After Dipoto leaves, Angels nab Aaron, Killebrew

The Angels broke out their bats during the July 4 weekend in Arlington, scoring 33 runs in a three-game sweep of the Texas Rangers. We won't say for sure that the Angels players were glad to see general manager Jerry Dipoto go, but we're pretty sure they weren't upset to see him leave.

Angels slugger Albert Pujols reportedly had words with general manager Jerry Dipoto shortly before the latter resigned (Marianne O'Leary [UC International crop]/Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license).

By BILL PETERSON
Big Leagues in Los Angeles

It's easy to say the wheels are coming off the Angels' season now that general manager Jerry Dipoto has left the building after a much-reported dust-up with the fellows in baseball uniforms. It's much harder to say the wheels are staying on.

We prefer to do things the hard way, so we're going in that direction. An air clearing like this isn't the worst that can happen with a baseball club that's really been flat-lining all season, just winning a couple and then losing a couple, ad nauseum, all the way from the start of April until now.

Not a bad idea to roll a head or two under the circumstances, and Dipoto ended up rolling his own.

In a short run of games since Dipoto gave way on July 1, the Angels have performed well, demolishing the Texas Rangers three straight in Arlington during the July 4 weekend by a combined score of 33-8.

Incidentally, the three-game sweep gave the Angels possession of the Harmon Killebrew Award
and the Henry Aaron Award.

It's easy to say Dipoto's departure must have made the Angels bats happy, at least immediately. How this plays out in the long term is anyone's guess, though it's hard by now to believe the players were thrilled with their former general manager.

One can imagine how it went over with the players when the guy in the polo shirt – the guy who didn't provide a lead-off hitter, or a clean-up hitter, or even a No. 6 hitter, the guy who traded away the old second baseman and didn't replace him, the guy who worked harder at poor-mouthing Josh Hamilton than at replacing him – when that guy went into the clubhouse and told players that the real problem was that the coaches weren't giving them good enough information. One can imagine.

But we don't have to imagine, because the reports tell us that what happened is what we would imagine. At least we know now who's the boss, and it isn't Mike Scioscia, the 15-year manager who's still under contract through 2018 at $6 million per year. Scioscia won the power struggle with Dipoto when Hall-of-Fame-bound first baseman Albert Pujols got his back. When the GM enters the clubhouse to run a meeting with the players and the most expensive and accomplished player on the team basically tells him to do his own job better, it's over.

So, the boss is Pujols, and everyone kind of knew that the moment he signed that 10-year deal for $240 million before the 2012 season. Angels owner Arte Moreno has much more invested in Pujols than in Scioscia or Dipoto. Now Pujols leads the American League with 25 home runs, his credibility is high and the general manager went across him. Cross Scioscia? Part of the general manager's job. Cross Pujols? Probably not the general manager's job.

Compare the situation with what happened last year in Oakland. Reports say a huge conflict arose between their general manager, Billy Beane, and their best player, Josh Donaldson, with manager Bob Melvin in the middle. After the season, Beane traded Donaldson to the Toronto Blue Jays. Beane has said the conflict did not motivate the trade, and it doesn't even matter. The Athletics will never be so invested in a player that Beane can't trade him for any reason he wants.

By the reports, Dipoto was dissatisfied at how basic scouting information was filtering through the coaching staff to the players. By the reports, Pujols told Dipoto that the roster this year just isn't as good as the roster last year.

We can't judge if Dipoto was right, but we definitely can judge that Pujols was right. The most obvious problem is a dreadful lack of depth in the batting order. When your lineup has Pujols and Mike Trout, but you still have one of the worst offensive teams in the Major Leagues, that's almost an achievement. Even after their hitting explosion in Texas, the Rangers still are 11th of 15 American League teams at 4.10 runs per game.

One doesn't have to be a player to see that the front office has failed his team. Time will tell, for example, if young left-hander Andrew Heaney is ultimately a good return for popular and productive second baseman Howie Kendrick. So far, though, time is saying the Angels are significantly downgraded at second base.

In so many ways, the Angels front office performed terribly throughout the Josh Hamilton saga. When you commit $125 million to a known and admitted drug addict, a constructive approach to a relapse has to be part of the equation. But the Angels didn't see it that way, because they never thought they were committed to $125 million. They thought Hamilton's drug problem would get him suspended without pay, the way performing enhancing drugs (PEDs) are, and that they could weasel out of his contract if he relapsed. When they learned otherwise, they were petulant and indignant.

We don't suppose for one second that Moreno's chaotic leadership isn't behind all of this, but Dipoto got in front of the microphones and played the heavy, and that couldn't have gone over well with players who are sympathetic to Hamilton. The Angels management reacted to Hamilton's problems with outrage, as if a drug addict's relapse somehow defied the moral and physical laws of the universe.

The Angels already knew Hamilton would miss the start of the season with shoulder trouble, even before we all learned of his relapse. Yet, they did next to nothing – they signed Matt Joyce – to account for Hamilton's absence in left field and the middle of the batting order. The problem isn't that the Angels don't have Hamilton, who OPS-plussed 114 last season. They can replace that with someone about as good as Juan Rivera used to be. The problem is that they don't have anybody.

So, the Angels figured all along that they would be rid of Hamilton's contract with a relapse, they rooted openly for him to be suspended because of the relapse, when they didn't get their way they sent Hamilton back to the Rangers for almost nothing and, all this time, they didn't make a serious bid to replace him. And they have a big whole in their lineup now because of it.

One day a couple of weeks ago, the general manager entered the players quarters and told them he was going around the field manager to fix the club's mediocre performance. If you're a player on that team, maybe the general manager can go to hell. The Angels happen to have a player who can tell him that.

We're not saying Pujols told Dipoto where to go. All we know is that Dipoto went somewhere.

First Division: Angels, Dodgers both facing trouble

The Angels and Dodgers both are in First Division trouble coming through the first week of June. Both are at the bottom of the division, which spells relegation to the Second Division for 2016 if they don't rise in the top tier. That means beating top-level clubs, which neither Los Angeles club has done very much of this season.

