This Week in (Dumb) Baseball: Angels front-office missteps – CBSSports.com

It’s Monday, which means our regularly scheduled programming of This Week in (Dumb) Baseball is ready for consumption.

As regular readers already know, this feature has the title, sure, but it’s mostly for fun— a fact that eludes the masses but remains the case. For example, if you tell me to “quit whining,” you are missing the point. I’m mostly chuckling to myself as I write these things (with some exceptions, of course).

For all This Week in (Dumb) Baseball columns, click here.

1. Oh, Angels

The Angels on the field are streaking, meanwhile the administrative wing continues to embarrass itself in a season of lowlights.

Let’s start with the messed-up hierarchy. In any business, there’s a ranking system. In baseball it flows from the owner to the club president of baseball operations (if there is one) to the general manager to the assistant GM and on down to the manager. More people are involved, of course, but those are the principles.

We could debate different nuances or the division of labor (like that the manager should make the daily lineup, not the GM, for example), but the basic lineage dictates that the GM is the boss of the manager.

Except that’s not how Angels owner Arte Moreno handles things. He essentially chose manager Mike Scioscia over a good GM in Jerry Dipoto, forcing Dipoto to either resign (which he did) or continue on the job with no power.

Remember, Moreno is the owner who meddled and decided to sign Albert Pujols to a megadeal and then ink Josh Hamilton to a real inadvisible deal the following offseason — when the offensive-powered Angels badly needed pitching and Zack Greinke signed with the Dodgers.

This reeks of an owner who doesn’t trust the GM he or his club president hired. You know, kinda like a GM that tries to dictate how a manager works on a daily basis? So if anyone has a problem with Dipoto trying to convince Scioscia to integrate more analytics into his daily game-planning, that same person should have a huge problem with almost everything Moreno does.

That Hamilton deal blew up in the Angels’ faces and for several reasons it isn’t all too surprising. What Moreno did was tantamount to giving Hamilton away (he is still paying the overwhelming majority of Hamilton’s salary) in the fit of a childish temper tantrum, essentially just to rid himself of the reminder of his own mistake — and the contract is Moreno’s mistake, not Hamilton’s — on a daily basis.

Still, we get this from Scioscia late last week.

“I’m hoping he’ll take an opportunity to thank the teammates that supported him, and to reach out to (Angels owner) Arte (Moreno) and let Arte know that maybe some of the things he did weren’t what he signed up to do. We’ll leave it at that.”

I honestly don’t have a problem with the mindset that Hamilton should apologize to the Angels, but respect to a situation should go both ways. Here’s an idea: You want Josh to be accountable? Don’t be a hypocrite. Apologize to your fans for the signing. What’s fair is fair.

It is not difficult to choose the latter if you don’t believe the former.

2. Worrying about All-Star voting tallies past the winners

Did you see that Anthony Rizzo got fewer All-Star votes than Matt Adams or that Albert Pujols finished behind Justin Smoak?

I actually didn’t notice until I saw people complaining about it on this our Internet.

Why in the world does this matter? This isn’t MVP voting where there might be contractual considerations. This isn’t the final season standings. This isn’t how All-Star reserves are determined. It means nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Yet, people complain. Imagine that, I know.

My guess is the complainers hate that fans get to vote and want to find reasons to prove why the vote is stupid. Where these people are misguided is that the vote only elects starters. Nothing behind the starters matters, so the arguments should only involve the elected starters. Going past that is a waste of time.

3. C’mon, Ruben Tejada

I believe this is why the #lolMets meme was created on Twitter.

OK, so let’s point out that it was possible for the umpires to have ruled that Tejada was passed on the bases (both players on the same base is interpreted as the hind runner having passed the lead runner) and that when Tejada ran off the base, both players could have been called out. In fact, I’m pretty sure this was botched.

So the umpires and Tejada get a “dumb” here.

As we do every week, we wash away the dumb with some fun.

Throwback highlight of the week

In 1987, Cubs right fielder Andre Dawson won MVP and clubbed a career-high 49 homers. His final at-bat at home resulted in his 47th home run of the year.

Baseball card/fun fact of the week

(Image via gmagrading.com)

Yes, that’s Big Papi, David Ortiz. His full given name is David Americo Ortiz Arias. He was known as David Arias until he told the Twins (who he was with at the time) that he preferred to go by David Ortiz. Weird to think of him now as David Arias, right?

Pop culture tweets of the week

Terminator franchise fans, enjoy this.

Dying pic.twitter.com/jTgRdxx5nx

— Max Fisher (@Max_Fisher) July 1, 2015

I’m with Mr. Fisher. I was dying laughing just imagining all the Skynet tweets poor Ms. O’Connor was getting. I wonder if any of those accounts tweeting to her were actually self-aware computers? Uh oh …

On that ominous note, it’s time to put a bow on this thing. Have a great week, friends and foes.

Suggestions (dumb stuff, random videos, baseball cards, pop culture rankings topics, etc.) or hate mail? Feel free to hit me up: matt.snyder@cbs.com or you could always go to Twitter (@MattSnyderCBS).