6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog

For the one person who cares (me, now), I finally cleaned up the sidebar of dead links, including duplicated links to now-defunct blogs, both at major newspapers (the LAT and OCR Dodgers and Angels blogs are now long-gone), and other cruft that has vanished over time.

Labels: administrivia

Cleaned up a ton of stale links, including the minor league links, which I hadn't fixed in a couple years (and shamefully pointed to pre-2014 affiliations in some cases). A few blogs that haven't been updated recently got the axe, as well some various sites I haven't used in a great long while. I've fixed a few other links; the sidebar post references are, after a couple years of breakage, now semi-functional, at least through 2007. I hope to fix that shortly.

Labels: administrivia

My overall inattention to this space led me to forget a promise from 2009, when I told the proprietor of Dodger Therapy that I'd give them a sidebar link. (I was archiving my old mail from 2014 when I looked into prior years' archives and found an old exchange that I had forgotten.) Unlike a bunch of bloggers from the end of the McCourt era, they're still around and active as ever. Give 'em a try.

A lot of sidebar links have bit the dust over the last month, though I still have hope that Matt Welch's old Warblog will one day be resurrected; still, with each passing day, I concede the likelihood of that diminishes.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Labels: administrivia, blogs

I have added a new blog for my political and dog ravings, boringly named Scareduck Blog. Miscellany that used to end up here will go there from now on. You might stop by and say hello.

Labels: administrivia, blogs

• Yesterday was so intense — all of it — that I can only say I believe it was the craziest 24 hours of any offseason in my memory. Jonah Keri's piece at Grantland mostly encapsulates my at-the-moment take on the deals as well:
  • Matt Kemp:

    L.A. may well have sold Kemp at exactly the right time. Friedman and GM Farhan Zaidi aren’t slaves to the recency effect, recognizing that Kemp’s strong finish in 2014 didn’t really change any of the other factors that had led to the longtime trade rumors, including the outfield logjam and his hefty contract. Instead of viewing Kemp’s elite .311/.372/.561 performance over the final 99 games of the season as a sign of rebirth, they viewed it as a boost in trade value that would allow them to more easily move a guy still owed $21 million–plus a year for five seasons.

  • Dee Gordon:

    Gordon is a fun guy to watch, but comparing his projections to, say, Emilio Bonifacio’s should help assure Dodgers fans that they might not be giving up all that much.

  • Howie Kendrick:

    Kendrick is one of the best second basemen in baseball, and he’ll make the Dodgers significantly better in 2015. ... To get Kendrick, of course, the Dodgers had to give up Heaney, whom they possessed for a nanosecond before flipping him to the Angels. Though Kendrick should be a big gain, Heaney could prove to be an even bigger loss, as he has a chance to be good … really good.

    Here, I'm relying on Keri's prospect smarts, but it's a rare case of getting a quality prospect for an established veteran with only limited control. It's important to note this kind of deal rarely happens anymore.
  • Jimmy Rollins:

    Like Kendrick, Rollins offers the Dodgers only one year of guaranteed team control. But in this case, the lone year is a feature rather than a bug, since L.A. has 20-year-old top shortstop prospect Corey Seager not far from the Show.

  • Brandon McCarthy:

    McCarthy is the riskiest of all the moves, considering the length of his contract and his past health concerns.

  Read. It. All. I'm a big fan of moving Kemp, even with the big salary ditch; it strikes me as an example of Branch Rickey's maxim that it's better to move a player a year too early than a year too late.
• No comment on the Angels moves as of yet, but I generally find myself in agreement. My comments on Kemp? Apply equally to Howie.
• I cleaned out a mess of stale sidebar links; if your blog hasn't been updated in two years, or if you aren't named Tommy Lasorda, you don't get special consideration. I practically don't update this one, but I'm the king of this here domain. Angels blogs especially took a lot of hits; it seems generally that blogs are an affectation of the 2000's, to vanish in this decade. My heart haz a sad.

If I don't see y'all until next year, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Labels: administrivia, angels, dodgers, trades

Google introduced auto-pagination last February, but I didn't notice until just now. I may have to change everything around, as it looks like the "older posts" feature they mention here isn't available to blogs using the old style sheets (this one).

Update: Apparently, it can be done. Woot!

Labels: administrivia

Say goodbye to The Fabulous Forum, Sports Hub LA, and SportingGurus. Please see the link policy if you have questions.

Labels: administrivia

Angels Sweep Yankees To Finish First Half: Angels 5, Yankees 4

The Angels whomped C.C. Sabathia for four runs in the fourth and picked up a crucial insurance run in the seventh on Maicer Izturis' RBI single to sweep the Yanks leading up to the All-Star break. John Lackey got out of a tight bases-loaded, no-outs jam in the seventh (with over 100 pitches on the odometer) by getting Mark Teixeira to strike out and A-Rod to ground into a double play, complete with some nifty fielding by Chone Figgins. Brian Fuentes got his 26th save of the year by making outs against Derek Jeter (groundout to first), Mark Teixeira (fly out to center) and A-Rod (strikeout).

A good game for Lackey, who held up pretty well against a good-hitting offense, and for the Angels bullpen as well, at least for the non-Jason-Bulger parts of it.

Yahoo box • Angels recap

No, I'm Not Purposefully Ignoring The Dodgers: Dodgers 7, Milwaukee 4

... it just seems that way. The Dodgers took the road series in the rubber game, getting off to a 2-0 start in the first on James Loney's RBI single, and never looked back. Clayton Kershaw allowed two hits and five walks through six, and Orlando Hudson homered twice to help him out of a late hitting slump.

Yahoo box • Dodgers recap

Manny Acta Fired In Washington

David Pinto relays news that Manny Acta was fired after the team finished the first half 26-61. Former Dodgers bench coach (and Mariners, Cubs, and Padres manager) Jim Riggleman is expected to take over.