Angels manager Mike Scioscia won't be able to argue his way into remaining in the First Division for 2016 if his club doesn't improve its performance against this top tier of teams (Googie man/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license).

By BILL PETERSON

Big Leagues in Los Angeles

The First Division is heating up with a lot of action during these last couple of weeks, but the Dodgers and Angels aren't heating it up with it.

Far from it. The inability of the Angels and Dodgers to handle top teams has been noted in the First Division standings, among other places. Both Los Angeles teams came through this first week of June fighting against the possibility of relegation to the Second Division in 2016, which is the fate of the two clubs finishing at the bottom of the First Division in 2015.

The Angels lost two of three last week at home against the Tampa Bay Rays, dropping the first two games after winning the opener. The Dodgers have not succeeded in purchasing the goods to take down the two elite clubs in the National League, the St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants, posting a combined 4-11 against the two clubs that have accounted for the last five National League pennants.

The Angels need to get their getting quickly, as they'll play fewer than two dozen games, total, in the First Division. At 3-7 in the First Division, the Angels are defending their 2014 top tier title with a last-place performance, six games behind the front-running Giants. The Angels will get another crack at the Rays next weekend in St. Petersburg. After that, though, the pickings will be slim.

Following next weekend's series at Tampa Bay, the Angels will have only nine games left in the First Division this season – six against the Dodgers and three against the Toronto Blue Jays. Being six games down in the First Division is a lot different from being down 5½ to the Houston Astros in the American League West, which is another position they've taken. The Angels have a lot more time in the AL West, and the Astros (12-10 against clubs at or above .500 and 22-13 against clubs below .500) are likely to cool off as they play against better clubs.

Teams have won ordinal divisions with fewer than two dozen games, but it requires a superior winning percentage for that team, and there can't be another team that's both playing a lot of games and winning a big share of them. The record for fewest wins to take a division belongs to the Texas Rangers, who won the First Division in 2013 with a 13-8 record in their 21 games. The second place team, Tampa Bay, finished 18-15.

The team with the fewest games played to win a division was the Angels in the 2013 Second Division. The Angels played only 19 games, but finished 14-5. The Angels beat the Nationals (25-18) by one game and 156 percentage points (.737 to .581). Both clubs were promoted to the First Division for 2014, and the Angels went on to win it.

That has a way of happening in the First Division. In three of the last four years, the First Division winner had been freshly promoted that year. In addition to the Angels in 2014, the Texas Rangers did it in 2013 and the Rays did it in 2011. It's worth pointing out that the Giants are working on precisely the same achievement, leading the First Division after being promoted to the top tier this season. 

However, the Rangers were swiftly demoted to the Second Division after an injury-plagued 2014 season. That does not appear to be a danger for the Giants.

The Dodgers have a different kind of job in front of them. The Dodgers actually are last in the games behind column of the top tier, seven games down, compared with six down for the Angels. However, the Angels have a lower winning percentage (.300, compared with .333 for the Dodgers), and promotion and relegation ultimately comes down to winning percentage.

Last week was no better than a break-even proposition for the Dodgers, who won two of three at home against the Atlanta Braves, but lost two of three at St. Louis last weekend. All of those were First Division games. The Braves went on to split last weekend on the grounds of the division-leading San Francisco Giants. This weekend, the Dodgers have lost two of three at home to the Cardinals, with the final game of that series coming Sunday night.

The Giants lead the First Division with an impressive mark of 12-4, thanks largely to their combined 10-2 performance against the Dodgers and Angels. The Rays are pressing the closest pursuit, only a game down at 9-3 after taking two of three in Anaheim last week. The Nationals (7-5) and the Cardinals (6-3) are the only other clubs breaking even in the division.

As the schedule lays out, the Giants will play about 40 games this year in the First Division, so their work is far from done. Same with the Dodgers. But the Dodgers are on the other end of the standings from the Giants. While the Giants vie for the leadership and the championship, the Dodgers now hold seventh place, which will get them relegated to the Second Division in 2016 if they do not improve their performance against this top tier of clubs.

Another lesson learned, again: you never know

Perhaps Angels general manager Jerry Dipoto isn't a genius, but he clearly has something on the game's annointed genius, Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane. All Dipoto did this year was rebuild his bullpen on the fly, which is one reason why the Angels go to the last two weeks of the regular season with a 10-game lead in the American League West.

A common scene for the Angels: Huston Street finishing off a save. He's done it 14 times since the Angels picked him up on July 19 (Keith Allison/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license).

By BILL PETERSON

Big Leagues in Los Angeles

We often learn lessons about baseball, and the lesson often is the same lesson: Things aren't always as they seem.

We're thinking about a division, the American League West, in which the first-place club at the non-waiver trading deadline made a spectacular deal for a pitcher to help down the stretch. Subsequently, the second-place club at the trading deadline lost its best pitcher for the remainder of the season due to injury.

Which of these clubs now holds a 10-game lead in the American League West, having all but clinched it with two weeks left in the season? And which club has plummeted through the standings to the point at which its all-but-certain playoff position now is anything but certain?

When this all gets written up, the Angels will be in the books with their first division title since 2009, making an inspired comeback from a miserable start in 2012 and a miserable season in 2013. The story to be told will not include anything about Angels general manager Jerry Dipoto tearing a big piece out of his everyday lineup to add a pitcher he didn't need. But it will say quite a lot about the bullpen that Dipoto has been rebuilding since sometime late last season, and particularly on the fly during the summer of 2014.

How dark was that night in Boston on Aug. 20, when Garrett Richards crumbled to the ground trying to cover first base in the second inning? They drove him off the field and to the hospital. Everyone could tell that Richards was down for good, which meant the Angels were supposed to win this division without a pitcher who was 13-4 with a 2.61 ERA.

