SlappyUtilityMIF

Zero faith in Kohn? He's been one of our best, lol.
 
Glad you're not building the pen.

Cordero has lowered his ERA at SLC to 3.86.  32.2 IP, 7 BB, 26 K.
 
10 scoreless outings in a row.  His fastball has ticked up to 90-91 and it looks like has some sort of cutter that has been very effective.
 
I'd love to see him with the Halos soon.  Buckner and/or Roth could be sent down.  What a story.

Word is he is naming his next son Craig.

Jered Weaver's wife, Kristin, gave birth to the couple's first child on Friday. He weighed eight pounds, measured 21 inches and his first name was Aden -- in honor of the Angels pitcher whose death left a hole in Weaver's heart.
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I asked my sister what caused her bell's palsy and she told me the doctor said it was due to stress.

They don't want to have to suspend half the all star team, and invite Trumbo then have him in the HR contest by himself.

My money is on Masuka figuring it out, since he's the least likely.  And he'll be cool with it as long as Dex allows him to nail Deb.

Yeah, we don't want the 500 "I hate pujols" threads to get lost

She's no Tawny Kitaen.

Great article: http://ftw.usatoday.com/2013/06/rickey-henderson-the-greatest-leadoff-hitter-on-how-to-be-a-great-leadoff-hitter/
Dude clearly doesn't think walks are a false stat. Absolutely fantastic quote:
“People ask, ‘How do you steal all those bases?’” he said. “But they never say, ‘What do you do to get on base?’ The first thing is, can you get on base a lot to give you the opportunity to steal so many bases? That’s what the guys are not doing. They’re not finding a way to get on the basepaths. A lot of leadoff hitters, they’re free swingers — they’re not patient enough to take a pitch or two knowing that they can hit with two strikes and get themselves a chance to get on base more.
“As a leadoff hitter, you’ve got to be patient. A lot of times, you’re giving your teammates an idea or vision of what the pitchers throwing, what pitches he’s getting over the plate, basically because you’re being a little more patient and you’re seeing what he’s got.”

You're missing something, that's the paid attendance not the number of fans sitting in seats.  Teams always list the paid attendance.

It also takes a special kind of asshole to take sports so seriously they get personal or attack him. It really is the AW crowd he mentions and why a lot of newer people don't post here...why would you when AO or the other failos dismantle every thread.
I actually remember people calling him cheap because he didn't secure Matt Clement, Tex, or Crawford over the years, then he breaks the bank to bring these kind of stars here and everyone is on here professing their love for the greatest owner in baseball, but when the players have a down year the fans start giving Arte grief.
Fans can be the worst.

I didn't get that impression at all stradlimg. It definitely bums him out but to the point of selling the team? I don't think so. 
 
Oh and the people that are badgering him, STFU! 

I think it's just coincidence and people are looking too much at this season and last. I don't think his coaching style has anything to do with the guys in the batters box that either produce or don't.
As for the pre-Sosh era, those 90's teams just sucked really bad.

Sore wrist from swinging violently at so many pitches three feet off the plate.
 
 

Here's a clear picture of the elusive "skunk ape"
 

Besides the anger management issues, he's also not too bright.  If they continuously mess up his orders, why does he come back?

This is a long one folks.  Sorry about the length but hopefully it's worth it...
 
I have two very different sets of friends I meet-up with in Vegas.  They are extreme in their differences and their paths rarely cross.  I drove to Vegas on Friday to meet with my two friends from college who enjoy the following:  drinking, sitting, watching tv, working on computers, blackjack, downtown Vegas, eating.  As you might imagine, neither of the two are in the best of shape.  One moved from L.A. about five years ago, taking his girlfriend with him.  They got married in a drive-thru chapel in Vegas on the way to their new life in Utah, where my friend grew up.  The other friend has never had a girlfriend in his life.  He gave me some advice this weekend:  wait until a girl asks you for your number.  He agreed with me this tactic hasn’t worked out too well for him over the years.  We’ll get to why this matters in a bit.
 
