OC Register: Angels Notes: Halos, Rangers have chance to offer respite to a healing state

[AngelsWin.com]

ANAHEIM — On Friday, the Angels and Rangers will play the first Major League Baseball game in Texas since Hurricane Harvey made landfall near Houston. For many in the state, a baseball game will offer a dramatic change of pace. A preliminary estimate by the private firm AccuWeather predicted up to $160 billion in total damages from the storm, which would reportedly make it the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history.

Harvey’s trail of damage missed Arlington and veered to the north and east, but reminders of the storm will be close.

Some Angels players made individual contributions to relief efforts on the Gulf Coast this week. MLB and the MLB Players’ Association announced a joint $1 million donation too. The Rangers said 10 percent of revenue derived from tickets for the three-game series will be donated to the Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund through the Greater Houston Community Foundation, while proceeds from the Rangers’ 50/50 raffle in each game will be donated to the American Red Cross.

Maybe the Angels and Rangers can offer relief by doing what they do best: playing baseball.

“I always go back to this line that I heard in Dead Poets Society,” Manager Mike Scioscia said Wednesday. Robin Williams’ character, John Keating, “said it’s important for us, for people that keep us alive like doctors and lawyers – keep society going. That’s important to keep us alive. But he referred to poetry as why we live. It’s why we’re alive. That’s something you enjoy, something that can drive you. I think that’s what baseball is too.

“What we do on this field is pale in comparison to what all the first responders are doing, all the doctors, all the social workers down in Houston area trying to deal with that tragedy,” Scioscia continued. “But I know that once this clears – and hopefully everybody gets on the path to recovery in Houston – for many Houstonians, baseball’s a big part of their life, as football will be as they start to play football in there in the fall. There is a role for what we do in society, not as important as a lot of things, but the fact that we can do what we love to do and people can be fans of the competition and striving for those championships as we all do, you can see the value of what all these guys do is to society.”

ESCOBAR NEARING RETURN

Yunel Escobar will be the Angels’ everyday third baseman when he rejoins the team this weekend, Scioscia said.

The decision was not clear-cut. Since Aug. 6, when Escobar played his last game before suffering an oblique strain, his replacement Luis Valbuena was hitting .260 with six home runs in 17 games before Wednesday. Valbuena’s other position is first base, but C.J. Cron is hitting .310 with six home runs in the same time frame. Those numbers would appear to make either player difficult to displace.

Some managers endorse the theory that an established player can’t lose his job because of an injury. Scioscia does not. He said if Valbuena had 100 home runs in his last 100 at-bats, “he’s got a pretty good chance of being our everyday third baseman.”

The manager would rather platoon the left-handed hitting Valbuena with the right-handed hitting Cron at first base, with the player who doesn’t start becoming a late-game option off the bench.

“Yuni was swinging the bat well before he went down and is a big part of what we need to do,” Scioscia said.

Escobar, 34, has a .274 batting average, seven home runs and 31 RBI in 89 games this season.

Limiting Cron to starts against left-handers (he has an .874 OPS against them) and Valbuena to starts against right-handers (.735) could turn a position of weakness into a strength. Angels first basemen entered Wednesday with a collective .706 OPS this season, the third-lowest in MLB.

ALSO

Escobar started at third base for Class-A Inland Empire on Wednesday, in what could be his final minor league rehabilitation game. … Right-hander Garrett Richards is starting for Triple-A Salt Lake in Tacoma, his first game at any level this season since April 5. Richards, on the 60-day disabled list with nerve irritation in his right biceps, is a candidate to rejoin the Angels in September.

View the full article