With the playoff drought sitting at eight seasons, the Los Angeles Angels and their front office have made aggressive roster moves to show their sense of urgency.
They’ve brought in enough talent to win offensively, and although the pitching has been shaky, they remain in striking distance to compete. The difference, this season, is the Angels’ need to win if they want to remain in contention to retain Shohei Ohtani.
The Angels sit six games over .500 at 38-32, 1.5 games of a Wild Card slot, and 5.5 games out of the American League West. Their most recent run of winning, including an 8-2 stretch, have been huge for morale.
When asked about a feeling of mounting pressure to win, Anthony Rendon doesn’t believe there’s a different vibe in the clubhouse, via Doug Padilla of the O.C. Register:
“No, not really, because, to be honest, this organization has sucked for so long,” Rendon said. “We haven’t made the playoffs in a long time. I take that burden too, even though I wasn’t here for those years, right? I came into this organization and I want to win and we all want to win.
“Hopefully we all want to win. That’s what everybody wants to tell you. There is no extra pressure. It’s just, we need to win now. It doesn’t matter.”
They’re in this season as one unit, but they’ll have to find a run of solid play in each area of the team. The starters will have to pick up the offense, the bullpen will have to close out leads, and vice versa, if they want to stay competitive:
“I always tell these guys we need to get a minimum of 15 wins a month,” Rendon said. “You do the math. If we get 90 wins, we’re going to have a good chance to be in the hunt, to be able to play longer into October.
“We haven’t been playing our best but we’ve hit the bare minimum so I need to push these guys a bit more to get maybe a 16th win or a 17th win. So we just have to keep grinding.”
The players understand what’s at stake, and baseball is a difficult game. However, each player and group on the roster can only do what they can and hope the next man does the same.
General manager Perry Minasian has called up a number of his top prospects to directly contribute to the big league club, but that will also hinder his ability to deal them at the deadline. As those needs become more clear, expectations about newer additions to the team via trade should be tempered with a busy, more expensive, trade market upcoming.
Angels Shohei Ohtani & Mike Trout among American League All-Star vote getters
Ohtani, who is on the ballot as a designated hitter, leads all AL players with 924,182 votes. The Angels two-way star is topped by only the Atlanta Braves’ Ronald Acuña Jr., who received 1,086,537 votes.
Trout is the second-leading vote-getter among AL outfielders with 598,918. He trails only the New York Yankees’ Aaron Judge, who collected 844,965 votes.
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