What was most terrible about Thursday's loss is that we had actually come back from a steep early deficit and, at one point, taken the lead. Allowing them to climb back up and then over, there is a sapping energy to that. But Mike Scioscia insists that the players take every game as one game. Mike never gets too up nor down even if he did totally chew-out Bootcheck on the mound tonight.
Nick Adenhart will start in Kansas City on Tuesday. The long-term is fine. The short-term, however, is a lot of tired arms that love finding the center of the plate when they are not nibbling at the nothingness beyond the corners.
No team in baseball could conceivably expect its 3 lowest totem pole relievers to eat up 8 innings unscathed - throw in anticipating perfection from the 5th starter as a delusion a reasonable team would avoid (and as L.A. Seitz reminds us all , we are really talking about the Angels' 7th starter). But fans expect it. Counting our currently vague 5th starter spot, we are talking about inadequacies in the 4 least important pitching positions in baseball.
After a month of excellence, we finally had to suffer the ramifications of being without our two 18-Game-Winners on Thursday. The cringing of Robb Quinlan challenging himself to have range beyond a couch potato reaching for the remote is not a pitching problem, but if that was the glaring problem - in addition to a flailing Guerrero and a suspiciously DHing-Again Hunter - these things are minimal concerns among a team of high-achievers.
So we as fans can turn the page, too. So let's!