TBLA Friday morning links: May 3, 2019

Dodgers news...

• Bill Plaschke wrote a column for the LA Times arguing the Dodgers should retire No. 34 in honor of Fernando Valenzuela.

“No matter what anybody decides, no Dodger player will ever again wear number 34. The Dodgers might as well make it official. And that should just be the start,” — Bill Plaschke, Los Angeles Times

• This next one is not quite Dodgers news, but I’m sure this has something to do with the Dodgers coming to town...

• I’m not going to jinx anything, so I’ll just leave this tweet here.

• Cody Bellinger was named the National League Player of the Month for his magnificent performance throughout April. This is the link to the TBLA story on Bellinger. And a post for people who care about sabermetrics.

Around the league...

• A cool thing happened on Thursday! For the first time since a Dodger did it in the 80s.

• Steven Strasburg recorded his 1,500th career strikeout on Thursday. He is the fastest pitcher to achieve this milestone, in 1,272 ¹⁄₃ innings.

• Chicago White Sox’s Tim Anderson was named the American League Player of the Month for April.

• FiveThirtyEight published a story discussing if hot starts really mean anything.

“...The sensible move would be to sit tight and ignore the standings for a few more weeks. But we obviously aren’t going to do that — it’s too much fun to speculate about which hot starts are for real,” — Neil Paine, FiveThirtyEight

• MLB attendance is down — ESPN’s Jeff Passan delves deep into the numbers. Spoiler alert: the Dodgers are leading the MLB in attendance with an average of 47,481 fans per game.
• The daily dingers.