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Tuesday, July 19, 2005

The River Of Pitching: A's 3, Angels 1

I've had enough of the A's. Specifically, I've had enough of their starting rotation constantly being refilled by guys who can just blow through the Angels. Sixteen straight retired in a row! Meantime, the Angels have a bunch of overachieving third starters in their rotation, and a bunch of random junk in their minors. The fact that the highly questionable Dustin Moseley (5.09 ERA, 4-6, 29 BB, 36 SO, 81.1 IP) was Baseball America's fourth-ranked Angels pitching prospect says volumes. Meantime the A's churn out guys like Saarloos, the extra-vowels man who could be a number one on a half-dozen teams elsewhere, and a stone-cold ace like Harden, seemingly at will.

Troubling signs: still nothing from Anderson, still nothing from Vlad, Kennedy's gone into a funk, and almost no power from the offense. The Angels are eleventh in home runs in the AL, worse even than Minnesota and Tampa Bay. Stephen Smith can kid himself all day about "Contactball", but the Angels' absence of power is going to kill them, if not now, then in the playoffs. (Those who think I'm exaggerating should be reminded that the 2002 squad hit 24 home runs in the postseason, versus eighty total for this season and 152 for the 2002 regular season; they're on pace for 139 on the season.) I don't know if McPherson's going to be anything useful, but man could they use that home run swing.

Tomorrow, a resurgent Barry Zito. I'm not looking forward to it, not with Paul Byrd on the mound.

ESPN BoxRecap


Comments:
"The fact that the highly questionable Dustin Moseley was Baseball America's fourth-ranked Angels pitching prospect says volumes."

It says that an organization can't be spectacualry deep at every position. Mosely would be the fourth-ranked (or higher) pitcher in a lot of organizations.
 
Pitching being only the most important one.
 
My fear is they take the division. I see them more as being a threat in the Atlanta mold: incapable of winning anything past the division series.
 
Consistently good hitters but never great ones. Pitching is fine so far as it goes but you aren't going to win a title without good hitting. Some of it is luck, of course.
 
I'll grant you that a lot of it is luck, but the Tejada-less 2004 A's lacked a consistent power threat in the regular season; they struck me as very pitching-heavy in the front end and not so much in the back, and the 2002 and 2003 teams a little less so. The best team they fielded in my not-looking-at-the-stats opinion was really the 2001 version.

It's weird but it seems that the Angels and A's are mirror images of each other in their minors; the A's turn out very, very good pitching, and the Angels are poised to turn out a mess of quality position players, some of them with very good power.
 

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