I can’t remember a time where I have ever been this excited for Opening Day, or the beginning of any professional sports season for that matter. Granted, it was great to avoid lockouts in both the NFL and NBA this year, nothing can replace my favorite hometown team, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (still a ridiculous name). I thought about writing this blog a few days ago, but wasn’t fully motivated until after watching tonight’s game. Hope you enjoy this blog as much as I hope to write it.
From now until October, I am going to do my best to cover every single one of the Angel’s 81 home games (and hopefully playoffs). This is going to be a long season, but I’ll do my best to update after every game or at least by the end of the next day.
In this blog, I’ll give my thoughts on the previous game as well as developing stories, while trying to keep the writing light-hearted and easy to read. Comments are always welcome, and I hope to have a lot of fun working on this.
Without further ado, let’s get started with the Angels 2012 season!
Angels won! Thanks to a nice 8th inning rally, Angels were able to beat the Kansas City Royals 5-0. To some, tonight’s game was really slow. Let’s face it, in baseball the closest thing you’ll see to a slam dunk is a home run, and unless you’re playing the Rockies, those home runs can be few and far between. Home runs are exciting, but the real drama comes from the pitchers’ dual.
Pitchers’ Dual
Tonight we witnessed Kansas City Royal’s young ace, Bruce Chen go toe-to-toe with Cy Young Award runner-up Jered Weaver. Chen pitched 6 innings of shutout ball and only allowed the revamped Angel’s offense to get 3 hits, but it was still no match for Weaver picking up right where he left off last year. The Angel’s ace went 8 shoutout innings, only allowing 4 hits and struck out an Opening Day best of 10.
Angels Hitting Woes
The big story before the game, and quite frankly this whole offseason, was Albert Pujols. The man who wishes to not be called El Hombre, went hitless in his Angels debut (the only Angels starter to do so for the day). To be fair, the entire team was hitting poorly for the whole game until a breakout 8th inning. The hits (and homers) will come for the new face of the franchise, but expectations could not be higher for the 2nd highest paid player in baseball.
Don’t fret Angel’s fans; the hits will come in this revamped Angels lineup. Torii Hunter remarked after the game that hitters are at a disadvantage earlier in the season as opposed to pitchers because they show up to spring training three or four weeks earlier than position players and have more time to get ready.
8th Inning
The five run 8th inning was the direct result of Angels hitters focusing and not trying to do too much with the ball. Instead of trying to bash homeruns like in the previous 7 innings, the bottom of the order put together a string of clutch hits that would have made a certain white-haired, capuchin monkey proud.
My favorite part of the inning had to be Peter Bourjos racing from 1st to home to be the throw on Erick Aybar’s 3-RBI triple. There’s no debate about it: the dude is FAST. There are maybe a handful of players in the major leagues that aren’t named Juan Pierre (or a younger Ichiro) that could have scored on that play. I don’t know about you, but I sure can’t wait to see the one-two punch of speed from Bourjos and Mike Trout, once Trout swims his way up to the majors again.
That’s it for today. I’ll be going to the day game tomorrow versus the Royal to get my fleece blanket. Who is the idiot PR professional that thought it would be a great idea to give blankets away during the day games?
I'll leave you with Jered Weaver's 10 K's for the evening.
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