The March 23rd, 2012 edition of daily news for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim including Morales makes his return, Angels seeking a trade for starting pitching, Jerome Williams hopes to return to action on Monday and much more…
The Story: Kendrys Morales made his return to the Angels lineup, going 2-for-3.
The Monkey Says: You couldn’t ask for much more from K-Mo. He had two singles, got to hit from both sides of the plate, ran the bases and even slid. He’ll be in the lineup for one of the split-squad games again today.
The Story: The Angels are looking around the trade market for low-cost starting pitchers.
The Monkey Says: The Halos have options at fifth starter, but none are that great so adding some more low-cost depth can’t hurt. I’m not sure who their targets might be at this point, but once teams get close to having to figure out what to do with some of their out-of-options players the rumors should really start heating up.
The Story: Jerome Williams is aiming to make his Cactus League debut on Monday.
The Monkey Says: This still means he is one rotation turn behind schedule based on Mike Scioscia’s comments from earlier in the spring. Whether or not Sosh sticks to that proclamation remains to be seen, but given the rumor in the news item above, the Angels may not be willing to wait on Williams.
The Story: Torii Hunter believes all Japanese pitchers have the “same style.”
The Monkey Says: This comment comes off as mildly racist for anyone who is over-sensitive or ignorant baseball-wise to the uninformed. As the analysis in the post shows, there are a lot of similarities in the Japanese pitchers that have come to MLB, so I don’t think he should be raked over the coals. I also think we should probably reserve judgment as to whether or not his comments are off-base relating to Yu Darvish until we actually see how Yu pitches in the big leagues. He’ll probably be wrong, but everyone said Dice-K was going to be different and that didn’t work out too well, did it?
The Story: Kendrys Morales’ lasting legacy on Angel walk-off homer celebrations.
The Monkey Says: I think this might be a veiled attempt to troll Angel fans, but it contains animated GIFs… and I just can’t resist animated GIFs.
The Story: Bobby Abreu’s trade value is plummeting due to poor performance and poor conditioning.
The Monkey Says: Read Scioscia’s quotes, it sure sounds like he is starting to lose patience with Abreu. And who could blame him? Bobby spent weeks before training camp complaining about his role and then showed up in Tempe out of shape and immediately began mailing it in every game. One month ago I didn’t think him getting released was an option, but it is definitely on the table now.
The Story: The Angels and Rangers are hiding their starting pitchers from each other this spring.
The Monkey Says: The Angels aren’t admitting to it, but they clearly are. This is just stupid. The Rangers have all seen the Angel pitchers before, except for Wilson really. Hiding Darvish makes a little more sense since he is such an unknown, but these teams both have legions of scouts, so the mystery won’t last long. Frankly, I think they both just like tweaking each other.
The Monkey Says: Here is the thing, I think that the true answer is $0. A 20-year contract is crazy risky for the Angels unless Trout were to offer it up at a substantial discount, and if he were to make such an offer, he wouldn’t be doing it to give the Angels that kind of discount.