Baseball season is finally upon us and the Angels started out their season with a series victory over the Seattle Mariners.k I happened to be in the Safeco seats for the opening day game and have some reflection on that game as well as the series in it’s entirety.
The Good:
Angels – Winning the opening series and starting the season win the green with a 2-1 record is a great start.
CJ Wilson – Holy cow. Who was this guy on Tuesday? Most will call it a freak one off – but you don’t pitch THAT well unless you have something in you. The question is how consistent can he be? Wilson was no doubt dialed in on Tuesday with career bests in all sorts of categories. “He threw first-pitch strikes to 19 of 27 hitters, 70.4 percent. His career average is 57.1 percent and the major league average is 59.1”. Check out the OC Register article for how dialed in CJ was.
The Bullpen – 6 innings, 8 Ks, ZERO earned runs. The Halo bullpen was been flawless in the opening series. Kudos Alvarez, Morin, Ramos, Salas, Smith, and Street!
Fielding – 1.000 PCT with 28 attempts. Three games is a small sample size but there are 7 other teams that have a less than perfect FPCT. Also – there have been some pretty spectacular plays like – don’t you dare go first to third on Kole Calhoun!
The Bad:
Jered Weaver
– Where have you gone? Scioscia isn’t concerned, or he is just playing lip service to the fact that Weaver’s average speed was a mere 83.5 MPH on opening day. Heck I could almost hit off that so it’s no wonder his BAA was .320 and he have up 8 hits and 4 runs. To be fair, much of that performance could have been different if Seth Smith (3for3 with 3 extra base hits) had not been in the lineup. But still, Weaver struggled. Bright side? He didn’t walk a single batter.
Strike out kings – Mike Trout has not yet shown he is going to strike out less this year. He and Chris Iannetta have a massive 10 combined Ks in 3 games. However – King Felix is the cause of almost half those strikeouts.
Mendoza line – It’s still early but the Angels lacked a lot of punch in their first three games. The following players are all batting below .200 – Freese, Pujols, Joyce, Iannetta, Calhoun, Cowgill, and Cron. Our leadoff man is batting .083 with 4 strikeouts. Come on Calhoun!
Baserunning – Scioscia’s least favorite thing is to steal bases (at least I think it’s on the top of his list). The Angels have a combined ZERO stolen bases through 3 games. The Angels were 11th in team stolen bases in 2014 so this is no surprise, even if they do have one of the fastest players in the game.
The Meh:
Matt Shoemaker – The Shoe wasn’t bad. He wasn’t good. He was okay. Yes he got the win but with a 4.50 ERA and .261 BAA. Like Weaver he did not walk a soul so both of them were showing some great control.
Offense – 8 runs in 3 games? Yea, not that impressive. I expect the Angels will pick things up but not having Howie in the lineup does suck. Trout, Freese, and Pujols all have homeruns with the later two helping to win ballgames so it’s not all bad.
