Dtwncbad

Not hard to recoup a zero dollar expense. He paid no tax last year.

I’m just glad I probably don’t have to worry about Washington repeatedly calling him “Hicksey”

As long as he doesn’t fall somewhere between Casey Kotchman and JT Snow.

Exactly how many of the 94 players ranked ahead of Schanuel would you trade him straight up for? The answer is exactly where he should be correctly ranked.

Lorenzo says yes.

Yeah, and pro-rated for just the nine months of baseball.

Somebody is going to need a lot of Kleenex after reading that, like maybe 1961 sheets.

No, Wenger

A healthy OHoppe catching well and hitting well is extremely exciting. I have always been enamored with the advantage of having a potent bat attached to an excellent defensive catcher. What a luxury.

Genger

Wenger

The Angels need a for sure theng, someone that doesn’t geve up dengers, so ef you want to fenger a target, you should seng the praises of a real renger. Es that really Clevenger?

Fixed.

What is IIRC? Oh wait, I remember.

The period goes inside the quotation mark.

Tony Conigliaro

I am personally not a big believer in Ward. I am concerned that the injury just postpones the team’s opportunity to find out if he is the real deal or not, with the downside being wasting time and finding out he isn’t really that good. That is my last choice outcome and I am willing to gamble a little to avoid that last choice outcome. I would rather tap into the possibility that he is a decent player now and spend that perceived value as trade capital while you can. Ward is 30. I don’t feel like the odds are good that a really late bloomer’s success is all that sustainable, so to me the window to move him is now.

If Ward has no mental challenge going forward, he is a better man than me. I got hit in the eye at 13 years old in baseball practice. Our coach’s philosophy is he should hit absolute rockets at us in practice so that balls hit to us in games would seem easy. I was playing 2B and he hit a bullet at me that was supposed to be a ground ball but it was more of a liner that bounced once about 4-5 feet in front of me and took a bad hop and got me square in the right eye. It was swollen shut for days and it damaged my eyeball permanently (and now with some age on me, the vision has degraded further, so that sucks). I never played infield again. I just couldn’t mentally get comfortable fielding hard hit grounders. So that was it for IF for me. To this day, I am not playing IF even in slow pitch softball. Somebody has to play OF, so let’s just agree I am in the OF.

I would be much more concerned about the mental aspect of getting back in the box over any concern about the success of the physical procedure.

To be totally honest, I had already completely forgotten about Jared Walsh.

I have no idea why we are talking about Joey Votto. If he has no job come spring training and he wants to show the Angels in ST that he has something left, then whatever. But this isn’t a player I would be even talking to in January.

The more accomplished and storied one player is with one previous team, the less interested I am in that player coming to the Angels. I have been a fan of Votto for a long time, but I have no interest in seeing him in an Angel uniform.

He was always Dunn.

I guess if they can’t get Ryan Howard, then Joey Votto is the next best thing.

I don’t think going deeper into games is exclusively an issue of stamina, fatigue or the number of days rest. I think the shorter outings is mostly due to contemporary statistical analysis of the decline in effectiveness in facing the same batter the third time through the lineup. And that is not also in isolation. It’s the combination of how fatigued a pitcher is and the fact that they are facing the hitter a third time. My personal opinion is even the pitch count is a bit overplayed. Yes there is fatigue. But is the concern of some fatigue really always injury, or is it expected effectiveness? Also it is certainly a lot easier to defend taking a pitcher out at a pitch count than it is to say “We don’t believe in his ability in that situation of third time through the lineup.” So I don’t think it will be a matter of the pitchers being “asked” to go deeper into games. It could be a matter of them just getting better. If the starter simply improves (strad used the word “maturing”), then maybe they are into the sixth inning with more experience and less overall fatigue (a mature pitcher may get through a troubled third inning with fewer pitches). I could envision the starters (overall) go slightly deeper into games even with a five man rotation, especially when you have a number of guys coming into their prime.