Detroit Tigers Links is secretly injured

Cheating takes many forms

Yesterday, Buster Olney broke the news that San Diego was hiding players’ true medical reports by keeping two distinct records: one for industry consumption and one for the team’s internal use. This, as you can imagine, is a big no no.

All records on each player are kept in a central database for each team to access. Therefore, when making a trade, the process of a player’s health assessment is built upon trust. The Padres intentionally betrayed this trust to gain an advantage.

Trainers were told in meetings during spring training that the distinction was meant to better position the team for trades, according to two sources with direct knowledge of what was said.

That is pretty egregious, at least they haven’t made any trades lately ... oh no:

The Boston Red Sox, Miami Marlins and Chicago White Sox — were enraged by what they perceived to be strategic deception: veiling medical information that could have been pivotal in trade discussions. At least one other team reached out to the commissioner's office with a complaint, according to sources.

The Padres are a total tire fire. On top of their buying purge completely failing, their subsequent sell off was aided by cheating. A.J. Preller, the team’s GM, has already been suspended for 30 days and there better be a lot more punishment coming. The league needs to take a hard line on something as atrocious as this.

You'll never guess the luckiest team in the league

Yes you will, it's the Cardinals. Can't wait for this trash team to sneak in as the second Wild Card and win the whole thing, because the baseball gods hate us and don't want us to be happy.

The unluckiest team was the Seattle Mariners, which, *looks in the review mirror* is totally fine.

The Yankees signed Billy Butler

The Oakland Athletics got little return on their $30 million dollar investment and cut Butler loose. The Yankees, in the need of some offense, picked him up for little to nothing. Is this link worthy news? Absolutely not. It’s just an excuse to embed this picture for the 300th time.*

*This was supposed to be the modeling picture of Billy Butler in a white t-shirt and blue jeans suggestively holding a baseball bat. However, it appears he has wiped it from the internet. If anyone has or can find that picture, PLEASE send it to me. Thank you.

No one wants to deal with the Twins’ tire fire.

Actually, that’s not entirely true, but they sure are having a hard time filling their president of baseball operations position.

We’ve already heard recently that Alex Anthopoulos turned down a chance at consideration. And Passan says the same held true of former Red Sox GM Ben Cherington, who joined the Blue Jays earlier today in a position of less authority than he theoretically could have obtained in Minnesota.

Athletics GM David Forst, too, has “declined interest,” according to Darren Wolfson of 1500 ESPN (via Twitter).

New ballpark, young talent, and the ability to pick your own GM sounds pretty appealing to me. Feel free to shoot your resumes over to anyone at the Twins organization, whose emails are all listed. Actually just send them really angry GIFs about that series.

Good analysis is good!

We always tend to make fun of analysts. It’s in our nature to be couch coaches and smart-asses. But it is pretty cool to witness a baseball person give you live inside analysis into the action:

Terrific work. Although I’m always clouded on how bright Dan Plesac actually is considering sharing a stage with Harold Reynolds would make a sixth grader look like Elon Musk.

Savvy baseball journalism

Veteran move by Jon Heyman to release your top 30 free agent rankings and guesstimated salaries a full two months before the end of the season. Especially logical, because, as we’ve seen, playoff performance has absolutely no affect on a players contract.

For your free time.

I had not heard of Shohei Otani, and that was a gross oversight on my part. How much can hitters actually see coming out of the pitchers hand? We are still not paying enough attention to Mike Trout.

Baseball is awesome.