It turned out to not be a very dark night at all. The Angels fell behind the Boston Red Sox, 2-0, on the very play that put Richards out for the season, then went down, 3-0, in the third on a homer by David Ortiz against Richards' replacement, Cory Rasmus. But that was as bad as it ever got. The Angels rallied for an 8-3 win that night. They tacked up a five-run inning, which has become common, to forge an easy win. The Oakland Athletics lost, 8-5, to the New York Mets, improving the Angels' lead in the AL West to 1 1/2 games.

The Angels picked up another half-game the next day with another win in Boston, then went to Oakland for a three-game series with a two-game lead. That lead was gone after the A's won the first two, but the Angels picked up the final game for a one-game lead, only to lose it the next night. That next night was to be the first start for which the Angels would need a work-around to replace Richards. The man they put on the job, Wade LeBlanc, wasn't very good, the Angels lost, 7-1, to the Miami Marlins, and an Athletics victory tied the division again.

So, that takes us through the games of Aug. 25, which was the very last moment when the Angels didn't hold first place all by themselves. From that night going to the games of Sept. 13, the Angels were unstoppable – 15-2. Even if the Angels didn't score an average of 6.9 runs during that stretch, they would still have won a lot of those games because the pitchers were tossing a 2.82 ERA. That's the whole staff, which includes some of C.J. Wilson's worst run of pitching in his three years with the Angels.

Think about this. The Angels are out Richards, Wilson can't last more than five innings unless the Angels already have scored 10 runs, Jered Weaver only now and then can put 89 miles per hour on his fastball, the other two starters are people named Matt Shoemaker and Hector Santiago ... and the Angels are getting everybody out.

During that very same run of dates, the Athletics were 4-13. Their offense scored three runs per game – 51 in those 17 games – from Aug. 26 through Sept. 12. In one of those games, they scored 11 runs, so we can just as well think of it as 40 runs in 16 games. The A's were scoring five runs per game as of July 31, the day they dealt left fielder Yoenis Cespedes to the Red Sox for left-hander Jon Lester. Their pitching staff, fortified by the in-season acquisitions of Lester, Jeff Samardjiza and Jason Hammels, tossed a strong 3.21 ERA in those last 17 games, but that's still not as well as the Angels are pitching without their best pitcher.

We do not attempt to explain things like this. We just look on in awe. Angels manager Mike Scioscia is doing something very right with his pitching staff, not the least of which involves massaging the rotation schedule to make the Richards turn come up as seldom as possible. That turn came up three times in those 17 Angels games, and the Angels won all three. They won all three without actually having a starting pitcher to take the starts. Instead, Scioscia has fashioned it as bullpen night, the kind of exhibition usually to be found only in the college game and the low minor leagues, and made it a major league happening.

Bullpen night made its glorious debut on Aug. 30 at Angel Stadium against the Athletics, when Rasmus, Michael Roth, Yoslan Herrera, Fernando Salas, Jason Grilli, Kevin Jepsen, Joe Smith and Huston Street joined forces for a three-hit shutout with 11 strikeouts in a 2-0 win against Samardzija and the Athletics. In 28 innings of pitching on these bullpen nights, the Angels are 3-0, tossing a 2.57 ERA by allowing eight runs (all earned) on 21 hits with 10 walks and 23 strikeouts.

Except for Roth and Jepsen, all of the relief pitchers named just now have been acquired by the Angels within roughly the last year. The pitcher who has been with the organization for the longest, Rasmus, arrived just before the non-waiver trading deadline last year (on July 29, 2013) in a deal with the Atlanta Braves for Scott Downs. Grilli and Street have arrived just this summer, and that's leaving out Joe Thatcher, a key left-handed specialist acquisition who has been felled by injury.

If the Angels had traded for a starting pitcher who tossed a 2.57 ERA in 28 innings over three starts, Dipoto would be heralded as a genius. Maybe, he should be, anyway. He's about to win the American League West without killing his offensive club for a starting pitcher.

Editor's note: All advanced statistics in this piece are from Baseball-Reference.com, unless otherwise indicated.

A's made the trades, Angels made the pitches

The Angels put together a huge four-game sweep of the Oakland Athletics at Angel Stadium during Labor Day weekend, increasing their lead in the American League West to five games. The Angels heroes were pitchers, none of whom arrived with any fanfare this season.

Angels pitcher Jered Weaver doesn't have his fastball, but he has guts and guile, which was enough to defeat the heralded Oakland Athletics acquisition, Jon Lester, in a key game during the past weekend (Keith Allison, (UC International crop)/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license).

By BILL PETERSON

Big Leagues in Los Angeles

The Angels begin the rest of their life today after building a five-game lead in the American League West with a remarkable four-game sweep of the Oakland Athletics at Angel Stadium during Labor Day weekend.

And if it wasn't the Angels who made such bold and celebrated moves for pitching this summer, it was the Angels who received pitching when it really counted. Either that, or the A's didn’t receive hitting when it really counted. We'll say it's the first, but we don't rule out the second.

It has become tiring to labor over the grand error made by Oakland general manager Billy Beane when he traded his left fielder and the anchor of his batting order, Yoenis Cespedes, to the Boston Red Sox for left-hander Jon Lester, who he really didn’t need. But the weekend in Anaheim brought that error into the sharpest possible focus.

The series began with the only truly dramatic game in the bunch, a 4-3 Angels victory in 10 innings on Aug. 28. The A's entered the night one game down in the division and had their best pitcher, Sonny Gray, on the mound. But Gray came a bit unglued in the second inning. Josh Hamilton, Howie Kendrick and Erick Aybar began the inning with consecutive singles, the last of those driving in Hamilton for the game's first run. Then, Gray threw two wild pitches to place Kendrick on third and Aybar on second. A two-out single by Gordon Beckham drove in both runners and gave the Angels a 3-0 lead.

