Jered Weaver seemed to have a bit of a hangover after his no-hitter, leaving the game a little early after completing 6 innings with less than 90 pitches. His command was a little off and he had trouble keeping runners off the basepaths, but like a true ace he didn’t let that stop him from limiting the opposing offense to only 1 run off of three hits. His short outing today is really nothing to be concerned about, most likely he is just fatigued from his rather taxing no hitter. His performance was good enough to earn him the W behind the exploding offense that benefited from a couple of “gift” runs late in the game.
Even though the bullpen gave us a little scare the Angels were able to grind all the through to earn the victory, their 3rd in a row after going a month without winning more than two games in a row. Now I know it’s fine and dandy that the Angels have won 3 in a row, but it would be extremely beneficial to this team if they could pull a stark contrast of last month by avoiding more than two losses in a row. So far they’ve done a good job of holding up the fort, but then again the competition hasn’t been too strong.
Another series against the Twins, another big game for the offense….
We should really be beefing up the offense off of these guys to start of every month.
Game Notes
- The top of the order was surprisingly effective today consider the past struggles with the top third of the order all season. Izzy was on base three of his four plate appearance off of 1 walk and 2 hits, eventually coming around to score 2 times (hmmm, is that what leadoff men are supposed to do?). Now I’m not so surprised to see Izzy do so well at the top of the lineup, that’s really the name of his game, but Callaspo was absolutely on fire today. He really got the ball rolling for the offense with his 2 run home run in the 3rd inning off of Liriano. These runs gave Weaver a lot of comfort on the mound, which would prove to be vastly important with his struggles early on in the game.
- The bullpen has been shaping up pretty nicely the past few games and today was really no different. Although Carpenter had an iffy inning that led to the Twins picking up 2 runs on the Angels to make it a 5-3 game in the 8th inning he was bailed out very quickly by the offense in the very next inning. I should probably rephrase that, he was bailed out the by the opposing defense in the very next half inning. The Angels managed to bring around 1 run before Komatsu made a fielding error in LF off of a deep drive by Mark Trumbo that led to two more runs for the Angels. Thank god too since Isringhausen was most likely going to come in for the save as Frieri had already pitched two days in a row.
- There’s no doubt that everyone’s eyes were on Pujols after he finally lifted the homerun curse off of his back yesterday. Today was really no different from the Pujols we’ve been seeing for the season so far, in 5 trips to the plate he came away with only 1 hit. If it ended there it would be a rather disappointing night for Pujols, yet he came away with 2 RBI’s in the game, one of them coming off of a single with 2 outs. Haven’t seen much two out action from Pujols in, well….the whole season I guess. Regardless it’s good to see Pujols to put together back to back multi RBI games after his long offensive drought. It’s going to be a slow process for Pujols to put all the pieces back together, but they always did say slow and steady wins the race.
*Other notable offensive performances: T. Hunter 0-4 1BB 1R 1K, H.Kendrick 2-5 1R 2K, V.Wells 2-4 1K, C. Ianetta 0-2 1R 2BB 1K, P.Bourjos 1-2 1RBI 1R
Halo Hero
It was awfully hard trying to pick just one person to earn the Halo Hero for today, but everyone on the team contributed to the victory in some way today. Every hitter in the lineup made some contribution to the victory, Weaver pitched a very solid game, and the bullpen did a nice job of holding the lead together. It’s great to see team efforts like this instead of a couple of players carrying the team. More games like this and we should have no problem catching up to the Rangers by the end of the season.