Capital_Dave

I, for one, am a yes. I think Adell's upside is limited due to his high K rate. Give me 3 years of Blake Snell at the front of our rotation, with Brandon Marsh waiting in the wings to take over RF when he's ready.

Sometimes you can measure a GM as much by the moves he DOESN'T make as the ones he DOES. Good job Minasian.

Just curious... can anyone explain why Soriano had been in our system for four seasons and never rose about High-A? I've heard good things about him on this board, and his surface stats look terrific. Weird that he wasn't more aggressively promoted. Were there makeup problems or other intangibles holding him back?

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Love this move. Cost us nothing of consequence and we gain a defensive star with offensive upside for $3M. Sign me up.

He's a very very skilled defensive shortstop who had an explosive offensive year out of nowhere last year. 1 year $3.5M left on his contract... hopefully didn't cost TOO much but if not I like it. He'll be fun to watch.

Pitcher List is a great fantasy baseball website with some very good analytical pieces. This one points to Walsh's cleaner, more compact swing as a root cause of his remarkable improvement, dramatically reducing strikeouts and driving up hard contact.

What's funny is that the $15M he agreed to was precisely the option that the Rays just declined. And the Rays were reported to be the runner up. So they hoped to save a million or two and lost Morton...

Alex Anthopoulos is schooling his protege. *This* is how you fill two empty slots in your pitching rotation. (TBF, he caught Minasian from a standing start... still, time to get going if we want to snap up some pitching.)

I'm all for trading a few valuable trade chits for Snell. The thing is though the Rays seem like they've got depth everywhere, hard to know what their needs are. Would Brandon Marsh + Jeremiah Jackson + someone really young like Vera be enough?

One year of Lindor, when the acquiring team pays all salary? I cannot imagine that it would be all that expensive. It'll cost something meaningful, but we're not talking Brandon Marsh here...

With the departure of Simmons, SS is an obvious position of need for the Angels. Would Luis Rengifo or someone of that trade value tier be enough for one year of Lindor?

twitter.com/RawlingsSports/status/1319337752647913473?s=20

I remember about 15 years ago I was having lunch at a restaurant at a golf course in Reno, NV. I heard his distinctive voice at the next table, there was no mistaking it. Looked over and there he was. Couldn't have been nicer when I briefly interrupted his lunch to thank him for some terrific childhood baseball memories.

It's like Donnie Moore, but the Astros!

Barria went exactly once through the order, seemed pre-planned. Clev's early departure "wasn't planned" per press reports. Sounds like he's still injured.

Surely you would remove Posey from that list too, right @Jeff Fletcher?

Hansel Robles shouldn't get to use his intro video if he's not the closer. It seems kinda sad for just some guy in the bullpen to have a hype video like that. Gotta earn it.

I like this move. Maybe I'm in the minority. La Stella is a free agent in 2021 so this is a rental for the A's. We get a long term 24 year old prospect who has had very limited playing time and has a 55 prospect score per Fangraphs. Sign me up. Let's see what this kid can do.

What about Bundy, Goodwin, Rengifo, Marsh for Clevinger And Plesac? Who says no?

Does no one catch the irony of complaining about no Angels prospect ever panning out while we currently have perhaps the best player to ever play the game on our roster as a home-grown prospect?

Thanks for the answers @Jeff Fletcher. For anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of how the in-stadium production works this season, I came across a really fascinating interview with a ballpark sound effects operator on Effectively Wild, the Fangraphs podcast. A great listen: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/effectively-wild-episode-1573-make-some-noise/

I've been going on the assumption that the crowd noise we're hearing on television broadcasts is heard in the stadium too, but I heard an analyst today talk about how players might be getting better breaks on balls defensively because they can hear the sound of the ball hitting the bat better. So, dumb question: the players CAN hear the same crowd noise we can, can't they? And how convincing is it in a stadium atmosphere? (If you close your eyes, could you be fooled that the ambient noise you're hearing is actual crowd noise?) I have to say, the crowd noise we're hearing on broadcasts -- especially at other stadiums -- is pretty convincing. The A's games have even mixed in sounds of the drummers, horns, etc. No idea how they captured those, but they are present and accounted for!