The Angels, countering with struggling left-hander C.J. Wilson, held that lead until the fifth, when the A's began hitting line drives. A leadoff single by Brandon Moss, followed by Geovany Soto's double, gave the A's their first run, then Coco Crisp hit a line-drive single to knock in Soto. In the sixth, the A's tied the game, 3-3, on solo homer by Josh Donaldson.

So, it became a battle of bullpens. And the Angels, who have been rebuilding their bullpen throughout the season, won. Five Angels relievers combined for 4 1/3 scoreless, hitless innings. The Angels won it in short order in the bottom of the tenth against Oakland reliever Ryan Cook. Albert Pujols led off with a walk and took third as he hustled out a single to center field by Hamilton. Kendrick hit a sacrifice fly to right field to drive in Pujols.

We witnessed that night the start of a remarkable occurrence  – the first four out of 29 consecutive scoreless innings by the Athletics, the AL's top scoring team, against an Angels rotation that is aged, unheralded, under-manned – everything but a sure thing. 

The second game, played on Aug. 29, was the definitive game. Not quite as improbable as the third game, perhaps, but what the second game said is in the standings today. The A's sent Lester, the guy for whom they spent heavily to win just this game, against Angels right-hander Jered Weaver, who is doing it all now with guts and guile. It was barely a fair fight.

The A's didn't reach base until Donaldson hit a double with two out in the fourth. They didn't get another hit until Sam Fuld's single with one out in the sixth. By then, the Angels had all the runs they needed, those coming on Chris Inannetta's two-run homer with no one out in the fifth after Aybar led off against Lester with a single. 

When the Angels batted in the bottom of the sixth, we could see the A's come apart at the seams. Watching the wheels come off of a baseball team is never a pretty sight, but the A's flailed all the way through August and it was just a matter of time. That time came with two out and nobody on, when Donaldson, the A's best player, made a fielding error allowing Kendrick to reach. Next, Eric Sogard, playing out of position at shortstop, made a throwing error, moving Kendrick to third and allowing the hitter, David Freese, to reach second base. Aybar then dropped a bunt in front of Lester and reached first base to load the bases. Flustered, Lester walked Iannetta for force in a run and give the Angels a 3-0 lead.

Pujols homered to make it 4-0 after seven innings, at which point Weaver departed, having allowed only three hits. Joe Smith and Huston Street finished out a 4-0 win the the Angels, giving them a robust three-game lead.

The importance of that game for the Angels can hardly be over-stated. They went to the third game of the series now assured that they would end the series with the division lead, even though their pitching plan for the third game – "the Garrett Richards start" that they will forever be trying to fill – was not one to inspire great confidence. That plan was Cory Rasmus, a reliever not even approximately stretched out for a start. The A's would go with Jeff Samardzija, famously acquired from the Chicago Cubs this summer.

No one could have or should have predicted that the team pitching Rasmus would beat the team pitching Samardzija. But the team pitching Samardzija doesn't have any hitters now. Missing Cespedes is some of it, but not all. The A's three-headed catcher (Derek Norris, John Jaso and Steven Vogt) has hit a bit over its head. Donaldson still has decent numbers for the season (.259/.348/.471/.819), but he hasn't been a force since May 30, which ended with him at .285/.379/.561/.940. 

Then there's Crisp, the key and unsung player of the A's surge in 2012 and their continued excellence in 2013. The A's committed themselves to Crisp as their leadoff hitter and center fielder on June 14, 2012, putting Cespedes in left field. Crisp was batting .172 with a .466 OPS. The A's were 28-35. From that point forward, Crisp batted .296 with a .857 OPS. The A's went 66-33, charging from five games back with 10 days left in the season to overtake the Texas Rangers for the AL West title.

The 2013 season was more of the same. The A's spent the entire season either in front or very close to it and easily won the division by five games. Crisp, the leadoff center fielder, had a solid year, if not great, tacking up a 4.3 WAR. He led the club with 93 runs scored and gave the club a solid all-around presence.

Beane has mentioned, correctly, that the A's already were struggling offensively when they traded Cespedes at this year's non-waiver trading deadline, which further mystifies the Cespedes trade. But there's no mystery that the A's decline offensively can be indexed some bit to Crisp. From July 5 to today, Crisp is batting .183 with a .559 OPS. The A's actually peaked offensively on June 4 (.253/.340/.421/.761). From that point to now, they are .244/.311/.372/.683.

Perhaps, then, it's not such a huge surprise that eight Angels pitchers, led by a three-inning start by Rasmus, shut the A's out on three hits to beat Samardzija, 2-0. The A's mounted one threat, that against lefty reliever Michael Roth, in the fourth. A walk, a single and an intentional walk loaded the bass, then Athletics manager Bob Melvin pinch-hit right-handed Jonny Gomes for left-handed Josh Reddick and Angels manager Mike Scioscia brought in right-handed Yoslan Herrera for Roth. Herrera induced a ground ball on which Kendrick at second base made an outstanding play for a double play to end the inning.

And with Reddick out of the game, the Athletics were without a left-handed stick who might have punished the ensuing parade of right-handed Angels relievers. The Angels walked out of the game with a 2-0 win no one could have predicted or expected, as well as a four-game lead.

The final game, on Aug. 31, was icing on the cake, an easy 8-1 Angels win behind rookie right-hander Matt Shoemaker, this season's surprise sensation, who improved his marks to 14-4 and a 3.14 ERA with seven innings of five-hit, shutout pitching. The Angels sacked Athletics left-hander Scott Kazmir with six runs in the second inning. The A's finally scored in the eighth. Angels, 8-1.

With only three games left between the Angels and the A's (Sept. 22-24 in Oakland), the Angels now still have a two-game cushion even if the A's win all three, which means the A's still have to be two games better than the Angels against everyone else just to force a one-game playoff for the division title. None of that seems likely to happen, especially after the Angels exploded and the A's imploded during these last four games in Anaheim.

Angels lose Richards, but not division

The Angels apparently will have to compete for the rest of this season without pitching ace Garrett Richards, who went down with a ghastly knee injury Wednesday night in Boston. But they are all but assured of going to the playoffs. And their team to beat in the American League West, the Oakland Athletics, aren't the team they were a month ago.

