Posted 12:55 PM by Sean
Okay, so the Angels drop the opener, 6-3. Everyone's referring to this one as "lackluster," or "uninteresting" or some variant thereof, I guess because they need to wake up to the fact that not every game is Game 7. It was a loss, plain and simple. There will be others. A couple of well-timed hits would have made it a win, and in fact it seemed a couple of times that they were getting ready to kick it into gear, only to stall out. Those things happen.

Lackey seemed off, of course, but I remember watching Washburn get shelled on ESPN on opening day 2002 and thinking that it was going to be a long, long year. And there were signs of encouragement - Glaus had two hits despite his wrist injury, and Salmon had two hits despite the fact that it isn't June yet. If Salmon reverses his career-long trend of hitting poorly in the first month or two of the season, a whole lot of things will have to go wrong to wreck the Angels' ship.

The Angels are off today, and continue their series with the Rangers tomorrow.

Posted 12:53 PM by Sean
Uh...yeah. Duke and Notre Dame. Well, at least now I can concentrate on baseball.

The average ticket price at Fenway this year will be $42.34. That's per person. That's also almost eighteen bucks higher than the next-highest average ticket price, Yankee Stadium's $24.86.

Part of this is just supply and demand, of course - Fenway only seats 34,000 or so, give or take the 280 they're going to put on top of the Green Monster. But part of it is also that Boston fans are nuts. I caught a weekend series in Fenway a couple of summers ago, and scalped seats were going for $100 per - against the Royals. I'll say two things about Red Sox fans: first, aside from Cardinals fans, they're far and away the most knowledgable about what's going on during a game. You'll hear conversations in Busch and Fenway that would challenge a lot of TV "analysts" (note the judicious use of quotation marks). Second, Fenway has the highest proportion of drunken idiots I've ever seen at a ballpark. No, scratch that - as a sometime drunken idiot myself, I don't mean to badmouth my tribe. Fenway has aggressively idiotic drunks. During the Friday night game I saw, the guy sitting to my left got into a fistfight with the guy sitting two seats to my right because the latter objected to the fact that the former had chosen to walk in front of him to leave the aisle on his way to the concession stand, rather than going the other way. Mind you, I was still sitting between them when the fight broke out, meaning they were throwing punches at each other while standing on opposite sides of me.

That's Fenway: some jackasses, some guys who know Rich Garces' opposing batting average splits by heart, and some who are an intersection of those sets. When that's your fan base, you can pretty much charge whatever you want.

The Angels, by the way, raised their average ticket price to $15.97, which is a 35.5% increase but still below the MLB average of $18.69.

Posted 3:22 PM by Sean
Like I said, I love the NCAA's...but I'm a little disheartened that, this year, the championship game is a full week after baseball season begins. If I recall correctly, for quite a while the championship has been within one or two days of opening day, which always seemed to be just about perfect. Now, however, I will be required to hold more than one thing in my mind at once for a full week, with predictably disastrous results.

Anyway, like most people, I don't care who wins so much as I care about winning the pool I'm in. Unfortunately, at this point I need both Notre Dame and Duke to win tonight, or else it's pretty much tap city.

Posted 4:49 PM by Sean
After way too much consideration, Eric Neel concludes that the baseball playoffs are the best tournament around. No kidding. Look, I love the NCAA tournament. The excitement of the opening two days, the upsets, the stunned looks in the eyes of seniors who've just crapped out of the last real game they'll ever play, the nearly-guaranteed run to the Sweet 16 or Final 8 of at least one double-digit seed...these are all great things to see, moments of high drama. But in terms of combining drama with truly excellent athletic performances, nine times out of ten the World Series kicks the NCAA tournament directly in the gonads. A few years ago, for example, Michigan screwed the pooch in the final game when Chris Webber was called for a technical foul, his offense being that his team was, um, out of time outs. When was the last time the World Series was decided on something that stupid? And don't bother with Buckner in '86 or Mickey Owen's dropped third strike in '41 - those, at least, were physical screw-ups rather than technicalities or mental mistakes. You'd have to go back to 1926, when Babe Ruth was thrown out stealing second for the last out of Game 7 to find anything comparable.

And you know, the less said about the NBA, the better. I appreciate that these guys are athletes who perform at a level that I can barely imagine. But the NBA tournament sucks. Between including a ridiculous 16 teams and scheduling enough off-days to conduct another season, the NBA tournament proceeds at the pace of Dutch Elm Disease and is about as interesting. Like someone once said, if the NBA had been in charge of World War II, Germany and Japan would still be in the running.

Posted 1:34 PM by Sean
And now, a little good news: the third item in this story mentions that Aaron Sele should be back in the rotation around May 1, a month earlier than I had heard previously. I have no idea how well he'll pitch, but it's nice to have him around in case someone else is faltering.

Posted 1:19 PM by Sean
Troy Glaus may have broken his wrist. Lovely. With the Angels, you generally have to ignore all the reports of various aches and pains coming out of spring training, because traditionally there are so damn many of them that worry about them all is a sure route to Bedlam. This looks like the real deal, though, and may keep him out for weeks.