I like to drive to Vegas.  Wouldn’t do it every day, but I like being in the car by myself and playing my music.  I usually pick the music well ahead of time in anticipation of the landscape and what type of experience I want to have.  I hate Southwest airlines and airports.  I’d rather spend the extra hour in the car and have my own personal space.  This is the first time I can remember where I didn’t stop once on my drive.  I purposely did not drink too much coffee or water before my drive so I wouldn’t have to stop much.  It worked.  3.5 hours.  I didn’t go crazy with speed but I didn’t shy away either. 
 
I met my friends at the M Resort which is a shiny glass structure plopped to on the landscape to the right as you wind your way into greater Vegas.  This is about where you really want to drop your speed since the patrol knows that all those people pouring into the Fun City have been stuck in their cars and can now taste the booze and have visions of next month’s mortgage floating out of their wallets.  So instead of going 80mph, they kick it up to 85.  Anticipation is a very dangerous thing when it gets behind the wheel. 
 
My friends move slower than Hamilton on a ground out, so I got in line to pay for the buffet, which was getting longer by the tour bus.  Half-hour from beginning to till.  (Hint:  I asked, good naturedly, for a ‘waiting in line forever’ discount, and it turns out residents of Calif. Get $5 off their bill, but ya gotta ask).
 
The buffet used to be pretty good, but it felt off this time.  Maybe it was the people. Everywhere I looked I saw fat people sitting with their legs spread into the walkway.  Their guts need the extra space lest they get a rash from the edge of the table so a leg out buys an extra couple inches up top.  I wonder if these people even taste the food.  Americans will tell you a restaurant is good if the food is served in heaps and mounds but tastes average.  Ever heard of the Cheesecake Factory?  It’s good, but we all know it’s about the giant servings and the doggie bags.  “They have the best chicken marsala...!”  Not really.  It’s just that there’s 25 pounds of it and you get a boner when you think about microwaving the leftovers at the office for lunch the next day.  And don’t pretend you don’t throw in the bread from the table when the waitress isn’t looking.
 
Obamacare would never have happened if the signing ceremony took place across from the 300 lb. lady murdering a third round of spaghetti in-between gasps from her oxygen tank.  As her motorized scooter sits tableside. 
 
I blew a gasket at lunch.  Like my fellow Americans, I ate five times more than needed.  My mouth said yes while my heart said attack.  After lunch I drove to my friend’s house where the three of us do what we always do in Vegas:  sit, recover, watch tv (discovered a show on Cinemax called ‘Banshee.’  No story, tons of violence and a bit of the ol’ nudity.  Perfect for me and my nerdy friends as we recovered from buffet assault).  It helps to have a friend with a house in Vegas.  I get my own room and don’t have to walk an hour - then wait an hour - for a hotel elevator.  You know you have a good friendship when you can stand-up, walk upstairs to your room and fall asleep for an hour or two and you don’t need to provide explanation or excuse.  My friend and his brother purchased the house when the Vegas market went way south.  Including HOA fees, they each pay $500/month for a three bedroom/three bath.  I wonder if the neighbors would by the speed I would cook if I got a house in the neighborhood. 
 
My friend – we’ll call him ‘Utah’ since that’s where he lives – wanted to check out a bar called Frankie’s Tiki Room.  It was cool.  I loved the florescent sign out front.  It coulda been in Miami Vice. 

 
The inside was mellow, with some hipsters and average Joe’s.  A local’s spot.  We were met by this odd gal who is sort of friends with Utah and the Arab.  (We’ll call my other friend ‘the Arab’ because he’s from the Middle East.)  This woman has a brutal voice...high pitched and without clarity since she was raised in Thailand or Malaysia or the Philipines.  She once told me but I couldn’t understand what she said.  I couldn’t wait to get out of there after round two...there’s a huge downside to not drinking.  Tolerating high-pitched voices in geographically non-specific accents being one of them.
 
The rest of the night was spent downtown.  Unlike my other set of friends who only go to the Strip, Utah and the Arab like to see humanity, and man, do they get it on Fremont Street.  We went to Hennessey’s which had a terrible band playing.  However, they played a not bad version of Billy Bragg’s song “New England,” which is not an obvious choice.  I love it.  It’s on my ipod.  “I don’t want to change the world, I’m not looking for new England...I’m just looking for another girl.”
 
