Posted 12:12 PM by Sean
The latest Moreno price cut at Edison Field: doing away with higher prices for tickets to more in-demand games. Over the short term, this is understandable - Moreno wants to get a repuation as a fans' owner, a populist in the mold of Bill Veeck, perhaps, and lowering ticket prices is good press. Over the long term, though, pegging at least some ticket prices to demand just makes more sense. If I'm going to spend $20 to see a baseball game, why would I spend it to see the Devil Rays on a Tuesday instead of the Red Sox on a Saturday? But if the D-Rays ticket cost $16, and the Sox were $22, maybe I'd think about it.

Okay, probably not. But I'm sure some people would.

Moreno's move is in direct contract to the latest bit of idiocy from the Chicago Cubs, who actually own a ticket broker service to which they release blocks of unsold tickets, which are then resold at scalpers' prices.

Posted 10:27 AM by Sean
Holy crow! King Kaufman at Salon.com points out a new online exhibit at the Baseball Hall of Fame's web site, featuring a database of every uniform worn by the teams in the American, National, and Federal leagues since 1901, plus all kinds of great information on the history and development of uniforms in general. There's an exhibit in the Hall itself showing how the standard uni has changed over the years, of course, but that's just a handful of examples (albeit real, as opposed to photographs and drawings). Awesome stuff.

Posted 11:36 AM by Sean
Ervin Santana and Jeff Mathis, Angels prospects at Class A Rancho Cucamonga whom I mentioned a few weeks ago, have both been selected to play in the "Futures Game" during All-Star weekend, intended to be a peek at each organization's most promising minor leaguers. Santana and Mathis will be the only Angels representatives (a total of 50 players make the two teams, so that's actually slightly higher than average). The game is on Sunday, July 13, starting - I think - at 4:00 central time. Santana and Mathis will be on opposing teams, since the format for the game is U.S.-born players versus foreign-born players.

Posted 11:09 AM by Sean
Following up on his lowering beer and concession prices, new Angels owner Arte Moreno is lowering ticket prices for certain seats in an effort to draw more families and children. Maybe it's just me, but I think it's pretty funny that a businessman would take the kind of steps to bring kids to the ballpark that Disney wouldn't.

Which is not to say I enjoy sitting near large numbers of kids, because generally parents seem to have an attitude that anything their kids do is okay as long as they're at the ballpark. Shrieking, whining, kicking seats, whatever. And if it does dimly impinge on them that perhaps el nino diablo is bothering people who actually came to watch the game, their temporary solution is always to buy them something with sugar in it. Brilliant.

I guess I never understood the impulse to bring a child to a baseball game if he or she isn't going to watch it. There are thousands of more comfortable places to be with a kid than a baseball stadium, where you're expected to stay more or less in one place for three hours, surrounded by strangers, on hard seats. I know for sure that if I didn't love to watch baseball games there's no way in hell I'd spend money to do that alone, much less with a child. But compare the number of parents you see explaining a play to their child, or teaching them to score a game, with the number who are completely ignoring them and you'll see what I'm saying.

Posted 4:56 PM by Sean
With a week's worth of balloting to go, Troy Glaus seems to have solidified his lead over Oakland's Eric Chavez for the starting third-baseman's job on the AL All-Star team. Glaus now leads 408,739 to 314,081, the closest margin of any leader in the AL, but still pretty comfortable.

That's nice and all, but Glaus is also in a fairly nasty little slump that dates back to June 6. During that time, he's 4 for 42, with one home run. I'd swap the All-Star Team selection for a few more hits any day, and I'm guessing that so would Glaus.

Posted 3:45 PM by Sean
So what happened? On Friday the 13th, the Angels seemed on their way to getting well - lineup intact, starting pitching coming around, three games over .500 for the first time all year. And then...well, I'm going to resist the temptation to say that everything went wrong, but it looks like it was pretty close. The offense has been anemic, scattering a few hits around but stranding legions of runners on base. The starting pitching, meanwhile, imploded again; yesterday's win over the Dodgers by Kevin Appier was the first time an Angels pitcher not named Ramon Ortiz had won a game since June 10. Subtracting Ortiz, the starters' ERA over the past ten days or so is somewhere in the early ionosphere.

At this point, even the wild card is looking pretty desperate. The Angels will have to catch no fewer than four teams ahead of them - Oakland, Toronto, Boston, and Kansas City - while fighting through a tough division schedule down the stretch.

Posted 10:45 AM by Sean
Well, I'm back, and I feel like the parents of a teenager who've returned home to find a naked kid passed out in their front yard, a keg floating in the swimming pool, 650,000 cigarette butts smoldering on the sitting room divan, and several police cars parked on their front lawn.

Obviously, the Angels' performance over the last week has been just ghastly, and, in a couple of hours, they get to hit against Kevin Brown, who is far and away the best pitcher in the NL this year. I really have no idea what's been going on, so I'll save the scathing commentary until tomorrow (or Tuesday - I have to catch up at work, too, you know), but let's just say that in the next few weeks I anticipate writing about whether the Angels should trade away a couple of their mainstays to contenders.