The Angels do have at least three legitimate short-term replacements at third in Spiezio, Gil, and Wooten, but it's never good when one of your starters goes down (well, almost never good). Especially the guy who just won World Series MVP a few months ago.

It's funny - this would be pretty good evidence of an Angels' curse if they weren't WORLD FREAKIN' CHAMPIONS!

Heh, heh. I still get a thrill out of saying that.

Posted 11:56 AM by Sean
As if I needed it, another reason to look forward to Opening Day: the Angels' spring training record is utterly wretched. A 0-0 record is starting to sound really good.

You hope, of course, that spring training is being used to work the kinks out, but then you read that the Halos have the worst batting average in the Cactus League and have made more errors than any other AL team, and you start wondering exactly how many kinks the team has. Have they gone from brilliant to hapless in five months? We'll find out starting March 30 - either my fears will be put to rest, or I'll withdraw away from reality into a Gollum-like state of catatonia, rocking back and forth while clutching my World Series DVDs and whispering "my precioussss...my preciousssss..."

Posted 5:07 PM by Sean
Chone Figgins is learning to play the outfield. Figgins, you may recall, was dubbed the Angels' "secret weapon" at the end of last season, and was used as a late-inning pinch-runner fairly frequently. The guy is fast, faster than just about anyone I've seen play in an Angels' uniform. But his natural position is second base, and the Adam Kennedy / Benji Gil platoon has that one more than covered. I would think that if Figgins continues hitting - he's batting .378 this spring, and hit .305 in triple-A last year - Scioscia will find room for him to play from time to time.

Posted 9:29 AM by Sean
The A's-Mariners trip to Japan has been cancelled. Like I said, probably completely unnecessary, but understandable.

This means that the first game of the season will be the Rangers at the Angels, March 30. It should be on ESPN, though I haven't seen confirmation of this. I had been under the impression that the ceremony honoring the 2002 team at which the championship banner will be unveiled was to be before the second game of the season, but this story in the L.A. Times seems to imply that it will be on opening day.

Posted 11:24 AM by Sean
There's apparently some question that the war will lead MLB to cancel the A's and Mariners' trip to Japan, which was to include the official opening day series beginning March 25. Actually, the article seems to imply that the series will go on, just with a smaller contingent of family and friends accompanying the players. I suspect that the risk is miniscule, but of course you can hardly blame them for being nervous.

Posted 11:11 AM by Sean
Bill Plunkett at the Orange County Register serves up yet another "Percival goes from student to teacher" story, joining the previously-noted features from the L.A. Times and MLB.com. Meanwhile, it looks like Washburn is recovering from the injury to his left shoulder sustained during fielding drills on March 1, but I get the sense that he definitely won't be pitching opening day, and will probably miss his first start or two. The Angels have enough off-days near the start of the season to get by with a four-man rotation for the first couple of weeks, and their prediliction over the last couple of years has been to be very cautious about rushing guys back. So it may well be Ortiz, Appier, Lackey, Callaway for the first couple of spins through, which may have the hidden bonus of demonstrating whether Appier will be effective this year earlier than otherwise. To me, he's the most troubling question, and I'm relieved that Aaron Sele is projected to return in June, right around the point at which we'll probably know where the rotation needs fixing (if it needs fixing at all).

Posted 11:25 PM by Sean
Here's an idea almost as bad as three-legged jeans: play some regular-season games in Europe. Europe's never been especially receptive to baseball. I mean, there are leagues in a couple of places - Italy for sure, and I think the Netherlands - but there's nothing like the popular interest that the game has in Mexico or Japan, or even Australia (and that's not to give you the impression that there's a lot of interest in Australia, either). And unless they did it right at the beginning of the season, it'd be a huge disruption on the schedule, since you'd have to give them at least a couple of days before and after the games to deal with jet lag and travel concerns, plus all the shit the players will have to take from their families, who will want to go too and make it into a vacation. I'm all for building international support for baseball in places that have shown an interest, but I just don't think that the average European cares all that much. If you're from Europe, or have some insight into this, let me know what you think.

Posted 11:10 PM by Sean
Good news for Angels fans: 2003 is likely Miguel Tejada's last season in Oakland. It's a financial decision, of course, one that makes me grateful for the Angels' policy of signing their young stars to long-term contracts before they enter their walk years. That's a policy that's paid off in more ways than one - we've gotten Erstad, Glaus et al. for pretty fair prices and avoided planting any bitter seeds with them, meaning that future contract extentions won't start out with rancor.

Posted 5:20 PM by Sean
Tim Kurkjian has a roundup of statistical milestones likely to be achieved during 2003. Most impressive to my mind: (1) Bonds is seven steals away from being a 500-500 guy, when no one else in history has ever been even 400-400, and (2) Jeff Kent is 49 doubles away from breaking Ryne Sandberg's record for two-baggers as a second baseman, despite (and Kurkjian doesn't mention this, so shame on him) playing more than 700 fewer games at that position (okay, to be fair, it's likely to be more like 500 fewer by the time the record is broken, but still).

