Posted 10:30 AM by Sean
Uh-oh. I guess maybe I shouldn't have wondered what's up with Erstad - he won't be ready to come back on Tuesday, which is the day he's eligible to return from the disabled list. Eric Owens is going to have to start picking it up as Ersty's replacement in center; .182 isn't going to cut it.

Aside from Erstad's absence, however, things are going swimmingly on the offensive side. Fullmer, Salmon, and Anderson are off to monster starts. Glaus and Molina are playing as well or better than they did last year. Eckstein, after a wretched start, has pulled his OPS up to .701 and his batting average up to .257. Kennedy's back off the DL and playing reasonably well. The only one of the regulars not in 2002 form is Spiezio, and statistically speaking he was the only one who looked like he had a career year then anyway. The Angels have been hurt by lack of contributions from Owens and Gil, but by and large offense has not been the problem.

Neither has relief - the bullpen has a 2.49 ERA, including stellar performances from their two reclamation projects, Ben Weber (0.55 ERA) and Brandon Donnelly (0.00 ERA), whom critics judged to likely be one-year-wonders. The relief has been second-best in the AL, behind only Minnesota.

What does that leave? Not fielding - they're prety much middle of the pack in the AL in terms of fielding percentage, range factor, and zone rating. Let's see...it'll come to me...

Part of the problem with the pitching has been injury, of course - Aaron Sele and Kevin Appier are both hurt, though Sele should return this weekend. But a lot of it is just plain disappointing performances from John Lackey, and inconsistency from Washburn and Ortiz. To me, the former is a lot more troubling than the latter; Washburn and Ortiz have pitched enough games to show that it's likely they'll return to form eventually, and indeed they both looked stellar in wins against Cleveland yesterday and Tuesday. But Lackey still needs to prove himself as a dependable rotation guy, despite his fine performance at the end of 2002, and he hasn't looked especially sharp during any game this year. Lack's next scheduled start will be Saturday in Toronto, his first since the team escaped the steel-cage death match that was their first twenty games, and it should be interesting to see how he fares against gentler competition.

Tonight, Scot Shields will get the spot start against the Indians, just his second start of the season. He's pitched extremely well this year, with a 0.77 ERA in 23.1 innings, and went 5.1 innings in the Angels win against Boston on April 26. The Indians start rookie Jason Davis, who was impressive in spring training but had a couple of rocky starts thereafter and comes into the game with a 6.67 ERA (somewhat misleading, his last couple of starts have been decent). Davis has a good fastball, but the Angels hit fastballs pretty well. Watch for contributions from Anderson, Fullmer, and Kennedy tonight.

One final note of interest: MLB is offering their MLBTV service on free trial basis from today through Sunday (signup required, but I don't know if you have to give them a credit card number). They've also started offering a daily subscription for $2.95/day, which strikes me as pretty reasonable. The details are here.