The Los Angeles Angels are close to losing 100 games in a season for the first time, and the Rockies have been there.
The Los Angeles Angels are trying to avoid doing something that’s never happened in franchise history, which is lose 100 games in a single season. They have to go 3-2 to do it, and four of those games will be against a Seattle Mariners team that’s still playing viable baseball, having won three of their last five games. The Mariners are currently 13 games ahead of the Angels in the AL West standings.
The Angels are also “chasing” the Colorado Rockies, who have just done this in back-to-back seasons. Fabian Ardaya of The Athletic did a comparison of sorts as he noted the reactions of current Rockies manager Warren Schaeffer, who was blunt in his comments about trying to turn this sort of thing around.
Schaeffer said it’s “not easy,” and he talked to his club about not wanting to experience the feelings that come with a 100-loss season. He wanted them to hold onto those feelings so it wouldn’t happen again.
But now it has, and the manager added that there are “a ton of lessons” to be learned from it. But the Rockies haven’t learned those lessons, and they play mostly non-competitive baseball as a result.
Contrast those comments to the ones from Angels manager Kurt Suzuki, who instead offered a series of coach-speak platitudes. He said the Angels are “trying to get better every single day.” He added that he didn’t need to give inspirational speeches because the players know what they have to do, and the Angels would “like to finish off the season strong.”
The Angels already hold baseball’s longest active postseason drought, and they’re about to finish their 11th straight losing season, so they’re trying to complete a trifecta of sorts here. The A’s are also trying to do this as they play the Halos on Wednesday night, but they only have to win one in their final five to avoid the same fate.
Presumably Suzuki is gone, although interim GM John Mozeliak said some complimentary things about Suzuki’s baseball acumen and professionalism that seemed to speak to the possibility of him coming back. That would spark a new level of fan outrage that would mirror what just happened with current owner Arte Moreno, who’s about to walk away from his ownership tenure with $4 billion in his pocket.
The Rockies have been selling hope under the new front office combo of Paul DePodesta and Josh Byrnes, but hope hasn’t resulted in wins. The Angels have been smart enough to soft-peddle the hope angle so far, and the track record of new owner Stan Kroenke suggests that he knows that wins are the ultimate form of currency in sports. Fans want to see a complete overhaul with most of the roster gone, but we still don’t know how Kroenke is going to do this rebuild.
