MLB 2022: The Long and Winding Thread

It's a borderline miracle they weren't perfect gamed by Taillon (hi @outofplace!) the other night. There is NOTHING after Ward-Ohtani-Trout (so of course Jared Walsh broke it up).

 

Roansy Contreras is making that deal look like it might not be so terrible for the Pirates even with Taillon dominating for the Yankees lately.

 

This is really true. It almost feels like watching one of those high school games where you wait for the 2-3-4 hitters to come up and just bide your time in between, knowing nothing is happening until the 2-3-4 hitters come up again..

 

He was throwing strike one to almost every guy and they weren't working the count. Really thought that was gonna happen.

 

Lagares was a Gold Glover.

Granted, that was back during Obama’s second term …

 

Mets 2015 media guide cover: Jacob deGrom and Juan Lagares.

 

re: The Angels, it seems like forever since the team has had depth, which is usually more difficult to secure on the free agent market. It's defensible to outlay big for some FA superstars, but it quickly adds up if you need to plug multiple positions with average production at $10M per, for example. I'm a Red Sox fan, and while plenty of our prospects are overhyped and don't end up being perennial all-stars, they've "hit" on enough that they're still regulars. In contrast, the Angels haven't even seemed to get that from their farm system.

The other thing - For a bunch of years, the Angels seemed to have the market cornered on bullpen guys that came from nowhere, that would get guys out "via laser beams from their eyes," as one edition of Baseball Prospectus put it. It seems like that market has dried up for them.

 

As a Cleveland fan, it was easy to see the Angels didn’t know what they were doing when they traded Mike Clevinger for Vinnie Pestano and gave Joe Smith way too much money.

Sometimes it’s the fringe deals that alert you to the fact that a franchise can’t evaluate talent.

Cleveland fleeced Seattle for more than a decade in trades once it became clear they had no idea how to value their own prospects or find organizational depth.

 

That '02 bullpen was LOADED with roiders. Might have been every single one.

 

It'll always be overshadowed by "Bagwell for Larry Anderson" in the negative column, but the Red Sox pulled off a heist of their own when they got Jason Varitek AND Derek Lowe in return from the Mariners for Heathcliff Slocumb.

 

I adored Heathcliff so much as a kid. I’d go to minor league games just to watch him and Dennis Cook warm up in the bullpen. And to see Sam Horn at the very end of his career get AB’s.