(Photo Credit: Yardbarker.com)

First things first, we need to get the usual caveats out of the way: The Angels have thus far played 26 out of 160 games, which is obviously a pretty small percentage, and not nearly enough of a sample size to definitively say anything except what they’ve done in 26 games. Of course, if you’ve ever watched Baseball Tonight, you know that fact doesn’t stop most people.  That said, with the uneven performances we’ve seen from the team thus far, I think it’s a fair question to ask.

So far this season, the Angels have played Minnesota, Detroit, Oakland, New York, Toronto, and Cleveland, and they’ve amassed only a 12-14 record. The offense has been woefully uneven thus far, scoring a high of eight runs only once, but they’ve been held to two or fewer runs eight times thus far, and while they haven’t been shutout, it’s been of little help to their W-L record. The pitching, unfortunately, has also been as inconsistent as the offense, giving up ten runs three different times, and averaging nearly five runs per game given up. Unfortunately, the blame for the pitching woes can’t be given to only the rotation or pen, as both have been rather uninspiring thus far.

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We can find plenty of examples of this with even a short glace around baseball. In 2007, Joe Saunders put up a 3.41 ERA, despite never before or since posting anything better than a 4.44 ERA. Looking even a little deeper into his numbers, we discover he had an obscenely low .267 BABIP (Batting Average on Balls In Play, which measures how many times a ball put in play will go for a hit), which is a full 25 points lower than his career BABIP, and certainly helped with his lower numbers. Simply put, pitches of his that were put into play weren’t finding holes then like they are now. Darin Erstad is another fine example. In 2000, he hit .355/.409/.541, which is a really good season for a lot of people, but was clearly an out-of-his-mind season for a career .282/.336/.407 hitter. The very next season, his OPS dropped an absurd 260 points, and in the nine seasons of baseball he’s played since 2000, he’s never come even remotely close to repeating those numbers.

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