With Trevor Bell’s start today, the Angels have now used five different rookies in their rotation. Not the god awful Nationals. Not the fire sale Pirates. Not the perennially hapless Royals, but the Angels. The World Series hopeful Angels. That just isn’t right.
How can a team hoping to contend for a championship really expect to compete while slavishly relying on a crop of rookies and expect to come out alive on the other side? The Angels are essentially playing Russian roulette with their starting pitching by going with all of these rookies and sooner or later they are going to blow their own brains out all over the mound.
Thus far the Angels’ rookies have delivered a mixed bag of results. In 24 starts, the Angel rookies have posted a very respectable record of 11-4, but that win-loss record is very misleading when you look at the rest of the numbers. In 133 innings of work, the first-year starters have been banged around to the tune of a 5.28 ERA and a 1.49 WHIP while allowing a whopping 21 home runs. Frankly, it is a minor miracle that they aren’t 4-11 instead of 11-4 with those kinds of stats backing them up. Logic dictates that if the rookies continue to struggle on the mound, that shiny 11-4 record will even itself out before too long.
If not for the horseshoe up Palmer’s butt, the Angel rookies would be just 3-3.
This isn’t too disparage the rookie hurlers, mind you. After all, what could anyone really expect from them? They are rookies after all. Heck, going into this season Sean O’Sullivan and Trevor Bell had yet to graduate Single-A, Matt Palmer was a minor league free agent picked up off the scrap heap and Anthony Ortega was just an anonymous farmhand. Of the five Angel rookie starters, only Nick Adenhart was even on the 40-man roster to start the season indicating just how far from ready the Halo front office considered the rest of them. While there is no way Tony Reagins and company could have predicted that they would be so ravaged by injuries, it simply does not compute that these players were deemed not ready for prime time heading into the year are now suddenly the obvious fallback options.
Even though the most casual of outside observers can tell that the Halos are living on borrowed time by counting on these sopping wet behind the ears pitchers to man the rotation, the Angel front office has been mysteriously stubborn in their stance of not seeking out veteran talent. Yes, they did make a hard run at acquiring Roy Halladay, but they have largely ignored every lesser option on the market. Though they insist that they have no financial limitations to acquire additional talent, they also paradoxically insist that they are only going to invest in talent if it makes sense. What could make more sense than spending a few extra bucks on a proven veteran to take the place of at least one of the prematurely promoted newbies? Are they really better off with Trevor Bell on the mound instead of Pedro Martinez (who won tonight, by the way)? Was holding onto Sean O’Sullivan really a preferable option to trading for Jarrod Washburn? The choice isn’t just a former Cy Young winner or rookie, there is a massive gray area between those ends of the spectrum that the Angels could have easily dipped into. If the Angels were a cash-strapped club like the Arizona Diamondbacks, I would understand their reluctance to take a financial risk on a veteran, but they aren’t.
Now the Angels have missed their chance to swing an easy trade at the normal trading deadline and have just a few weeks left to try and conjure up something via the arcane waiver system if they want to finally abandon their “rookies only” philosophy, and right now that looks like a big if. Perhaps they really believe that their five game lead in the AL West is more than sufficient and they can win the division in spite of their wonky rotation. From then on they just need three reliable starters for the post season which they already have in John Lackey, Jered Weaver and (hopefully) Ervin Santana. If that is really the case, then that is a textbook example of counting your chickens before they hatch. What guarantees do they have that Weaver or Santana won’t slump again or one of their three top starters won’t suffer an injury?
The Angel front office has long been accused of overvaluing their prospects and now they’ve finally had to put their money where their mouth is and the results continue to be unimpressive. It is high time that they swallow their pride and open up the check book and bring in some real, battle-tested talent before these rookies melt under the pressure of the pennant race.
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