Impressively Sad Skid Maintained in Tampa

Angels 3 Rays 13

Winning the season series against the Rays might be a bit difficult at this point. The team will need to take 7 games of the next 1 in order to put the reigning American League champions to bed this season.

Jokes aside, another game this week has sucked. The pitching was classic Angels, the offense was in the game enough to make sure you didn’t quite change the channel until it was a utter rout, and the defense’s ability to make bad players underperform continued to elate hate-watchers.

The game kicked off for real when, just a lone out into the Rays’ second frame, Manuel Margot lined a ball very hard and very ideally angled into the left field seats. This would plate 2, but the Angels were not fazed quite yet.

The top of the 3rd saw the Angels bounce right back as 6 men reached base safely in the inning and an impressive 3 extra-base hits were lucked into. Sequencing is very important of course, and the Angels really capitalized on this opportunity by making sure that the bare minimum expectation was met.

3 runs scored. 3 men were left stranded. 3 sides later, the Angels died.

To be totally fair to Alex Cobb, he probably did his best. His best just isn’t good enough. Fewer baserunners and somehow less luck didn’t stop a legitimately good team from scoring enough to put the game to bed. A Brett Phillips triple and break for home left the game at 6-3.

Jose Q. and Jose Q. showed up to really aid some TB counting stats. Quintana and Quijada gave up a combined… God, I swear they’re still giving up runs to this very day. And let’s not forget Junior Guerra, who permitted every single one of his inherited baserunners to score and then loaded the bases himself before managing to get a 3rd out that was not altogether far from being a grand slam.

At that point, we might have welcomed it. Daron Sutton and Mark Gubicza couldn’t even be bothered to watch the game in the 8th with a runner on base. Max Stassi grounded into a twin-killing to end the inning and you and I and everyone else didn’t know because they were talking about a Shohei Ohtani pillow. Given the way the Angels have been playing the last 10 days, the question for their detractors now is, “Can you honestly say you’d do any better?” I mean, the pillow was pretty sweet.