Angels manager Mike Scioscia will have some juggling to do with his pitching staff for the rest of this season (Keith Allison/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license).

By BILL PETERSON

Big Leagues in Los Angeles

Did the Angels lose the American League West Wednesday night?

Well, they won their game Wednesday night, 8-3, on the road against the Boston Red Sox, which increased their division lead over the Oakland Athletics to 1 1/2 games, their largest lead of the season.

They also lost their best pitcher.

The moment Angels right-hander Garrett Richards fell to the ground on his way to first base as he attempted to cover the back end of a double play in the second inning, this club's aspirations appeared to go dark. Richards laid out on the ground clutching his left knee. An object of skeleton that should have been inside his body appeared to protrude outside of his uniform. The club's training staff had to roll him over to get him onto a stretcher, then the stretcher had to be loaded onto a vehicle. 

The Angels already trailed, 2-0, in the bottom of the second inning at Fenway Park against the Red Sox, the last-place club in the American League East. Into the game came Cory Rasmus as the new pitcher. 

And the wheels began to spin. How in the world can the Angels make it through a season-ending injury to their ace pitcher, the hardest throwing right-handed of any starting pitcher in Major League Baseball?

But the Angels have not disappointed us this year, and there's so much to like about this club that it's hard to lose confidence. Even in the midst of that disaster, the Angels came back with a five-run fifth inning to take a 6-3 lead. Rasmus survived 2 1/3 innings without further damage, then Mike Morin tossed a shutout inning, then Fernando Salas, then Kevin Jepsen, then Joe Smith, then Huston Street. And the Angels kept their season moving. 

The Oakland Athletics lost earlier in the day in their own park, 8-4, to the New York Mets. The Athletics are reeling. From the day their general manager, Billy Beane, made the deal that brought him so much praise – the deal that tore the heart out of their everyday lineup in exchange for left-hander Jon Lester from the Red Sox – they are 8-11. 

With Yoenis Cespedes departed for Boston in the trade, the Oakland batting order slashed .224/.299/.344/.643 from Aug. 1-17. Before that trade, the A's slashed .253/.329/.405/.733. The American League this year is slashing .254/.318/.393/.711. With that deal, the A's went from being a much better than average offensive club to being a much worse that average offensive club.

It isn't that Cespedes was enjoying such an awesome season, but he wasn't bad, running a 115 OPS-plus with the A's. Since the deal, his OPS-plus with the Red Sox is only 80. But the man who came back to Oakland in the deal to replace Cespedes as the A's left fielder, Jonny Gomes, is OPS-plussing only 60 for the Athletics. 

Beane really disrupted his club's balance offensively. Before the deal, the Athletics ran out lineups with up to five guys who could hit, meaning four guys who couldn't. With Cespedes gone, they never have more than four players in their lineup who can hit, and sometimes they have even fewer. 

But the Angels now have fewer pitchers, and this is a club that seems to have fewer pitchers every day. They've already lost lefty starter Tyler Skaggs for the season, and they're still waiting for lefty reliever Joe Thatcher to come back from the disabled list. 

But no loss hurts like losing Garrett Richards, who entered Wednesday's game with a 13-4 record and a 2.53 ERA. And as Wednesday night ended, there was no indication of what they can expect from Richards. The club announced during the game that Richards suffered a left patellar injury. The patella is the kneecap.

"It's a significant injury," Angels manager Mike Scioscia repeatedly told reporters after the game.

The big question, of course: How significant? Can Richards be back in time for the postseason? 

No one knows.

But there's a lot else no one knows, which is why we can't answer the question with which we began, the question of whether or not the Angels lost the AL West simply because they lost their ace pitcher. 

The one source of help on which the Angels can not depend is a trade that would depend upon some pitcher clearing waivers. Because the Angels, at 75-50, have the best record in the Major Leagues, they are last in turn on the waiver wire. Any club that wants to stop the Angels from acquiring a pitcher can simply stake a claim on that pitcher. Reports tell us that Texas Rangers right-hander Yu Darvish and New York Mets left-hander Jon Niese have cleared waivers, but those would be hard deals to make.

In the minors, the Angels have little to trust. Their only pitcher at Triple-A Salt Lake who even conceivably belongs in a poor big league rotation is lefty Wade LeBlanc, who couldn't last more than one inning for the pitching-starved New York Yankees after they took him from the Angels on waivers in June. The Yankees released LeBlanc and the Angels signed him two days later. They might be glad now that they did.

At Double-A Arkansas, the Angels have 24-year-old lefty Michael Roth, who is 10-6 with a 2.82 ERA. Chances are, he gets the start the next time Richards' turn comes up.

Three more items to consider:

First, we don't know that Richards would have been the same pitcher down the stretch that he'd been approaching the stretch. He had never, in any professional season, thrown 160 innings. When he went down Wednesday night, Richards was on 169 1/3 innings. The Angels never had any guarantee of how well Richards would pitch in September with all those added innings on his arm, though they would much rather have found out. Either way, it was unknown how Richards would respond to the added innings, and we can't assume that the pitcher they've lost is the pitcher we've seen all season.

Second, the Angels almost certainly are in the playoffs, already. With 37 games left in their season, they are 7 1/2 games ahead of the AL's sixth-place team, the Seattle Mariners. If the Angels (75-50) go 18-19 the rest of the way, the Mariners (68-58) would have to go 26-10 and the fifth-place Detroit Tigers (68-56) would have to go 26-12 the rest of the way to knock the Orange County club out of the postseason. We have little hope, after watching Richards go down, that he will pitch any time before next spring, but the Angels do have that much cushion, just in case there is enough time to bring him back for the playoffs. 

