Won't get Easier

Swept by the Mariners. Doh! As I've said before, sometimes teams just have someone else's #. The Devil Rays are 7-4 vs. the Yankees. But really that's not what happened to the Halos. Their pitching, so reliable this year, just failed on them. And Mariners fans, in their current joy, maybe have forgotten what happened in early May - the Angels went into Seattle and swept them. The Angels are now 4-5 vs. Team Trident this year. The focus now should be on how to get the halo pitching and hitting clicking again. I wouldn't worry much about the opponent at this point, the angels have done well this year regardless of opponents (they're still in first!). Fix internally and the wins will follow.

Next up, after the break, is the Twins and then the lemon-lime fun that is the A's. Team Red has done well against the Twins over the past few years, so that will be a good benchmark of how this team is doing. If we drop too many vs. the Twins, then we'll know something is very wrong. The A's are surging right now, so it would be very dangerous to face them with a team in disarray.

As to what went on here at HH.com over the weekend, well I'm still pretty disappointed. That was awful, annoying and sad. I was in Seattle recently (back when they were playing the Padres) and I loved the city, the people up there were great and I had a great time. The Mariners are very popular up there and their stadium looked great. And there are great fans in every city the MLB plays. There are crummy fans too. So now I'm going to do something I really haven't wanted to do, but I will -- here is my midterm grade of HalosHeaven:

C-

All season I've been a little disappointed with this site. My suggestion would be to look at other sites in the SBFamily for improvement ideas. The Mariners site has some great commentary from their head honcho, the Win Expectancy graphs are fun and the little game by game grades (based on win expectancy help or hinderance) are good too. Something like that is somethig to emulate. The Angels are my #2 team, #1 is the Cubs. The Cub site has a rabid, intelligent community, propped up by the honcho and has never, ever (to date) sunk to the ugliness of this weekend, even with the hated Cardinals and the Viva El Birdos crew. In fact, there's a very healthy respect there and even some collaboration has occurred. Blogging Roundtables have been very fun, and the one between the White Sox and Cubs was great! The trash was kept to a minimum even between those crosstown rivals. I fear the day a Dodgers SB comes into existence, I worry the ugliness would be even worse here. Time to rise above that.

I think it's time for Halos Heaven to improve itself. Look at other SBNation sites for ideas about what works. I haven't looked at them all myself, so I'm sure there's more great ideas out there. The only fun thing this site has is the "predict the hits/runs" thing, which seems to have the side effect of eliminating any thoughtful posts.

Just my opinions.