Slip Slidin’ Away

(Photo Credit: Yardbarker.com)

If you’ve been reading Halo Hangout for any real length of time, it’s probably pretty clear that I’m a statistics guy. I love the mountains of data that can be unearthed in a single play, a single game, and single season, and multiples of all of those. Things like WAR and UZR and wOBA and OOZ and even OBP and SLG can tell you so much about what’s happening during the course of a season or a player’s career, and most times tell you so much more than the so-called “traditional” stats ever could.

With that said, this post will contain no stats. Traditional or saber, you won’t find them here.

Instead, I just have a feeling. Watching the Angels, watching them get leads and then piss them away, watching them go into games and series they should win and coming up with a goose egg at the end, I just have a feeling that we’re watching the 2010 season slipping away before our eyes. Sure, there are plenty of games left to play, there are literally months of baseball left, but where is the improvement going to come from? Our pitching sucks. Forget the stats for the moment. It just sucks. There cannot be a realistic Angels fan that has any confidence when the game is turned over to any single person in that pen. Fernando Rodney has been okay, but it’s only a matter of time before his meltdown comes. Kevin Jepsen, who had been solid, was very much responsible for the meltdown against Boston Wednesday night. Even the rotation has been shaky at best, with Weaver the only dependable starter of the five of them. Every single one of them has lost in spectacular fashion at least once. It’s probably safe to say there is more to come.

There is no defense to fall back on. Every starting OFer, including Hideki Matsui, is aging and already a poor defender. I see no reason to think they’ll get any better. Even the offense has been less than stellar for far too many games this season. I know all about sample sizes and needing more data and all of that, but still that feeling is there, in the back of my head, nagging at me. I think the front office took a gamble on a number of things – a repeat of career years, improvement from younger players, leaving free agents not being worth as much as they perhaps truly are – and I think it’s a gamble they’re losing one after the other. The AL West could easily belong to any of the four teams in it this season, but I haven’t seen anything from the Angels that makes me think they will be one of them.

Maybe I’m just down after being swept by the Red Sox. Maybe it’s the fact that we haven’t won a game during the month of May yet. Maybe I just feel like I’m watching all of my pre-season fears come true. And maybe this is all premature.

I just have a feeling it’s not.

(Nate Proctor is the lead writer for Halo Hangout.  You can stay up to date on all of Nate’s work by following him on Twitter, Facebook, or by way of the Halo Hangout RSS feed.)