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2009 ALCS: Errors costly as Los Angeles Angels are eliminated from postseason - ESPN
That's eight errors in all. Which begs the question: How would the Angels have fared if they had been fundamentally sound?

Angels can't stop Yankees, season over   - OCRegister.com
"I think the biggest difference was we had players play big in the series," Yankees manager Joe Girardi said. "CC was huge for us. Alex (Rodriguez) was huge for us. Mariano Rivera was huge for us. Our starting pitching has been outstanding throughout the playoffs. Guys have gotten big hits. "We’ve had big players do big things – and that’s why we got a chance to go to the World Series."

Superb pitching seals Yankees' destiny as AL champs - Ben Reiter - SI.com
Over 6 1/3 innings of work, Pettitte allowed seven hits and one earned run, and threw 64 of his 99 pitches for strikes. That total might have been aided by home plate umpire Dale Scott's rather generous strike zone, but the Angels didn't complain after the game, insisting that Scott's zone was consistent for both sides.

Team Reports - CBSSports.com
3B Chone Figgins finished the postseason with just three hits, three runs scored and a .086 batting average (3-for-35). "I'm disappointed that the way I went about it was the way I wanted to, but I didn't get any results," Figgins said. "I didn't change anything about the way I played in the regular season. That's just the way the playoffs went for me."

Team Reports II - CBSSports.com
Manager Mike Scioscia was outspoken in his criticism of the postseason schedule, drawn out to accommodate TV coverage. "It's just something that seems like it's gotten away a little bit," Scioscia said. "Eight games in 21 days (since the end of the regular season) is something you never expect in a baseball season."

Baseball's Unspoken Corruption - Twinkie Town
Baseball has a big problem. One that threatens the credibility of the game. No, it's not steroids, nor runaway contracts, nor mal distributed team revenue, though each of these is bad enough. Baseball's biggest problem right now is tying its post-season schedule directly and unalteringly to T.V. network requirements. In other words, games can only be played (or must be played) when the TV network decides.

Did MLB give the Yankees an advantage?  - OCRegister.com
By the time Andy Pettitte makes his first pitch to Chone Figgins in Game 6 of the American League Championship Series Sunday, the Angels and New York Yankees each will have played eight games in 21 days. That, in the word of Angels manager Mike Scioscia, is "ridiculous." "Can I say it any clearer than that," he said.

Angels are lost in the Bronx -- latimes.com
It wasn't quite as stinging as last year's division series loss to the Red Sox, when ace John Lackey said he wanted to "throw somebody through a wall." The Angels thought they were the better team last October. They did not this October. "They're a great team," Lackey, who will become a free agent this winter, said of the Yankees. "We would have had to have played pretty perfect to win this series, for sure, and we didn't do that."

Los Angeles Angels' putrid play and errors result in agony of defeat to New York Yankees
They didn't play like a team that belongs in the World Series and now the Angels are going home. They capped a thoroughly unspectacular showing against the Yankees in the AL Championship Series with another less-then-stellar performance in the 5-2 loss Sunday night.

Same old story for Angels: Falling short - eastvalleytribune.com
They may be among baseball's most consistently excellent teams, praised throughout the sport for doing all the little things right, but the Los Angeles Angels can't find a way to reach the final two again.

Yankees buy, reclaim part of their birthright - Yahoo! Sports
It was a long restoration, a five-year plan, the sort seen from another Evil Empire. And it took money that looks like it was delivered by TARP: $1,056,894,314 spent on players alone since the 2005 season, give or take a few million this year. And yet if it delivers that elusive 27th World Series ring, one the Yankees will have to snatch from defending champion Philadelphia, a billion might as well be a penny and five years a day, because all the struggle of turning the chokingest team in history into this – a mighty machine – took more than time and money.

Pennant pressure too much for error-prone Angels - Ted Keith - SI.com
What was surprising was that the Angels had once again bumbled their way to yet another loss in yet another game they could have -- perhaps even should have -- won. After groping through the usual run of clichés to describe the feeling of emptiness that accompanied his seventh title-less trip to the postseason in his career, he finally settled for this: "It sucks, actually. We should've played better defensively. We didn't play Angels-style baseball."

Above all, poise was missing - Angels Unplugged - Los Angeles Times
The team that played so well, with so much confidence, in the regular season and the ALDS never showed up in the ALCS. Instead, we were forced to watch these tentative impostors dressed in red.

Hunter: 'We didn't play Angels-style baseball' - USATODAY.com
"Eight games in 21 days is something you never expect in a baseball season." Neither do you expect the club that led the majors with a .297 average with runners in scoring position to hit .229 in those situations in the ALCS. Or the second-highest scoring team in baseball averaging 3.2 runs, more than two below its regular-season output. Or the third-best fielding team in the league committing eight errors in the series, by far the most of any team in the whole postseason. "We didn't play Angels-style baseball," center fielder Torii Hunter said.

With '09 in books, Halos look to future - MLB.com
The overall outlook remains bright here, no matter how disappointing this postseason defeat was. This is a franchise that has managed to combine the better parts of two approaches in building its team. It has a productive developmental system; young, promising pitchers in particular keep on appearing in Angels uniforms. And it has been able to fill in with some reasonable free-agent signings. This is a stable organization, well managed at every level from the front office to the field.

Video Central - FOX Sports on MSN
Now that the Angels' World Series run is over, find out Mike Scioscia's very candid reaction as told to Ken Rosenthal.

October 26 - BR Bullpen
Events, births and deaths that occurred on October 26.
2002 - The Giants appeared destined to win their first World Series since 1954, when pitcher Russ Ortiz, tossing a 5 - 0 shutout, strikes out Garret Anderson to begin the seventh inning. But scoring six times in the 7th and 8th innings of Game Six, the Angels' rallied from five runs down to stage the biggest comeback in Series history for a team facing elimination and beat the Giants, 6 - 5, forcing a Game Seven.