Third, Athletics aren't 10-feet tall anymore. They were 59-36 at the All-Star break, a .621 winning percentage, which projects to 101 wins over a full season. Since the All-Star break, they are 15-16. For the remainder of the season, there is no scheduling advantage, to speak of, either way. The Angels and the A's have 10 games left against each other, starting this weekend with three in Oakland. The Angels have seven games left against Seattle, and the A's have six. Every other remaining opponent for the Angels and A's this season has a losing record, except for this: The Angels have one game against the Cleveland Indians (64-61) and three against the Miami Marlins (63-63).

Thus, the Angels didn't lose their division Wednesday night. They did lose their best pitcher. And they still have enough to win their division without him. Which doesn't mean they will.

Editor's note: All numbers in this piece are from Baseball-Reference.com.

Moreno: LA's unsung baseball hero in 2014

After taking the heat for over-reaching his baseball operation to saddle the Angels with a poor club in 2013, Angels owner Arte Moreno doesn't receive enough praise for reversing his own course and giving the baseball people room to operate in 2014. The Angels are back to being an elite club this season, and Moreno's new patience has a lot to do with it.

Angels owner Arte Moreno has left his baseball club to his baseball people in 2014, and the results are obvious (public domain image).

By BILL PETERSON

Big Leagues in Los Angeles

They don't give an annual award for the most reviled person in baseball across Los Angeles. If they did, they'd have to retire it, anyway. Frank McCourt would win it every year. Still.

If, however, active participation were a requirement, then it's hard to imagine a more likely winner in 2013 than Angels owner Arte Moreno.

As of one year ago right now, no rhetorical task across the game would have been much tougher than defending Moreno's leadership of the Angels' baseball operation. In short, he was an ignoramus and a busy-body, the proverbial  – and all-too-real – rich guy with a baseball club for his plaything. These guys never understand the game because they think baseball is like other sports, replete with game faces and outcomes dictated by brute force.

Moreover, Moreno is a marketing guy who saw his club as a marketing project because, you know, when you're a hammer, everything is a nail. Thus, Moreno reached past his baseball people for two consecutive offseasons, signing the likes of Albert Pujols, C.J. Wilson and Josh Hamilton to $500 million worth of free-agent contracts while the organization's player development operation languished as one of the least promising across professional baseball.

It wasn't really until last season that the entire mess came home to roost. Pujols produced his worst season ever before finally going on the disabled list with a plantar fasciitis in his left foot, the Angels made the characteristic error of thinking Hamilton could whisk into a new position (right field) just because he was on a deal worth an annual $25 million, the club decided to sign Joe Blanton  instead of giving those starts to Garrett Richards, and a disjointed club turned in a disjointed season.

The Angels finished 78-84, their worst season since 2001, when they finished 75-87 in Mike Scioscia's first year as the club's manager. The Angels that had been built by Bill Stoneman had run their course, and the new direction was not promising. Some fans believed Moreno should respond with something big, like firing Scioscia, or firing general manager Jerry Dipoto.

But Moreno did nothing of the sort. In his darkest moment as the Angels' owner, Moreno instead did something really big.

He pointed the finger at himself. In interview after interview across the national media (since he deals so seldom with the local media), Moreno made himself accountable, said he's the owner and it's on him. Moreno couldn't be led into selling out his high-priced players for under-producing. He refused to pin it on his manager, and he said outright that he wanted to give Dipoto's systems a chance.

So, when the 2013 season ended amid speculation that Moreno might actually eat the last five years of Scioscia's contract, there was, indeed, no news. And throughout the offseason, there was little news – just a couple of trades and a couple of changes on the coaching staff, the kind of events to characterize an ordinary offseason for any club. But there was no news, no headline news, no big initiative designed to scream across the media. 

It was, in fact, rather a dull offseason, an offseason of baseball people making baseball decisions. The owner kept his hands off.

Now, if we didn't want to give Moreno credit for seeing the light, that would be easy to do. Surely, it wasn't an attractive proposition for the Angels to go into the big free-agent market again, since the club opened the season with a $155 million payroll and has so much money committed to future seasons that another big contract would remove any remaining flexibility, particularly with the club angling for a long-term deal with Mike Trout. Additionally, anyone looking at the talent on this club had to know it really wasn't as bad as the 2013 season showed.

In fact, the Angels enter Wednesday's game against the Dodgers at Angel Stadium with a 67-45 record, the second best across Major League Baseball. And it has a lot to do with the fact that the owner didn't make a chaotic situation even more chaotic by going crazy on his top people. Instead of pressing the baseball operation with marketing initiatives, Moreno let the baseball operation operate a baseball club. 

Everyone around the Angels, it seemed, could take a deep breath, which is for the best because the Angels run like mad and they needed a breath. The Angels are back to playing baseball a lot like we remember from their best days under Scioscia. The focus is on players already with the club. The new guys giving new blood to the club are their own guys.

There's Richards, starting every fifth day instead of some mediocre free agent. There's Erick Aybar at his demonic best, and Howie Kendrick hitting at his best, and Trout having his best year ever, and Jered Weaver getting hitters out without his old stuff, and C.J. Cron up from the minor leagues to lend a bat, and so on.

The owner has left the club alone, and the club is responding with a fierce brand of baseball unlike any other club around the game today. No club in the major leagues is more aggressive on the bases or on the field or, for that matter, in the batter's box. 

Credit the players because they are playing, and credit the manager because he dictates how the game is going to be played, and credit the general manager because he assembles the playing roster.

But also credit the owner for allowing all of that to happen just by staying away. It's not an easy thing to do. If any of us owned the Angels, or any other club, we'd probably have our mitts all over it. Some of us might figure out when the bottom goes out that we don't know what we're doing, but you can look around sports and find plenty of owners who never get the picture. Moreno has.

A year ago, Moreno was the most reviled man in baseball across Los Angeles. This season, Moreno is the city's unsung baseball hero.

Angels designed for August apathy

The Los Angeles Angels are built on gimpy sluggers signed to expensive long-term contracts. Now, it's August, and we can see where it has gotten them -- 15 games out of first place in the American League West.

