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Game Day: Angels’ strange weekend is ultimately a plus

June 26, 2023

Editor’s note: This is the Monday, June 26, 2023, edition of the “Game Day with Kevin Modesti” newsletter. To receive the newsletter in your inbox, sign up here.

Good morning. When a baseball team has a weekend like the Angels’, I think of a piece of long-ago baseball lore and the right and wrong lessons to take away from it.

First, other sports news: Freddie Freeman got his 2,000th hit but the Dodgers missed a chance to sweep the Astros, losing in extra innings. Nneka Ogwumike was named to the WNBA All-Star Game, then showed why in a Sparks win over Dallas. Angel City couldn’t capitalize on a Houston red card and the teams played to a scoreless draw. Tigres UNAL beat C.F. Pachuca in Mexican soccer’s Campeon de Campeones match in Carson, and will face LAFC in the Campeones Cup between the Liga MX and MLS title winners. Florida routed LSU to set up a decisive Game 3 in the College World Series baseball final today (4 p.m., ESPN). And before NBA free-agent season, columnist Mirjam Swanson got back to basketball basics by attending the annual kids’ clinic hosted by the Clippers’ Terance Mann.

Now, about the Angels’ weekend against the Colorado Rockies in Denver. Not many baseball teams have had weekends like the Angels’. It featured a club-record-setting 25-1 victory on Saturday, but on either side of that, a come-from-ahead 7-4 loss on Friday and a nail-biting 4-3 loss yesterday.

As writer Dennis Georgatos pointed out in covering the series for Southern California News Group readers, the Angels’ plus-20 run difference in a regular-season series is the second-largest in major league history for a team that lost the series, exceeded only by the Chicago Colts’ 23-run edge in losing two of three to the Louisville Colonels in a National League game in 1897 (the team later to be known as the Cubs won the middle game 36-7).

The most historic case of a team racking up runs and losing the series occurred in, no less, the 1960 World Series. The New York Yankees won games by 13, 12 and 10 runs, but the Pittsburgh Pirates won games by 3, 2, 1 and 1 and took the championship. The 1 best remembered came thanks to Bill Mazeroski’s home run in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 7.

“Baseball, like history, moves in strange and shifting eddies,” columnist Jimmy Powers wrote in the New York Daily News, and who hasn’t said exactly that a few times?

If they’d posted Five Things We Learned analysis in those days, one of the five surely would have been that blowout wins are for bullies and losers and that winning close games is the mark of a champion.

No doubt that’s the worry of many Angels fans frustrated by the Halos’ recent 7-7 stretch, which includes two losses by one run and four other losses by the bullpen.

Me? I’ll take the team that wins by 24 runs.

Look: There’s nothing bad about crafting ways to win one-run decisions. But if you’re trying to predict which teams will go farthest, it’s as good if not better to look at run difference than records in one-run games. If you don’t think so, compare those numbers for recent World Series teams in the detailed standings at Baseball-Reference.com.

Something jumps out if you piece together a list of one-sided wins – like the Angels’ on Saturday – since the major leagues as we know them came together in 1901. Those games are almost always won by the better team. They’re usually won by very good teams, mostly playoff-quality teams. The 13 winners include the 1936 Yankees and 1948 Cleveland Indians, both World Series champions.

Those 1960 Yankees and Pirates, of the strange and shifting eddies? The Yankees lost that World Series, but they won the next two and went to the next four. The Pirates finished sixth the next year and didn’t make it back to the World Series for a decade (winning in 1971).

It feels funny to have to say it, but the right lesson from history is that winning big means you’re a good team.

That 24-1 romp is more evidence that the Angels, currently fighting for a wild-card playoff spot, are going to get there.

TODAY

• Angels open a seven-game homestand against the White Sox, with Reid Detmers facing Chicago ace Dylan Cease and (6:30 p.m., BSW).

BETWEEN THE LINES

The Angels are scheduled to face nothing but right-handed starting pitchers in the homestand against the White Sox and Diamondbacks, according to a schedule at FantasyPros.com. They are 34-23 against right-handers (.596, sixth best in baseball), and have produced a betting profit in games against righties (plus 10.5 wagering units, fourth best), according to StatFox.com.

280 CHARACTERS

“Dodgers clawed back to send it into extra innings but couldn’t finish off a sweep of the Astros. But they end this week feeling a lot better about themselves than they did a week ago.” – Bill Plunkett (@BillPlunkettOCR) after the Dodgers won four of five games following last weekend’s sweep by the Giants.

1,000 WORDS

Denied: Tigres goalkeeper Nahuel Guzman and defender Jesus Pizarro, in yellow, prevent Pachuca’s Paullno De La Fuente Gonzalez, in stripes, from scoring in the first half of Tigres’ 2-1 victory in the Mexican league’s annual Campeon de Campeones game yesterday at Dignity Health Sports Park in Carson. Photo is by Kevork Djansezian for Getty Images.