Administrivia: A Word On Commenting

Blogspot commenting seems to have been broken for some time now, on and off. The issue seems to be the CAPTCHA image becoming invisible because of formatting issues (it is under the visible part of the display); I'm not sure what browsers have this problem, but Firefox and Safari for sure. A quick look on the most recent Blogger known issues page doesn't show anything about this, but usually the discussion forums have something. So far, nada, but I haven't looked closely. Stay tuned, or if you have something urgent, just drop me an e-mail by my address on the top right of the sidebar.

Labels: administrivia, angels, brewers, dodgers, firings, managers, recaps, yankees

Unfortunately, thanks to the FiOS cutover, I've lost e-mail. (Also, the archive summary links on the sidebar are temporarily out of commission.) I'm hoping to have this restored to service tomorrow. If you sent anything over the weekend and got a bounce message, well, sorry.

Update: E-mail appears to be back up.

Labels: administrivia

Time again to cut back on home page posts. The archives will continue to have the same number of posts.

Labels: administrivia

I've been frustrated for a while now with the lame and frankly opaque restrictions on Blogspot label pages; the main problem, in my view, has been the lack of a "page 2", etc. ability on a given keyword. For instance, the "dodgers" keyword only goes back a couple weeks, a ridiculous state of affairs. Rather than wait for Google to fix this, I decided to extend per-title archives by label*year; you can reach them on the sidebar, above the archive-by-year list. (I know, you're thrilled.) As an example of what I mean, here's the Dodgers label page for all of 2009.

Update: Still having a little bit of trouble with this feature, so for now I'm taking it down.

Update 2: Fixed.

Labels: administrivia

Finally catching up on minor league affiliation changes for the Dodgers, the AAA and AA links are up to date.

Labels: administrivia

Blogger turned on commenting at the bottom of post pages last week, but made them optional in the last couple of days; the fact that I had gone for days without a comment probably had something to do with my missing the reversion to the default old style comment pages. Also, Blogger has enabled multiple authentication types, including Keypad and OpenID, so you don't need a new Google user account to comment anymore.

Labels: administrivia

Some changes for the system links on the sidebar: after having had Jeff Sackmann's minorleaguesplits.com on my sidebar for each team, I finally gave up as he wasn't updating those numbers and wasn't replying to my e-mail about the lack of updates, either. So, off they go. They'll be replaced with links to the local newspaper in those teams' hometowns, if I can find a good one (or two).

Labels: administrivia

Goombye to Watching All Angels, FKA Watching Jeff DaVanon, now a cobweblog. Gone, too, is Purgatory Online, part of a general cleanup of Angels blog links on the sidebar.

Labels: administrivia, angels, blogs

A couple sidebar changes worth mentioning in this space ...

• Ross Porter wrote in (imagine!) to let me know he's running a blog called Real Sports Heroes. I can't promise I'll check in every day, Ross, but I will give you a sidebar link.
• As further evidence of just how scanty my attention has been outside of the Angels/Dodgers baseball axis, one of the primary blogs for the Cubs, 6-4-2's official third team, has moved digs, and so The Cub Reporter has left MVN; MVN replaced it with The View From The Bleachers, which ages ago used to be hosted at Blogspot.

Labels: administrivia

Rather than getting out the latest minor league post earlier in the day, I spent most of my time running errands and working on figuring out how to make the new OpenSearch specs work for Firefox. Firefox used to use the Sherlock interface — used by most plugins previously — but this had the disadvantages of being SGML rather than XML, and requiring the use of specialized JavaScript to handle the installation.

I've created search plugins for MiLB.com and The Baseball Cube that use the new OpenSearch structure. The one for MiLB.com should be compatible with recent versions of Internet Explorer, which now support it. Thanks to a recent change at the Cube, only POST queries are allowed, which at the moment are unsupported by IE.

Those of you using Firefox 2.0 and up can simply use the autodiscover feature from the home page right here. Just click on the search icon on the upper right of your Firefox browser (which looks like this):

All you have to do is click on the "Add 'MiLB.com'" to add a link for MiLB.com's player search. (Really, it's only the last name of the player search.)

For reference, there's also a wealth of sports-related search plugins for both Firefox and IE here. Enjoy.

Update 8/6: Thanks for the link back from THT by Matthew Carruth.

Labels: administrivia, tech

MILB.com's overlords have gotten annoyed with me crawling them once a day, and have either changed their structure or instructed their machines to vaporize my IP address. I'm going to try the usual XML feed and see if that's feasible, but it's kinda annoying. Minor League Scorebook may be down for a spell while I recast it.

Labels: administrivia

I know this is sort of ridiculous to say now, especially considering that I haven't gotten the things out lately anywhere near on time, but thanks to a long-delayed upgrade to Fedora Core 6 on my main home machine, the database I use for the watchlist has fallen down, and can't get up. (No word on whether this means an annoying TV commercial will ensue.) Hope to get this resolved soon.

Labels: administrivia

I'm trying out some new stuff in Blogger (layouts instead of the Blogger Template), and we'll see how it works out. The site could end up looking pretty messy in the short term, so please bear with me while I iron out the kinks. Hopefully the end result is that the home page will load a lot faster.

Update: ... or not. Looks like templates has some pretty mind-bending breakage that prevents me from making it work, at least so far. Two main things bother me: first, the number of days of posts on the main page is ignored no matter what you set it to, and second, the JavaScript for moving sections around so far doesn't work with FireFox 1.5.0.9. Also, while the new tiered archives link structure is way better than the flat list offered before, I really don't like the fact that you can't control the number of elements. For something as big as what I do here, it would be nice if this could be made to be a separate page.

Labels: administrivia