Wednesday's terrible loss to the Athletics was made almost tolerable by the unimaginably first and certainly LAST time that Angel stadium announcer David Courtney will ever utter the sentence “2nd Baseman Juan Rivera.” Chone Smith and I marveled as it echoed throughout the stadium.
Are you of the belief that the Angels MUST disable Howie Kendrick immediately? I am. HK47 has played in too many consecutive games and could use the rest, let alone the desperate need for immediate depth here. Sure, we are going to make the playoffs, but if we are an exhausted crew of senior citizen mockers we are going three and out to the Twins, the Chowds or AJ Pierzsynski with or without Doug Eddings. Howie would be able to rejoin the team on September 12, plenty of games to get into an October groove.
I could see the recall of Brandon Wood making sense if it were not for the dual injuries – let’s hope they are of the “tweak” variety and not of the “Maicer” type – to Aybar and Figgins. A week or two of Robb Quinlan at 3B is like a week or two of indigestion, it is not fatal but it can make fatality seem like a nice option at times. We need a solid major league lineup with minor league players ready to graduate. Oh and Figgins strained his toe Tuesday, beating Aybar (tight hamstring) to the trainer's room by about 12 hours.
Meanwhile minor league starter Shane Loux looks capable of taking Joe Saunders’ job away, although the irony here is, unlike Howie, we root for a mild hand injury to explain away the astoundingly bad pitching Joe served up on Wednesday.
Mike Scioscia has just about exhausted his “roster depth” list of ingredients to sprinkle on this pizza. Please use this thread to discuss what exactly we are supposed to do to replace HK-Aybar and Figgy, back up Saunders and strengthen a depleted bullpen over the next few games. I know you are jaded in the bliss of a big lead, but pretend for a minute that winning a majority of the next 30 games kinda sorta matters, yeah?
Oh and in the middle of all this, Torii Hunter could sure use two or three days off...