AZMike

Good point here. FWIW several people wanted Maris' record to be given an asterisk due to the fact that he achieved the record in a 162 game season, instead of a 154 game season when Ruth set the previous mark.

Ron Washington is going a step further and placing Yu Darvish to the DL to deal with what would normally be day-to-day soreness. Because of the all star break going on the 15 day DL will only cause Darvish to miss one start, and by being on the DL he can't possible participate in the ASG.

The over the fence catch thing is a big deal. He also got a huge amount of negative credit for trying to rob extra bases and accidentally assisting the other team in getting a home run. Twice this season there were balls that would have hit off the top of the wall that just slipped out of Trout's glove and rolled over the wall. Trout also had a few misplays earlier in the season where balls fell in for doubles that should have been caught. That said I still don't consider the stat legitimate. According to both fangraphs and baseball reference JB Shuck is a better defender than Trout. That is complete BS.

Cabrera and Davis are something else this year. Kinda reminds me of the McGwire vs Sosa situation back in '97

FWIW I predicted that 2013 Angels season = 2000 Angels season long before it started. That's looking about right...

Yep. Nitpicking about semantics. The year 2000 had 4 players with 30+ HR and 4 players with 100+ RBI

We have 13 games each against the A's and the Rangers. We'd only need to 11-2 against both of them directly, and keep pace with them in general, to make up the gap

Moreno will pay him $13M+ a year for 3+ years as a free agent

Watching a bit of Dodgers/DBacks. Dodgers are heating up. They're about to pick up a game on the DBacks (up 5-0 at 7th inning stretch as of now) and appear to be a much better team than they were at the beginning of the season. I could see them winning the NL West this year. edit: Greinke is 3-3 as a batter (averaging >.350 on the season), and is pitching a 2-hit shutout through 7.

How was this guy able to evade security? I thought there was an Angels team policy against headware which blocks the face due to safety / identification concerns. At least that was the story the last time some guy wore a paper bag within line of sight of the TV cameras...

In the scenarios which involved teams getting punished (forfeiting games, losing draft picks etc) you could make it possible for players blackmail the teams by threatening to "get caught" for PEDs unless renewed for more guaranteed money.

I could easily see Texas winning as they get players back from the DL, but why do you expect Oakland to collapse to the point the Angels will catch them?

In general the Luxury tax is based on the average value of the contracts, not the dollar amounts paid year by year. Pujols and Hamilton are each getting paid $16M this year, but they count as $25M/year each for luxury tax accounting as that's the average cost of their contracts. Blanton, Weaver, Wilson and many others are all being paid less this year than the average annual value of their contracts. This is also why Trout hasn't been locked into a Longoria-type deal yet. Let's say they gave him $15M a year average for a long time. Even if the contract was written to only pay him league minimum this year, and $25M sometime on the back end of the contract, it would still count as $15M against the luxury tax.

Angels are not going to go above the luxury tax this year no matter what. Trading for Lee would do that. They will very likely be over next year due to the way the Wells trade was structured. After Wells deal is over I suspect they will offer Trout a long term deal which would likely mean the Angels are paying the luxury tax until Hamilton is off the books. Since tax rates go up base on number of consecutive years the team is over the cutoff, a small increase in payroll this year coud lead to millions in future penalties owed.

This x10. We would be at least a couple games above .500 right now if Bourjos were healthy all season. Several Blanton and Williams starts early on in the season ended up as close losses because shuck converted would-be put outs in LF by Trout into run-scoring extra base hits.

Both Oakland and Texas are winning and remaining in a dead heat for the division lead. Before the season started I expected AL West to be a close three way race with Oakland ultimately winning, and the Angels ending up in a close third. It now looks like that last prediction will only be half-correct. Angels will end up in third but it will not be close.

An exhibition involving some of the best OFers in the game doing just this would make the Derby a lot more interesting.

Iannetta for Chatwood. Maybe the Rox will let us take a mulligan on that whole situation...

These are the kinds of numbers I was expecting from him going into the year. A lot better than the Mathis line with ~12 HRs he was on pace for

Make zero moves since 2010 and this is the team you have today: Bourjos Segura (3B) Trout Trumbo Morales Napoli (1B) Kendrick Aybar Conger Weaver Corbin Chatwood Skaggs Hellweg

The Astros joining our division will add at least 5 wins to our win column making it much easier for us to secure a wild card berth oh wait

The #2 pitcher in the AL according to the ESPN Cy Young Award predictory sees what you did there

We should have kept Hawpe in the game

On the plus side, cars with a clutch are somewhat less likely to get stolen as an entire generation of auto theiievs has grown up with automatics their entire life

It's OK. We still have 13 games each against the Rangers and the A's to take care of that 9 game deficit situation