Also, Randy Johnson and Roger Clemens will likely break the 4,000 strikeout plateau. Somewhere, Nolan Ryan is folding his newspaper and smiling indulgently. We'll wake you when they hit 5,500, Nolan.

Posted 5:07 PM by Sean
The Orange County Register is reporting that Matt Wise will need Tommy John surgery. This is very likely the end of the road for Wise with the Angels. He wasn't expected to make the big club, but was out of options, so I suspect they may just cut him loose. I don't think there's a group of guys looking forward to the end of spring trainig more than the Angels' pitchers.

Me, I'm just looking forward to the time I can write about things that actually happened in games - you know, games that count towards the standings? The ones the players and managers care about?

Ah, don't mind me. I always get crabby this time of year.

Posted 4:21 PM by Sean
At this point, it looks like the race is over: Mickey Callaway is the number five starter. The question is rapidly becoming, will Schoeneweis even be effective in the pen, or will the Angels have to go looking for left-handed relief?

Further down in that same article, Scott Spiezio is quoted as saying the following about the spring training brawl last year that resulted in his and Glaus's suspensions (thus contributing to the Angels' 6-14 start): "It definitely hurt us at the beginning of the year. Who knows, maybe if we were all able to play early in the season we would have gotten off to a better start and had a better record and won our division."

Yeah, you can tell Speez is really broken up about only having won the World Series, and not the AL West, too.

Posted 4:11 PM by Sean
The Associated Press reports that the Angels were one of the teams being considered for contraction. Well, duh, if you consider "kinda thought about briefly while coming up with every conceivable scenario" to be "considered." Let's face it: Montreal is the canary in the coal mine when it comes to contraction; until they're gone, I'm not going to worry about anyone else.

Posted 5:07 PM by Sean
Hey, there's also an article about Percival mentoring Rodriguez at angelsbaseball.com! Collusion! Collusion!

Posted 9:42 AM by Sean
Rob Neyer interviews Angels' GM Bill Stoneman at ESPN.com. Neyer should stick to statistical analysis. When the biggest insight you have into your interviewee is that he's shorter than you expected, perhaps interviews are not your forte.

Posted 9:31 AM by Sean
Following up on my post the other day about Donnelly's exclusion from the roster on the official championship T-shirts, there's now an online petition asking the Players' Union to change their position on the issue. So far, 194 extraordinarily bright and upstanding individuals have signed.

Posted 9:23 AM by Sean
Another great piece in the L.A. Times by Ross Newhan, one of the best sportswriters around. This one's about Troy Percival's new role as mentor to Frankie Rodriguez. Percival is signed through 2004, and it should be pretty interesting to see what happens afterward if Rodriguez develops into the kind of pitcher he's shown himself capable of being. Percival's never been particularly adept at coming in for any situation other than a save - stick him in with runners on and you'll end up reaching for the Maalox tout de suite - so it's hard to envision relegating him to a set-up role as he gets older. But who knows?

Posted 3:01 PM by Sean
The Angels won a pair of split-squad games yesterday, beating the Diamondbacks 8-3 and the A's 8-5. Of note is the fact that Mickey Callaway continues to pitch well, while Scott Schoeneweis has been unimpressive - to say the least - this spring. If Schoeneweis wants to return to the rotation, he's got a funny way of showing it.

Posted 2:45 PM by Sean
Here we have the saga of Brendan Donnelly, former replacement player. Donnelly, who pitched brilliantly for the Angels during the 2002 postseason, crossed the picket lines during the strike of '94-'95 and consequently is barred from joining the players' union. Therefore, the officially licensed world championship T-shirts omit his name from the team roster. Nice, huh?

So what did the Angels' players do? Paid to have their own T-shirts made up that included Donnelly's name. A lovely ending to the story...until MLB and/or the union sues the Angels players for trademark infringment, of course.

Posted 2:12 PM by Sean
Okay, I'm back.

The Angels lost to the Cubs yesterday, 5-4. Ah, spring training, where the box scores look like roster sheets; the Angels used 25 men in yesterday's game, while the Cubs used only 23.

Spring training has been something of a disappointment so far - Anaheim is only 1-4 - but it's hard to get worked up about it this early. I never quite know what to make of a team's spring training record. I know that it often does correlate to how well they do during the season, but then you see something like yesterday's game, when the winning run was scored long after most of the regulars had been pulled, and you think "now, what does that really prove, other than that maybe Matt Wise won't get the fifth starter slot?"

Wise, of course, is considered a long-shot for that slot, which opened up when Aaron Sele had surgery that will delay his 2003 debut until June or so. The other candidates are Scott Schoeneweis and Mickey Callaway. Schoeneweis isn't going to get it, since he's the only lefty option they have coming out of the bullpen, so it'll be Callaway - which is fine, since he pitched pretty well when he was called up during the last half of 2002.

In other news, the traditional parade of spring injuries is progressing nicely. Jarrod Washburn is out for ten days or so with a sprained left shoulder, which may prevent him from starting the opener on March 30. Tim Salmon and Darin Erstad are both recovering from surgery, but should be back in a week or so. And war in Iraq might get the Angels' honorary trip as World Series champs to the White House cancelled. But that's the sweetest plum!