No.
First, a disclaimer. The Angels aren’t quite as good as their record indicates. I’m comfortable saying that. They won a lot of shaky one and two run games. They won 100 games in a division that mostly gave up after June (Texas didn’t tell its players that it gave up, but it did). So I don’t think we can look at the Angels as this unstoppable behemoth, drooling and mauling its way around the league, leaving pitching staffs destroyed in its wake.
But do I think the Angels are an 88 win team (which is what the Pythagoras’s Awesome Theorem of Winning and Losing At Baseball – PATOWALAB – says they should have won)? No. I think they’re better than that. A couple of reasons why:
1. Scioscia managed to the score. Especially in September, when he rested a lot of his key guys, he brought bad relievers into games that would normally be blowouts. Those relievers often gave up some runs, hurting the Angels’ expected W-L record, but not their real W-L record. That’s good managing, and because of it, the Angels have arguably the most rested/healthy bullpen in the AL.
2. The Angels team that’s heading into the playoffs is NOT the team that played all year. Lackey missed the first month of the season. Howie Kendrick missed a couple of months. Gary Matthews Jr. was inexplicably in the lineup. Mark Teixeira didn’t join the team until late July. Arredondo didn’t pitch for the team until mid-May. The team they will be sending to the postseason is the best they could field, and that team has not been intact for very long at all this year.
How much better? I don’t know, but I think Scioscia has managed this team for the postseason since the beginning of August, and it may have had an adverse impact on their run differential. For what it’s worth, the Angels severely outscored the AL East during the season and beat Boston 8 out of 9 games. You can cry and scream about sample size all you want, but those things happened, and I’m going to use them as support for my argument. Ha!
Besides that, run differential won’t mean squat in a 5 or 7 game series. The team that moves on is the team that wins more games. Period. And I think the matchups line up in such a way that the Angels could win three before the Boston guys do, Pythagoras notwithstanding. Some of my points stand on shaky ground. I’m okay with that. This is playoff baseball, baby! Anything can happen! So to you Angel fans out there, don’t sweat the run differential.
We have God on our side anyway.
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