We strolled under the Fremont Street canopy, optimistically called “The Fremont Street Experience.”  Here’s the experience:  Two bands play on the street.  One is a general cover band.  Not great but good enough.  People downtown aren’t in the business of being a critic when the clock strikes 10 on a Friday night.  They want their giant, colorful drinks in a long souvenir glass which they’ll pack for their flight back to England or Arkansas.  They want to walk where they won’t be judged for smoking 20 cigarettes in a row as the 6-year old cries to go to nighty-night.  They want to party where they won’t be analyzed for the suspicious truck stop tattoo on their left boob or the fault line teeth.  Every once in a while, you spot 20-something white chicks and it’s not unlike the feeling you have when you see a fellow American in a distant part of the world.  You feel like you should say something like, “Hey!  I’m an American, too; where you from?”  Only, you’d say, “Hey!  I have a dentist and I shower too!”  The three blonde chicks below did not belong on Fremont Street.  The hammered lady on the right, dancing the night away did belong here.

 
Once you get to the end of Fremont Street, the Plaza Hotel looms like a reminder of better days before Steve Wynn raised his middle finger up the 15 freeway from the Strip.
 
About here you’ll see a metal cover band called Arena.  They are great.  Terrible, but great.  The singer rocks a Vince Neil meets David Lee Roth (1983 version/hair) look.  They play all the arena rock sing-a-long hits.  You can’t help but sing with them and the crowd.  Near the stage, a pretty good sized group of homeless tweekers and alcoholics dances and chomps on their gums while playing air guitar.  They are never not there when Arena plays.  The brother of the bass player hangs out and plays air guitar (or bass?) in the crowd near the tweekers.  I’ve never seen the tweekers fight here.  They get along swimmingly.  It’s amazing.
 
The whole area has that diarrhea dive bar smell.  The dry air hurts your eyes and you imagine how awful the homeless tweekers must smell.  But you feel good that they’re having fun.  It’s not like they’re going to wake up tomorrow and think, “Well, enough of that; today’s the day I turn it all around.”  They are toast.  So why not have a little music to rock out to?
 
Saturday, Utah and I headed over to the Peppermill.  We like the lounge which looks extremely Miami Vice, especially season 1.  It looks like this:
 

 
And once seated in the adjoining restaurant, I like the hash browns.  Next, we went over to the outlet mall where Utah likes to get his clothes.  It’s not really that much cheaper, but like the buffet at M, you can linger and there’s alot of choices, so it must be good. 
 
I split up from Utah and went into the J.Crew Factory Store.  One of the shop girls asked me if I needed help.  She had a nice face, and a pleasant demeanor.  She asked where I was from and she told me how much she likes the area.  I started getting nervous as we talked.  I don’t know where it came from, but I asked for her number.  That’s not like me.  I’m way too shy when it comes to this business.  Always have been and likely always will be.  But it just sort of presented itself.  I put her number in my cell phone.
 
A few years back, when my wife was going through her first round of chemo, we were driving on the 73 freeway overpass.  I remember it so clearly.  It was a Sunday afternoon, about 4pm.  I could tell she was having a rough day, but she wouldn’t say as much...she didn’t want to sound like a ‘whiney-butt,’ as she used to put it.  Out of nowhere she told me she didn’t think she was going to live.  It was the first and only time I’d heard this from her.  She was going somewhere with this, and I will always be grateful for what she said next.  “If I die, I want you to mourn for a while.  I want you to be sad, and think about me.  And then I want you to find somebody else.  You’re too young to be a widow the rest of your life.”
 
At the time, I didn’t think much of it.  I didn’t have the room for thinking this way.  I spent my energy trying to keep my wife comfortable and looking for the best medical advice.
 
