Should We Be Worried That The Angels Aren’t Hitting?
- Updated: April 24, 2015
(Photo via Twitter)
The Los Angeles Angels can’t hit right now. Sure, it’s just a dozen games into the season, but six starters are hitting below .200 for a club that is going to face at least two very good teams (Oakland, Seattle) and one rapidly improving club (Houston) within their division all summer.
For the Angels, well, the slow start doesn’t seem to be a big deal. Reporting for MLB.com, Alden Gonzalez quotes Albert Pujols:
“Ask me in September, see where we’re at,” Pujols said after the Angels’ 4-3 loss to the Astros at Minute Maid Park on Sunday. “Twelve games into the season is too early to ask what it’s going to take [for the offense to get going]. We have a lot of baseball left. Obviously, a little bit of a slow start, but we need to flip the page.”
Manager Mike Scioscia also looks at the long play regarding the hitting slump:
“We have some guys who are good hitters who aren’t getting hits to fall in right now,” Angels manager Mike Scioscia said. “I think the track record with some of these guys shows what they can do. We’re really confident that guys will get it going and our lineup will deepen.”
Hey, fellas, I’m with ya. It’s a very long 162-game season, and a dozen games does not a ball club make. You can’t draw long-term conclusions from a short-term slump, even if it happens at the beginning of the year, and even if it happens to, well, two-thirds of the lineup.
Plus, you can’t take a small sample size and extrapolate across 162 games, because I’m fairly certain that Albert Pujols won’t hit .186/.286/.442 all summer in 700 plate appearances.
But, every game counts equally in the standings, regardless if it’s number 2, number 42, or number 162; a loss in April is just as bad as a loss in September looking at the biggest of all pictures: the standings. You can’t win a pennant in April, after all, but you sure can lose one.
Pujols asking reporters to talk to him about slumps in September is fine, but, there must be a little bit of urgency in the clubhouse (even privately) to get on track now, or else low run totals by the offense provide low margins of error for the pitching staff and, before you know it, we’ll be in June talking about the Angels as this year’s Kansas City Royals.
Fortunately, the Angels haven’t dug themselves a huge hole and they certainly haven’t lost the shot at a pennant. Sitting at 5-7 after 12 games is, of course, more than manageable across the rest of the summer. But it’s too easy for teams and the media to be lulled into a false sense of calm in the first three or four weeks of the season by shouting “small sample size,” and “it’s just April,” while, by the end of play Thursday, the season will be 10% complete.
Seven early losses mean just as much as seven late ones, and while the Angels’ bats will (probably) wake up sooner rather than later, the early season slump still matters, small sample size or not.
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