Four days ago the Angels and Diamondbacks embarked on a four-game home-and-home series with each team hovering around the .500 mark. As you might imagine, these two .500 teams split those games and exited from the series still hovering around the .500 mark. It is like the series never happened.
Boxscore Breakdowns
Game 1: Diamondbacks 7, Angels 3
Game 2: Angels 4, Diamondbacks 1
Game 3: Diamondbacks 3, Angels 2
Game 4: Angels 7, Diamondbacks 1
Series Takeaways
1) Get bullpen help now, before it is too late
The bullpen wasn’t a huge factor in this series, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t reveal some things about themselves. In particular, Fernando Salas looked particularly shaky. He had a good couple week stretch earlier in the year, but he’s fallen back to a level where every outing of his is cause to grab the Rolaids. He’d been limiting homers and walks most of the year, but got burned by both in the last week and generally looks to be a mess.
Having one struggling reliever wouldn’t normally be a big problem, but if you look at the other pitchers Scioscia was running out in middle relief and you see why it might be time to panic. Cam Bedrosian is next behind Salas on the depth chart, but has done nothing to earn that slot. Trevor Gott has been called up and is already getting medium leverage appearances because of the dearth of right-handed talent. Scioscia is now dangerously close to having to use Cesar Ramos and Jose Alvarez as more than just left-handed specialists, which is a just a bad idea.
At some point in the not too distant future Mike Morin and Cory Rasmus should rejoin the active roster, but there is no guarantee either of those guys will stabilize the relief corps. As much as I hate expending assets on relievers, Jerry Dipoto might, once again, need to go shopping for a quality bullpen arm. With the meager offensive production of the lineup, protecting leads is going to be more important than ever.
2) Don’t let C.J. Wilson play in National League parks, for his own good
C.J. Wilson has never been shy about letting folks know that he really likes the opportunity to hit. He nearly signed with the Marlins, in part, because of that opportunity (plus lots more money). So, whenever he gets the chance to hit and remind us all he used to play first base in college (as if he’d let us forget), he goes ALL OUT. C.J. Wilson is like the guy on your beer league softball team that shows up to the first game with hundreds of dollars in new equipment, arrives 90 minutes early so he can perform an elaborate stretching routine, curses out people in the field for not taking it “seriously” enough and refuses to swing at a single pitch unless it is absolutely perfect. How do I know this? Because of this:
"When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong." pic.twitter.com/AQ6Yj8tfAX
— Justin Russo (@FlyByKnite) June 18, 2015
That is the completely unnecessary stretching of a single and the reckless slide of an overcompetitive douchebag.
This is right up there with C.J.’s odd propensity for trying to field comebackers with his pitching hand. They (mostly) broke him of that habit, now the Angels need to rein in C.J.’s basepath thrillseeking as well. That seems pretty easy to do though, just rearrange the rotation before their next scheduled trip to a National League park.
Problem solved.
2) The 1990’s were a bad time for uniforms
In the finale of the series the Diamondbacks “treated” us to some throwback uniforms and they were AUUGGHH MY EYES!!
Who in the world thought teal and purple with pinstripes was a combination that needed to exist in nature? Maybe I’m being a little too harsh, we all made some questionable decisions in the late-90’s, so you can’t be too upset with this eyesore. However, you can be upset with the marketing moron that thought it was a good idea to dust off these throwbacks rather than burying them in that landfill in Mexico with all the E.T. Atari video games.
Fortunately, the Angels have no such embarrassing uniform history that they need to erase from the record books.
Huh?
What’s that?
NO! DON’T DO IT!!!
God dammit, Disney.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