Years later, I see her words as a genuine gift.  How selfless to think of me at what was then the worst time of her life.  How could she know this is something that would relieve me of guilt (or a fraction of it, anyways), and give me piece of mind?  When I think of that moment, I picture her looking out for me from where she is.  She knew then what I would need to know now.  It was okay to ask for the shop girl's number. This is all part of it.  Despite what the Arab says, you can't sit around waiting for people to give you their phone numbers and my wife knew that.  You need to deal with life because it's too easy to sit on the couch and mope.  And then you go no where.
 
I left the store feeling weird.  I told Utah that I had asked for the shop girl’s number.  He didn’t know what to say.  He just let me babble like good friends will do when they know some babbling is necessary.  I told him, “The funny thing is, I don’t even know what to do with her number.”
 
End Part One.
 
 
 

You have what it takes to be a major league umpire!

"Gross Seth Rogan bailed with his poor girl, back to the former Oakwood apartments to crawl onto the thrift shop couch where his other stains were waiting for him."
 
 
That is poetry right there. 

Friday was a supposed to have been spent in Vegas with friends, flying out of LAX on the Southwest express.  Luckily, it didn’t happen.  Had a migraine in the morning and it didn’t go away until the Angels game would have finished, which, in the words of Prince, ‘is a mighty long time.’
 
So, I sat on my ass all Friday, taking down an order of Thai food.  When you have a migraine, you don’t know what to eat, so you use it as an excuse to lunch off or not eat at all.  And the pity is, if you eat ‘comfort food,’ you really can’t enjoy it.  So I took down a ton of calories which I didn’t really appreciate.
 
My brother came into town around 9pm, driving down from Napa.  Since I wasn’t in Vegas, I invited him to stay over.  He had to do some wine business at the Century Plaza Hotel on Saturday so I figured his stay wouldn’t be too invasive. 
 
We were up pretty early on Saturday and my bro wanted to go out to breakfast.  He landed upon Haute Cakes in Newport which isn’t my scene, but I didn’t want to salt his game.  The place is like a capsule of lunch time in high school.  You walk in, get sized-up and jockey for a place to sit.  The food’s not bad but who is anybody here kidding?  It’s all about being seen.  (TIME OUT:  NEED TO PUT ON AN EPISODE OF MIAMI VICE.)
 
We picked a table outside, across from a very unhappy 20-something couple.  The dude is my worst kind of dining patron.  I don’t know if he was being hipster/emo or if he was trying to show his tiny Asian girlfriend that he didn’t care no more.  His hair was all over the place, and he wore a wrinkled T-shirt with disgusting shorts encumbered with puke inducing stains.  The kind that make you think back to some of the shit you wore in college to the dining hall and what an asshole you must’ve looked like.
 
To top it off, he was barefoot.  An all around douche who was very eager to show everyone how little he cared.  He drove me nuts as he scraped the bottom of his bowl with a spoon...ding! cling! ding!  Chewing with his mouth open and smacking his fat ass lips like a five-year old with a mouthful of gummie bears.  His girl was unimpressed with the situation.  She was wearing some workout shorts and I felt like she was looking forward to a fancy little breakfast.  But she got stuck with this homeless looking bag of dung who was channeling the worst habits of Seth Rogan. 
 
But God was looking out for me on this day:  A black man arrived with a kid in tow.  This being Newport, everyone tried real hard not to look.  Actually, I don’t think anyone cared, but it’s more fun to write to stereotype.  I recognized the homeboy.  It was Garrett Anderson.  The first thing I did was warn my brother not to ask him for his autograph, thanks to angelswin.com.  I think I scared the hell out of him because he didn’t even look in GA’s direction.
 
GA took off with his kid somewhere around my brother’s second cup of coffee.  No one asked for his autograph, but the owner of the joint chatted with him on his way out.  GA cracked a smile which threw me.  I think the former Home Run Derby champ comes here for breakfast often.  I’ve never seen his kid say a word, by the way. 
 
