We have played 12.5% of the season and...

1. If neither the Mariners nor A’s sign Barry Bonds by June 1, this division belongs to the Angels by an easy 12 games. Frank Thomas will not be enough.
   
2. The Angels’ record in missed John Lackey starts: 2-2.
   
3. A week without Howie Kendrick saw us go 5-2, and yet he remains the most-missed Halo at the moment.
   
4. Don’t worry about Shields and Frankie, the bullpen is going to be fine – Justin Speier might need the most help of them all and he has nailed it down of late.
   
5. If Juan Rivera remains the only apparent alternative to the slumping-yet-healthy Gary Matthews and Garret Anderson, assume Mike Scioscia will let them hit their way out of it – into productivity or oblivion.
   
6. After 4 starts each, Ervin Santana looks better than Jered Weaver.
   
7. Joe Saunders is having some great early success, but watch past the 80-pitch mark as he hits the exhaustion wall.
   
8. Jon Garland is going to get the Jekyll and Hyde award by the end of the season.
   
9. Mathis and Napoli are the best catching tandem in baseball and equitable playing time between the two should mean rested superiority late in the season.
   
10. Torii Hunter is the real deal.
    
11. Vlad is pressing and really should be DH more.
    
12. Casey Kotchman may wind up on the all-star team and should already have a gold glove.
    
13. In 4 of our 8 losses, we had the go-ahead run at the plate or on base when the final out was made.
    
14. With his bat and glove, Erick Aybar has made me forget Orlando Cabrera, but Matthews in the #2 slot and Garland on the mound have brought OC back into view.
    
15. I gave up on Chone Figgins before last season and he just surprises me every game. His glove is fine at the hot corner and he is an elite leadoff man – the transformation from overrated supersub to key cog in the machine is complete.
    
16. Like Bewitched!, we have two Darrens. Unlike Bewitched!, our new Darren (O’Day) is better than our old Darren (Oliver).
    
17. Frankie is determined to pitch 50 Saves in his contract year and we might as well let him.
    
18. Scot Shields should be an above-average to very-good closer next season.
    
19. Other than Matthews in the 2 spot, how can you complain about Mike Scioscia?
    
20. Going into play today, we had yet to play a .500 team.

The Angels will have a cool and overcast weekend in the Emerald City as they take on the division rival Seattle Mariners for 3 games. Many preseason predictions called Seattle the favorite, many called us the obvious choice.

We're both without our stud relievers. We are both scrambling to assemble decent bullpens. The Angels made mincemeat of the Indians' #5 starter but we will get the #2,3 and #1 starters sent to the mound against our (rotational) #3, 4 and 5 pitchers:

Jered Weaver V. Felix Hernandez ... Jon Garland V. Carlos Silva ... Joe Saunders V. Erik Bedard

Seattle has hit Weaver hard, although they are mostly older and on the wrong side of the baseball developmental curve now, age-wise, and Weaver is on the right side of the getting better buildup, age-wise and Hernandez is a dominant one-day/queen for the week the next day type of schizoid. Silva has dominated the hack-first, ask-questions-later offense of the Angels while he was with the Twins, so all "psychic predictions" about this game go out the window, as do the ability to foresee which Jon Garland will show up. Their supposed Ace, Bedard, is made of glass and Joe Saunders has been a damn solid arm.

I could avalanche out the spreadsheets and stats and try to prove my love of my team with biased numbers pretending to be objective science, but that tired jerkoff is available at every pop stand on the internet. I want the Angels to win and hope/worry blind me in the search for a glimmer of how the matchups might stack up in our favor.

And any real fan who tells you otherwise has themselves (but hopefully not you) deluded.

Since the 2001 steroid-scarred batflippers won 116 games, the Mariners have not been heard from, kind of in a cursed way, sort of like their presumptions that Edgar Martinez belongs in the Hall of Fame enraged the forces of nature. Maybe they have the Boston curse and their fans will just get more cantankerous and ugly over the next 80 or so years. Maybe we are their Yankees, although Oakland's 14 Divisional titles should have some say in that analogy. There seems to be a culture of asterisk in the fan base, of being an afterthought in the sports landscape. Were it not for the Donnie Moore game in 1986, Seattle would always have us by our 1995 nutsack, but even then they fall into a bland undefined 2nd - 4th place for being a team that did us in. Seems to be the way the town's fans conduct business.

But they are our rivals. It is too bad we couldn't have a sexier team to hate. The Rangers don't have any fans when a Mavericks or Cowboys game is on. The A's have a dilapidated stadium and math nerds chumming with Raider fans - just plain ugly. And the Mariners have people who post rage on the internet while it is raining and then are so nice to you in person that they do not let people walk in the aisle in their stadium during at-bats.

What I wouldn't give for a team with real fans to hate, television crews covering the parking lot on the morning of the games, big drunk guys who yell things to our faces, fights in the stands, a brawl and a bonfire on Katella with cops on horseback and tear gas. Ehh ... not gonna happen with the Mariners. Maybe they will put the Dodgers in our division one day and we can play Clash songs as the soundtrack to the postgame events. Until then, we get Paul Allen's part-timers chatrooming us with stats that don't matter. Call me underwhelmed.

So, Bottom Line: 3 + 0 = Sweep, 3 - 1 = Series win, there is your math, Go Angels!

Sometimes the best trades are the ones you never make, but a lot of times the best trades are the ones you do.

The November dominoes were lined up: Orlando Cabrera to Chicago for Jon Garland, Torii Hunter signed as a free agent, Santana-Kendrick-Mathis-Adenhart to Florida for Miguel Cabrera. No doubt that Miguel Cabrera’s bat would be a great thing in our lineup. But a few months later the pitching depth we once had is gone and Orlando Cabrera has apparently delivered a #2 starter who pitched like an ace in his Angel debut. We will need Ervin Santana on Thursday and the thought of Adenhart on the bubble near the end of March would have been unfathomable at the conclusion of the winter meetings.

It seemed almost gluttonous, then, to leave the trade talks alone with 7 rotation-worthy starters. Surely Tony Reagins should purge, should trade for trading's sake. But the lessons of Zen-Master Bill Stoneman guided the young Tony to hold on to the deep, deep roster. The torch had been passed - not extinguished.

Tonight was only one game, but Garland tonight was the first feather in Tony Reagins’ cap. Perhaps Tony will have a down comforter’s worth by the All-Star break.