Second Guessing Scioscia – Will the Scioscia play now that Dipoto is away?

Welcome to Second Guessing Scioscia, our look back at some of the questionable decisions that Mike Scioscia made in the last week. And, boy, there are some questionable decisions to be reviewed. In the history of this column, we have never once struggled for content. However, we aren’t anti-Scioscia. The official MWAH stance on Scioscia is pro-Scioscia overall. But his in-game tactics need some help and we are here to provide that help by nitpicking incessantly and grading them with our patented SciosciaFace grading system.

In this week’s edition we take a far too early look at how Scioscia might have altered his managerial style now that Jerry Dipoto isn’t around to browbeat him with his fancy numbers and what not.

Life after Dipoto
Jerry Dipoto was nice enough to take his ball and go home on July 1st. I don’t say that because I wanted him to leave, quite the opposite, in fact. I say that because it makes looking up the “post-Dipoto” splits for the Angels all that much easier. I guess we can call that his parting gift. Thank you, Jerry. You will be missed.

With his archnemesis no longer in place, you’d think that Scioscia would jump at the chance to fall back into his old and supposedly bad habits, right?

Through ten games, the results are inconclusive at best. Obviously that is a small sample, but it does provide some hope that the evolution in thought and strategy that Dipoto forced on Sosh might actually have stuck. Allow me to illustrate.

The big fear with Scioscia is that he is going to try and get back to his more aggressive, smallball tactics. Lots of stealing bases, lots of sac bunting, lots of relying on situational hitting. In short, he would potentially want to run the offense in a way that is perfectly ill-suited for the current roster. Alas, Scioscia has resisted all of those temptations thus far. In the ten games sans-Dipoto, the Angels have attempted but one stolen base, laid down just two sac bunts (which is two too many for my tastes, but on par with what he’d been doing earlier in the year) and seen the offense go crazy bonkers, scoring 6.6 runs per game on the back of 17 dingers.

Of course, that could just be the prolific offensive output of the last two weeks masking everything. When you’re smashing a bunch of homers and putting up crooked numbers in individual innings, there isn’t a whole lot of managing shenanigans that one can get into. Heck, Scioscia hasn’t even been guilty of throwing the batting order into the blender every three games like he usually does.  The lineup has been almost entirely static in July other than Perez giving Iannetta days off, Featherston giving Freese a day off and the Joyce/Robertson platoon. That’s all perfectly normal but it is also perfectly explained by the fact that the lineup is kicking butt and taking names. Even the most ardent of batting order tinkerers isn’t going to mess with the kind of success the Halos have had of late.

I can’t even begin to decipher if he’s changed his bullpen utilization this month either. Again, all the big wins have obscured any patterns. Scioscia seems to have spent more energy trying to get everyone the necessary work to stay in tune than he has trying to establish roles and play match-ups.

This is probably the biggest area of concern though. Even before Dipoto kicked himself to the curb, Scioscia was becoming increasingly dependent on managing the bullpen by inning. Trevor Gott emerged as a potential seventh inning guy and from there on out compelled Scioscia to use him exclusively in that inning during close games. He has a very good LOOGY in Cesar Ramos, a rebounding Fernando Salas and now the husk of a man that was Mike Morin at his disposal, but if he continues to rely on the Gott-Smith-Street formula, Ramos, Salas and Morin will be greatly minimized. That may not be the worst thing in the world given the inconsistency of the latter two relievers, but it really reduces Scioscia’s ability to exploit match-ups and places far too much on the shoulders of an unproven rookie in Gott.

So, really, nothing has changed for Scioscia since Dipoto left. Not anything that can easily be observed or measured anyway (my kingdom for stats on infield shifts). That doesn’t mean that it won’t though. What I’ve highlighted above are all the things to watch out for. So long as the Halos keep winning, I imagine Sosh will just keep clicking along, but once they hit their first losing streak, that’s when Scioscia will reveal himself for who he truly is.

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