Gross Seth Rogan bailed with his poor girl, back to the former Oakwood apartments to crawl onto the thrift shop couch where his other stains were waiting for him.  In high school, we called Oakwood ‘Coke-wood’ since a few people we knew who lived there either dealt coke or snorted a Miami Vice episode’s worth.  (FOLLOW UP:  I PUT ON THE EPISODE "TRUST FUND PIRATES") 
 
We got back home and my brother got ready for his wine thingy.  I got a text from my cousin inviting me to his baby’s baptism to take place in about a half-hour.  He appologized for the late notice, etc.  He also stated that there would be an after party at his folks’ house.  I texted back that I was busy (b.s.) but would try to get by for the rager.  The Angels were winning and I didn’t know if that would happen again so I wanted to savor it. 
 
I dropped by the party after the game and everyone was already sauced.  A bagpiper was wrapping up his session.  For those keeping score at home, that’s two weekends in a row for DR where the Shenanigans involved a bagpiper.
 
As I have learned to do, I built in an excuse for why I could only stay for a short time.  It’s one of the first things I do just about any party I go to.  You gotta frontload in case you want to get the hell outta (adam) Dodge.  I really did have plans.  I met my friend at the beach for a bike ride and a side trip to Gina’s pizza where I mangled a meatball sandwich and salad.  Going for broke, I stopped at the Pavilions market for a couple cookies.  Why is there a Pavilions market in this location?  It doesn't fit with the 909'ers who just want a twelver of Corona.  Much better when I was a kid and the same location was a Market Basket.  My dad would get his cigarettes here...and the lighter fluid you had to buy for your cigarette lighter.  I can smell it now. 
 
My brother and I met up later and he wanted to take me to dinner.  I love food so I said ‘yes.’  But first, we went to a bar attached to a restaurant so my brother could get some face time with the manager.  The wine business is 1/3rd wine 2/3rds public relations.  Our cousin was married for a couple years back in the late-70s.  Her husband worked at this same restaurant when they were married.  We heard that he was still working in the same position so we snooped around and found him.  He recognized my brother --who is older than me -- after a couple seconds.  Remarkable that he’s still here after all this time.  He was a real handsome man back in the day.  My cousin, named after my mom, was a knockout.  I mean, she was a 10+.  She could’ve married anyone and I can’t imagine the hell this couple raised in the swinging Newport of the 1970s.  Now, she’s married to an eye doctor and living a country life in Sonoma.  The one constant is change.
 
It was getting late but I had my brother call my Chinese restaurant while I drove to see if they would be open.  They were and we ate...again. 
 
My brother took off at 4am Sunday morning which was nice.  I wanted some alone time.  I went down and got my favorite donut, the old fashioned completely dipped in chocolate, and savored it through the Angels usual Fenway loss.  This is what the greatest donut in the world looks like:

 
 
Sunday’s are the hardest days for DR.  It’s when I miss my wife the most.  While wandering around the house during and with the game on in the background, I put on my wedding ring which I keep next to my wife’s picture.  I texted around in the afternoon looking for someone, anyone to hang out with but everyone was busy with their families or whatever.  Fortunately, my friend had just arrived in town for his mom’s birthday and had some time to kill, so we went on a late afternoon bike ride.  It was nice and overcast out.  It must’ve been hotter than hell inland since there were a ton of people at the beach still.
 
Balboa Pier looked like this after our bike ride:
 

 
Later, I dropped my friend off at his party and went by myself for an amazing slice of sausage pizza.  Felt like a p-i-g afterward but it was worth every bite.  You get some curious looks when you dine by yourself on a Sunday night, fyi.  Earlier, I told my friend I’d drive him back to his place in L.A. after the party since he didn’t have his car.  We headed up around 8:30pm and there was no traffic.  The drive back was wonderful.  I blasted tunes from my collection and felt like I could just keep going to pretty much anywhere.  I thought about it too, especially when Killing Joke’s “Sanity” played.  This song has one of my favorite lyrics of all time and reminds me of my past year, and this current Angels season:
 
“We cherished the seconds, counting the days.”

Let's talk about the subject of the thread, kate Middleton

Way, way too soon to speculate where Trout will after the 2017 season when he reaches FA

Great, now DiPoto can use that 91k towards Trout's raise this offseason.

that sucks.  I hope he has a total recovery.  
 
There are so many things that are more important than baseball.