I think I’ve finally given up trying to figure out what this team is doing. Far as I can tell, there are three things about this year’s Angels we know for certain: the offense is bad once you get past Pujols, the base-running is bad all over, and Johnny Giavotella’s defense is atrocious. Everything else is somewhere in the middle, often with flashes of good/great dampered by exasperating stretches of ineptitude. This constant ebb and flow, especially on the mound, makes it hard to determine just how much time and hope to invest in the team over the final five weeks of the season.
The way they played in Detroit, and the way they’ve played for most of August, makes me think we might all be better off turning our focus to one of the several football seasons starting up across the globe, or whatever it is that keeps your household entertained through fall and winter. The Angels have won but a single game by more than two runs since July 27, have committed nine errors in the past six games, and have a worse than 5.00 ERA as a team in the last 30 days. Outside of Matt Shoemaker’s strong performance Thursday morning—one of those sporadic flashes of good/great—there was maybe half an inning all series where the Angels looked like a legitimate contender. And yet, they still somehow took two of three the Tigers, still somehow sit less than a game away from a playoff spot, and still somehow have a chance to finish August just one win shy of a .500 record for the month.
It makes little sense, but here we are.
The Angels have seemingly turned winning ugly into an art form, backpedaling their way to victory after victory between equally ugly losses. This trait might be seen as an asset if it appeared the team was “scratching out” wins by way of grittiness and sheer determination, but what the Halos are doing when they win feels a whole lot more like “barely not losing” than anything else.
What this means for the final 35 games of the regular season is anybody’s guess. The most likely scenario, of course, is that the Angels continue to be mediocre (or worse) and inevitably miss out on the postseason thanks to a slightly less mediocre Twins/Rangers. However, all it takes is one hot streak at the right time to push a team deep into the playoffs, as the 2006 Cardinals, 2007 Rockies, and 2014 Royals can attest. The Angels are still in this thing, remarkably, and far be it from me to determine what the baseball gods might have in store for the home stretch. All I ask is that it be more watchable than whatever the hell it is they’ve been doing lately.
Boxscore Breakdowns
Game 1: Angels 8, Tigers 7
Game 2: Tigers 5, Angels 0
Game 3: Angels 2, Tigers 0
Series Takeaways
Frustrations Continue to Boil Over
Our window into player interactions with teammates and coaches is infinitesimal. The exchanges on the field and in the dugout during games probably make up less than 5 percent of the team dialogues in a given week, and our part is entirely parasocial, but that doesn’t stop us from coming to over-broad generalizations about what we see and how it might relate to things like overall team chemistry. Part of this, I think, comes from a natural human desire/need to project emotions on people even if we’re not directly interacting with them; it’s simply how our brain works to interpret human actions, and for fans these perceptions are often heightened due to the dramatic settings involved.
All of which is more or less a long disclaimer so I don’t feel like a total goof saying that it seems like the Angels have reached an unhealthy place so far as expressing their frustration is concerned. When Huston Street yelled at everybody and nobody in the dugout after the Blue Jays massacred the Halos over the weekend, I was left with the impression that his tirade was cathartic more than anything; everyone’s frustrations had bottled up over time, and his lecture was an attempt to relieve that pressure. When the Angels followed that with a closed-door meeting the next day—which I presume mostly involved hitting a punching bag with Bud Selig’s interleague-loving face on it—I thought that would be that.
But then Detroit happened. First, Jered Weaver threw a fit in the dugout Tuesday that was obliquely directed at Mike Trout and Kole Calhoun, then Albert Pujols threw a fit when Trout didn’t score from third during his very brief rundown on Thursday. Unlike Street’s lecture, the gesticulations of Weaver and Pujols appeared to come more from the “I’m angry at myself so I’m going to lash out at whoever’s closest to me” page of the Dad playbook than any sort of constructive place.
Again, we’re privy to only a very small number of player/team interactions, so it’s entirely possible they’re all cuddling with each other on the plane to Cleveland and singing Kumbaya. But having been on a baseball team that completely fell apart after a similar interplay of losing and butting heads on the field, I feel it’s warranted to be a little worried about the how clubhouse atmosphere might impact the club over the final month of the season. I’m no psychologist, but I’m pretty sure reinstalling Trout’s Nerf basketball hoop would resolve most of the issues. Because you can’t spell “Nerf hoop” phonetically without f-u-n.
Where the Heck is Kyle Kubitza?
Kaleb Cowart’s defense and arm have been as good as advertised, but I’m not sure it’s enough to make up for his .115/.207/.269 line and his 12 strikeouts in 26 at-bats through his first nine MLB games. The youngster has looked completely overmatched at the plate enough times—his pitch recognition skills appear to be nonexistent—that it’s worth wondering why he hasn’t been joined on the big-league roster by Kyle Kubitza.
Last time we saw Kubitza, he was briefly splitting playing time between left field and third base at the end of July to spell the concussed Matt Joyce and the fracture David Freese. The acquisition of Conor Gillaspie crowded Kubitza out of Anaheim for a while, then he was surprisingly usurped on the depth chart by Cowart. The way the Angels have seemingly gone out of their way to not play him since Jerry Dipoto resigned on July 1 makes you wonder whether the remaining guys in the front office were ever really sold on Kubitza. He’s batting .275/.387/.412 with 10 extra-base hits at Triple-A since returning to the minors, so it’s not like he’s in some big slump.There’s no question he’ll be recalled when rosters expand next week, but whether he’s still a favorite to be the team’s third baseman in 2016 appears to be very much in the air.
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