UBstrange

The annoying thing is that he caused his own injury by not running to first base properly. As he ran down to first, he didn't allow his body to flow in one motion. He jolted himself just before touching the base, which caused his injury. Had he not pulled up short of the bag there, and just kept on running in one smooth motion, he wouldn't have gotten hurt on that play. It's just like Gio Urshela did last year when he jolted his own leg into the ground, rather than continuing a fluid motion.

The article said "Carlos Fulmer." Nice.

Would $10,000 be better? I figure that they make so much money that $1000 might not be that much incentive. Also, I'd rather see the guy get a hit and earn it than automatically put him on first base. I didn't think of the reward incentive over the financial penalty incentive because again, they make so much money that sometimes giving them a few extra bucks doesn't really "hit home" like losing their money. But that would be an interesting experiment!

The reason the Angels lost, you might think, was because Mike Trout struck out to end the game. On the surface, this appears to be true. Looking deeper, the problem was Jose Suarez's lack of incentive. He walked the leadoff batter in the 6th inning and they scored on a HR. Even with Trout striking out and Suarez giving up the HR, had he not walked the leadoff batter before the HR, we would have gone to the bottom of the 9th in a 4-4 game instead of the game ending, 5-4. Imagine if you could fine any Angels pitcher $100,000 every time he walked a leadoff batter. If you're about to lose a bunch of money, that's a very strong motivator. You might think that they already have an incentive, which is to stay on the team and not get cut. True, that is some basic everyday incentive, but it's not enough to prevent leadoff walks. You have to attack their wallet. Enter the player's association. And now you see another problem with why we can't fix certain issues: The player's association prohibiting it. Ron Washington should tell every pitcher on the staff that for every leadoff walk that they give up (only the walks to start an inning), they should donate $100,000 to an Angels charity as a personal punishment, not as a fine. The economist in me says that would work almost instantly because the incentive is too strong not to do it. You'd see more leadoff HRs and other hits, but you'd rarely see a leadoff walk. Question: Would you rather see more leadoff HRs and hits if it meant there was almost never a leadoff walk?

This should be the pinned quote of the entire season. There's not much more accurate of a post anybody here could make to beat this one.

I thought he might have gone for .400 up until he ran into the wall. He felt unstoppable. Almost like he had a cheat code. He appears that way at the moment and I hope it lasts. If it does, then yes, he could very well be an All-Star. I honestly have no idea if the Angels should sign him to a 4-5 year extension because come July, if he's struggling mightily, I know how I am. I'm going to want Moniak in there.

My first thread was a bit silly and tongue-in-cheek fun, so I'll try to contribute something a bit useful or different to the community for my second thread. It's a bit long but hopefully, it's worth your time to consider. Before I mention Arte, I need to give some context: One of the engineers at a previous job taught me about a "Ben Franklin chart," or so he called it. He explained that Ben Franklin would use this weighted scale chart to determine which option was the best out of several possible options. He would create a column for each option (ex: determining whether to live in city A or city B). Then on a new row under that, he would list all of the factors that would determine which decision he would make. First, he would rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how important each factor was to him. Next, he would rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how well that factor applied to each option. So first, you're giving the factor some weight (or not), and next, you're seeing how well it applies to what you're thinking about doing. So in my example, if commute time was important to you and city A is 10 minutes from work while city B is an hour from work, you might rate city A as a 9 and city B as a 3 when it comes to commuting. If you rated the importance of a short commute time as an 8, you multiply 8 x 9 for city A, and 8 x 3 for city B. Then store "72" in a new column next to A, and "24" in a new column for city B's results. Then go to the next factor and do the same thing. Then when you're done, after you've multiplied and gotten the number for each factor like in the example above, you add the totals up and see which option has the higher score. The option with the highest score almost always ends up being the correct decision because you quite literally weighed your options, as they say. So: Should Arte sell, or should he stay? If you already think you have the answer, you can't quantify it yet without first doing the math. The reason is that although you could be completely correct in one regard about how Arte is a bad owner in this way or that way, there's more to it than that. Until you have given the factor a value, it's harder to compare its overall importance to, say, beer prices, salary size, or a minor-league systemic improvement. How important is salary size to you? If having a large amount of money to put towards players is important to you, you might rate that an 8. Then looking at Arte, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much does Arte fit this bill? Probably an 8, having the 6th richest MLB team in the league (in terms of monetary value). So for this example, Arte would score a 64. What would a new owner score here? What if the new owner was cheap, like the A's owner? What if he wasn't? How about the risk of a new bad owner being a factor? Add it to the list. How important are beer or food prices? Give it a value. How about parking? You're likely going to add minor-league development as a factor that is very important to you.......or is it? Maybe you feel that signing draft picks like Schanuel is good enough with all of the other young talent that the Angels acquired but didn't develop themselves (see O'Hoppe and Moniak). The elephant in the room is that we can't give a score to a new owner who doesn't yet exist. Even so, you could give a blanket score to a new owner as a sort of threshold, and if Arte doesn't meet that threshold, well at least you now have a mathematical way to show your work. We don't have future owners or a crystal ball, but we do have past owners to go by. Looking at when Disney owned the club, was salary up there? So if team salary is important to you, and you were to score between 1-10 on how Disney applied to salary, they'd get a lower score and Arte would get a higher score. But that's just one factor. Looking at food prices, if you looked at Disney vs Arte, Arte once again might come out on top since he lowered costs at the ballpark as soon as he acquired the team. I haven't lived in CA for many years now and maybe food costs are high again, so I'm going off of the data that I have. This post is getting too long so I'll stop now. Just take each factor into account, give it a value, figure out how much Arte applies to that factor vs a new owner, and see where things stand. Then if you want Arte to sell the team, you can say that you have a little more certainty in your decision, rather than going off pure impulse. Also, this Ben Franklin chart is great for all areas of your life when you're trying to figure out what to do and can't decide. Thanks for your time, and go Angels!

Hello, this is my first new topic since signing up. I was thinking about when Taylor Ward faceplanted into the wall. Obviously everybody knows that he wasn't the same after that. But then I started thinking about how he got hit in the face with the ball last year and whether he'd ever be the same again, being traumatized twice in 2 years like that. Strangely, it would almost appear like getting hit in the face has reverse-concussed him, if that's even a thing! Like it somehow knocked him back into his old self. Btw, fun random fact: Taylor Ward's wife's name......is Taylor.

Hey everybody, I'm Steve - I'm 45 and I was one of the fans in 2002 that showed up in April with 16,000 fans in attendance. I'm probably going to have some unpopular takes from time to time, but it's all in good fun!