his social media snafu as an 18 year old that nearly wrecked his career.

Dude may be another Tim Salmon in the sense that he seems to get off to the worst starts.... Gotta ride it out for more than a week to see if it all starts to fall into place for him offensively.

Errors can be the sign of a bad defender, or a great one reaching balls others cannot... Donaldson is a pretty good example of a guy with an elevated error total while being a truly great defender. As a solitary stat, errors are often a poor marker for defense albeit the only one people really looked at for a long, long, time. Consider this, Escobar only had 7 errors as a 3B last year, his FLD% was well above average... Donaldson had 18, with FLD% 20 points lower.... Donaldson was 2.5 dWAR better as measured by bb-ref.

ASU guy, I saw they used him as a starter today -- wonder if that's permanent... they had been using him as a RP. This is what Sickels had to say about him a little while back.. Alex Blackford, RHP: 37th round pick this year out of Arizona State as a senior, threw two innings of scoreless relief. Doesn't throw hard, just upper 80s, but kept hitters off balance because he could hit his spots and change speeds. Has a 31/6 K/BB in 26 innings with a 2.81 ERA. Oddly enough, he had problems doing this in college: he posted an ugly 36/24 K/BB in 35 innings for the Sun Devils this spring. Organization pitcher, but useful to have around.

Skaggs, 3IP, 3 H, 2 BB, 1 K, 1 ER.. First AAA start this year. The Bees remain undefeated.

You asked why age is relevant... I answered.. You need not rush out to white knight Newcomb -- nobody is attacking him.

Possibly because he's 24 years old and has pitched a total of 50+ innings at the MLB level at age 22 and 23. This isn't some 27 year old journeyman RP it's a relatively raw live arm.. He's pitched all of 70 innings above High A.

Age is relevant to every minor leaguer ever.. The optimal age for AA is 22. For AAA it's 23. The optimal age for a guy to break into MLB is 24. Historically, guys who do well when younger than the optimal age tend to have the greatest amount of success.

Bane's rep may have been boosted by the whole Trout thing, but he made his name while in TB.... He was considered a major reason why their farm system was as good as it was early in the 00s, but I never really understood the hype -- they were always drafting at the very top of the draft and if you look at their drafts from 1999-2003 -- they has some massive misses. Remember Brazelton, Elijah Dukes, Delmon Young?.. I mean, they hit on Hamilton and Crawford in the same draft but, that's a lot of high pick misses IMO. Here's a link to their 99 draft... http://www.thebaseballcube.com/draft/research.asp?Y1=1999&Y2=1999&R=&RS==&Ov=&Ovs==&T=28&Player=&School=&Pos=&HL=&Region=&P=June-Reg&CT=&Bonus=0&Signed=&Active=&Source=&Bats=&Throws=&Sort= if you play with the filters to go year by year - it's really not impressive.

My guess is the current front office doesn't see him as having been the issue so much as what the overall mindset going into the draft may have been. If a guy is being told to target a certain type of player, gets him and they fail, is it really on him or the guy that set the targets in the first place? I don't have many sources inside the Angels these days, but I've got some pretty well placed guys in the Bos, NYY, and Cinci organizations, I've asked them point blank what they think of Wilson and the consensus seemed to be he's a top end guy. I get that much of the industry is a good ole boy's network and there is likely some of that going on but none of the guys I'm tight with have had any ties to the Angels in the past. Anyway, I too have wondered how he managed to keep his job but there has to be more than what we as fans have been able to see. Or maybe they just didnt want to have a ton of turnover in year one.

He also spent first round money on guys drafted in the teens. Nick Adenhart and Mark Trumbo were both brought in with first round money to buy them out of college. The Angels also spent big in the Draft and Follow days... The difference of course was the GM at the time believed in building from within. Hopefully Eppler takes a similar bottom up approach and things change.

That's not how the process works -- those numbers don't actually mean what you think they mean.. They didn't spend because they couldn't spend - not only were they barred from spending more than a certain amount on any one player -- but having won the most games in MLB the previous season they had the smallest pool. Not sure about last year but, the Angels have in the past been very prone to trading away their pool money. Eppler has already gone on record as saying he has no intentions to trade away any of the international money, instead he intends to spend all of it.

I'm actually a bit more geeked about this than I was about Ep7... Seems like the movie is based what had just been described in the opening crawl of Star Wars (A New Hope). Looks like Vader will be in it too. Should be fun.

Cant reach 88 without first hitting 86.....

He was driving a DeLorean on his way to 1955.