MondoLinks: A recap of baseball happenings over this past weekend...and...this week's One Big Idea: What if your franchise owner was a despicable, horrible bad guy?
While you were away...
- The Angels opened their weekend in New York in monster fashion, blasting the Yankees 13 to 1 as C.J. Wilson maintains his strong outings against NY. Saturday was an eminently winnable game that fortune pulled from our limp grasp and the Halos drop one 4 to 3. Hector Santiago had one bad inning and the bullpen was rock solid, but the offense stalled. So Sunday night comes along and Garret Richards takes on the challenge of Masahiro Tanaka, and brilliantly stays ahead of him through 7 innings (at a fraction of the price). But the offense was still chill and the margin of error remained razor thin as the LAA bullpen took over again - this time, not so rock solid. Game blown 3 to 2. A sweep was within the realm of possibilities,and the Halos grossly out pointed the Yanks, but dropped 2 out of 3 anyway and now limp home. The Angels open by hosting three against the Indians in Anaheim, where they are an insufferable 3 and 6 to date.
- By the way, only two teams in all of baseball have scored more runs than LAA, and nobody has hit more home runs. The situation must have something to do with being 19th in ERA. So you probably don't want to look at this list, and notice where sits the names Vargas, Kazmir, Santana, and Haren. Oh, and K-Rod.
- The City of Anaheim and Arte Moreno are not going anywhere, but not in the way that you think. Talks have stalled. Well, except for the talking of Tom Tait. "You're the mayor. A guy walks into City Hall and offers to spend half a billion bucks to revitalize property owned by the city, at no cost to the city. What do you say? If you're Anaheim Mayor Tom Tait, you call it a taxpayer giveaway."
- ESPN wants to tell me something important about my team. But they want me to pay for it, and that ain't happening. From what I can gather, they want to point out that our pitching staff is the worst in MLB at throwing a first pitch strike. I will leave it to one of you people to figure out if they might consider the possibility that this might have something to do with managerial philosophies or dugout-based strategies.
- Miscellaneous: Bryce Harper has come down with a bout of Josh Hamilton, and hits the DL. Again............Because, after all, April is almost over and it's clearly obvious which are the hottest players this season, the MLB All-Star Ballot is officially out...........MLB is going to be taking a look at controlling pine tar with pitchers in teh offseason. So now that the Yankees are clearly in on it, Joe Torre wants us all to think about the safety issues...........In case you haven't been able to keep up, yeah, there's a lot of injuries in the air this year.............The Mets don't appear to like ppeople calling Bartolo Colon overweight.
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Moreno-Carpino Shame Update
Jim Fregosi still not being honored with a memorial patch.
24 games lost. Only 138 games remaining to save face.
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By now you must have heard or read quite a bit about LA Clippers owner slash bigot slash asshat Donald Sterling and his most recent spate of ugly racism. Brutally bad stuff. Just brutal.
Without pontificating on the obvious, this week let's just ask the question: what would be YOUR personal reaction if the owner of your favorite sports franchise - supposedly an entertaining diversion from the harsh reality of the every day - turned out to be an incredible social and civic villain? By "personal reaction", I am asking what actual action would you take, if any?