It has been years now since Angel Stadium was the scene of a playoff race (public domain image).


By BILL PETERSON
Big Leagues in Los Angeles

The Angels had a lot riding on their first 20 games after the All-Star break. But by the time they played 10 of them, the ride was done.

Look at this team now -- 53-64, 15 games out of first place in the American League West. Last week, Angels manager Mike Scioscia resorted to running pitchers infield practice before a game because his players can't handle tasks that are supposed to be mastered in spring training. This club was supposed to be a contender. Instead, it was running spring training drills in the middle of August.

The cat calls to replace Scioscia are louder than ever now, but here's one vote for keeping him. Scioscia didn't cause the problems with this team, which were characterized, from the start, by an imbalanced roster and a suspect list of starting pitchers. Everyone knows that the star-struck owner, Arte Moreno, has built this team on names and marketing objectives, rather than on skills and baseball objectives.

It's hard to tell how much of this disaster should be pinned to general manager Jerry Dipoto, whose record isn't sterling, but neither are his working conditions. He’s dealing with a busybody owner who clearly doesn’t understand the game. There are only 30 GM jobs in the big leagues, so you can’t blame a guy for taking any such opportunity, but it remains that meddling, trigger-happy ownership undercuts the GM’s mission, which is to build an organization that can win every year.

The Angels haven't had a good general manager since Bill Stoneman, who came on board before the 1999 season, built the 2002 World Championship team and won 90 or more games four times for a franchise that had won 90 only four times before in its history. For the two years after Stoneman's 2007 resignation, the Angels won two divisions on his fumes.

Moreno purchased the Angels on May 15, 2003. By then, Stoneman had the credibility that came with winning a World Series. Stoneman had his critics, who found him insufficient in the pursuit of big hitting. He believed in pitching, young players and depth. Headlines did not appear to interest him. You don't win with headlines, or even with hitting. You win with pitching.

Post Stoneman, though, the Angels have become everything his critics thought they should be. Post Stoneman, the Angels just can't accumulate enough star power. Where has it gotten them? They get the equation wrong. You don't win with stars. You make stars by winning.

Now, the Angels are defined by gimpy, aging sluggers signed to expensive contracts, and they are paying the price in more than just payroll. Since 2009, they have spent exactly one day after July 4 in first place. That was July 5, 2011, when they were tied with Texas. But the Angels lost the next day and they fell five games off within two weeks.

So, being nowhere in August isn't a new experience for the Angels. They're almost designed for it.

At the All-Star break this year, the Angels were 44-49, 11 games behind the Oakland Athletics in the American League West and nine games behind the Texas Rangers for the second wild card. But the schedule gave the Angels a path to contention, featuring 13 games of their next 20 against the A's and Rangers. Sure, the Angels needed to do much more than tread water. They needed to win at least five of their seven against Oakland and at least four of their six against Texas.

If the Angels did just that much, and all their other results since the All-Star break were the same as they have been, they would be 59-58 through Aug. 12. The Athletics would be 65-52, and the Rangers would be 65-54. In that case, the Angels, right now, would be six back in the AL West and four behind the Baltimore Orioles (65-53) for the second wild card.

But the Angels couldn't do it. And they knew they wouldn't do it as of the July 31 trade deadline, by which time they had lost four of their seven against Oakland and all three they had played against Texas. The Angels played their way out of the race before they traded their way out of it. Then they made their trades, the trades of a seller.

Moving left-handed reliever Scott Downs to the Atlanta Braves for minor league reliever Cory Rasmus, whose professional career has been marked by shoulder surgeries, the Angels conceded that they didn't have enough else to win. The reliever who can douse left-handed hitters in the late innings is a crucial piece for a team with ambitions. The Angels were saying they no longer needed it.

The next trade, Alberto Callaspo to Oakland for infielder Grant Green is a bit more defensible. Callaspo was never anyone's idea of a regular third baseman. Green, who played high school and college ball locally, has a chance to become that. The Athletics always liked his bat. With the Angels, Green is seven-for-18, playing second base in the absence of injured Howie Kendrick.

And that's another piece of all this. It's not a coincidence that players suddenly are injured. Players are injured all the time. In times of contention, those injuries often are no match for the prize. In times of irrelevance, they become disabling. Hence, Albert Pujols also is shelved, as he absolutely must be so he can deal with his plantar fasciitis and come back strong next season.

This Angels season was badly conceived from the beginning. That’s why it’s been poorly played since.

1967 a moment approaching glory for Angels, Reichardt

The Angels, the California Angels, had one moment of contention in the 1960s, and Rick Reichardt, the $200,000 bonus baby, was in the middle of a fine moment during that 1967 season. But the flame burned out for the Reichardt, and for the Angels, who wouldn't seriously whiff contention again for another 10 years.

Rick Reichardt's 1967 TOPPS baseball card (It is believed that this cropped, low resolution image constitutes fair use).

By BILL PETERSON
Big Leagues in Los Angeles

Today, June 25, marks an anniversary that isn't one of the most memorable in sports, but it's good enough for bringing up the name of Rick Reichardt, one of the interesting figures among the Angels and within the athletic world during the 1960s.

It's also a good enough excuse for talking a little bit about 1967, a outlier year in Angels history, one of few  years of roughly their first 20 in which they contended until August. It was on this day 46 years ago, on June 25, 1967, when Reichardt hit an inside-the-park grand slam, one of two in Angels history.

Reichardt was a Wisconsin native who starred in baseball and football at the University of Wisconsin. He played fullback on the Wisconsin football team that scored 23 points in the final 12 minutes of the 1963 Rose Bowl, only to lose, 42-37, to Southern California. He was at least as coveted for his baseball abilities.

The Angels won the bidding war for Reichardt in 1964 with a bonus of $200,000. The bidding war was one reason among many that the major leagues instituted the amateur draft in 1965.

Becoming a regular with the Angels in 1966, Reichardt demonstrated true star power. He hit the first homer ever at Anaheim Stadium and had 16 homers, a .289 batting average and an .847 OPS (no heard of OPS in those days) as of July 27. However, he also had to miss all of August and September to have a kidney removed.

During the offseason entering 1967, the Angels changed themselves substantially with one trade. They sent Bo Belinsky's pal, Dean Chance, one of their best players, to the Minnesota Twins in a deal that brought back first baseman Don Mincher and right fielder Jimmie Hall. Even without Chance, who helped the Twins for two years, the Angels produced excellent pitching across their staff as youngsters Jim McGlothlin and Rickey Clark came up big in their starting rotation. Meanwhile, Mincher and Hall materially improved the Angels' offense from first base and right field.

The Angels' best player, of course, was shortstop Jim Fregosi, already an All-Star and MVP vote recipient at 25 when the 1967 season began. Reichardt, in left field, was recovered from his kidney removal and primed to become a top producer.

So, the Angels had a nice club, but they were impaired offensively and they struggled, falling to 20-32 and already 12 1/2 games out of first place when they lost both games of a doubleheader at the Big A against the Baltimore Orioles on June 6. They were tenth place in the 10-team American League.

But that's when they really began to churn. In their next 11 games, Angels pitchers gave up only 27 runs and they won 10 of them. During that span, McGlothlin, George Brunet and Clyde Wright all threw shutouts, while relief ace Minnie Rojas turned up three wins and two saves. The club began climbing in the standings. When June 25 arrived, the Angels had won 14 of their last 19 as they set about closing a three-game series in Kansas City against the Athletics, one of the American League's sick men.

The Angels sent Brunet out there that day against a 22-year-old right hander, John "Blue Moon" Odom. The game began meekly for the Angels, with center fielder Jose Cardenal grounding out and third baseman Paul Schaal striking out. But Fregosi then beat out a grounder to shortstop Bert Campaneris. Apparently, that was enough to unnerve Odom, who walked Mincher and Hall to load the bases.

Up came Reichardt, who hit a fly ball deep to center field. Deep to center field truly was deep in Kansas City's Municipal Stadium, which measured 421 feet straight away and 409 feet to the deepest point of left center. So, Reichardt, the man whose $200,000 bonus was said to have been the last straw leading to the draft, hit it out there. The man fielding the ball in center field was Rick Monday, the first man taken in the first draft in 1965. The ball rolled around out there a bit and all the Angels base runners scored. Scoring, also, was Reichardt, who thereby posted an inside-the-park grand slam home run.

Brunet held a 4-1 lead going to the eighth inning, then got the first hitter of that inning out of the way when the A's No. 7 batter, rookie Reggie Jackson, grounded out to first. But John Donaldson followed with a double, then Ken Harrelson singled him in. A single by Campaneris moved Harrelson up to second base.

Angels manager Bill Rigney called for Rojas, but Ramon Webster greeted Rojas with a single that drove in Harrelson and moved Campaneris to third. It was 4-3. Next, Webster stole second to put the lead run on second. But Rojas struck out Jim Gosger and Danny Cater to end the inning. Rojas later retired the side in order in the ninth, striking out two more hitters. The Angels won, 4-3.

The Angels rambled on for another six good weeks. After sweeping three from the Boston Red Sox at the Big A, they were 62-53, only 1 1/2 games out of first place on Aug. 13. They were contending for the first time in their history, joining a legendary pennant race with the Red Sox, the Twins, the Detroit Tigers and the Chicago White Sox. It was the pennant race to which opponents of the coming divisional alignments would point when they complained of diluting the competition. Glorious.

But the Angels quickly dropped out. Immediately, the Twins swept them three games at the Big A. In the last of those games, Chance beat McGlothlin, 5-1. Then the Angels went to Boston and lost all four games. In the last of them, the Angels held an 8-1 lead through four innings. Then, Carl Yastrzemski hit a three-run homer for the Red Sox in the fifth to make it 8-4. Rigney brought in Rojas to stop a Boston uprising in the sixth, but the Red Sox scored four times to tie the game, 8-8. Finally, in the eighth, Jerry Adair homered against Rojas, giving the Red Sox a 9-8 win, the seventh straight loss for the Angels.

That was really the end of it. The Angels were 6 1/2 games down at that point, 62-60. They finished the season 84-77, 7 1/2 games back. The Red Sox beat the Twins on the final day of the season, breaking a first-place tie between them and completing their Impossible Dream season. Yastrzemski, with 44 homers, 121 RBI and a .326 batting average, won the Triple Crown and the MVP.

For the Angels, 1967 was the year of Minnie Rojas, who finished 12-9 with a 2.52 ERA and 27 saves. And it was a brief flirtation with contention. But they plummeted to 67-95 in 1968 and they contended only one more time in the next 10 years. That was 1970, the year Alex Johnson won the batting title (.329) and Clyde Wright won 22 games. The Angels were second in the league with 49 saves, but no one had more than Ken Tatum with 17. The Angels got into the AL West scrum with Minnesota and their new California rivals, the Oakland Athletics. As usual, Fregosi was an All-Star quality player, but it was his last good year. On Aug. 30, the Angels were three down. But on Sept. 4, they embarked on a nine-game losing streak against Minnesota, the Kansas City Royals, the Milwaukee Brewers and the Chicago White Sox. They finished 86-76, 12 games out.

The Angels finally won the American League West, the weaker division, in 1979. Their manager was Jim Fregosi. No need here to rehash the heartbreaks following their next two division titles, in 1982 and 1986, under Gene Mauch. They finally won a pennant, and a World Series, under Mike Scioscia in 2002.

Reichardt settled in as a .260 hitter, a 20-homer and 70-RBI guy for his next two years with the Angels. He never became a star. In 1970, the Angels traded Reichardt and Aurelio Rodriguez to the Washington Senators for third baseman Ken McMullen, who was the same kind of offensive producer. Injuries kept getting in Reichardt's way. After one at-bat with the Kansas City Royals in 1974, he retired.