Halos of Anaheim

Seriously though, I don't think I've ever watched an Angels win on TV, only in person. Maybe I should go to more games.

Haha what? You've never seen us win an away game on TV?

We suck right now, but it's opening day and I still have hope. Don't know if I'll be able to handle a performance like this in game 79 though.

Wireless. Could be because of the VPN I'm using.  Keeps switching from 1080p to 480p and that might be why it's freezing.

Why are you using a VPN? Blacked out? I turned mine off, it definitely slows your speed down. 

Clown play #1 of the season. 

Hundreds more to come. 

was running smooth on the xbox up until that last inning. Of course the commercials run just fine.

Weird. I'm getting 1080/60fps flawless and I only have 30-35mbps down. Are you wired or wireless?

MLB.tv running like crap now. 

Flawless for me on my xbox one, it was unusable on mltb.tv's website. Probably because my xbox is wired and my laptop isn't. Wired streaming > wireless.

I'd be happy if we scored 1 run off of this guy. 

Good to see a team improve without having to spend hundreds of millions more. This team looks hungry and much better prepared than last seasons team. The new coaching staff has this team more focused. Should be a fun season.

One thing's for sure = this team will be more fun to watch this year. No expectations, more young guys on the team, Simmons at SS etc. 

Lmao

LMAO

I don't know why but this image in the context of this thread just cracks me up. You can see how much they dread the kid, and to no fault of his own.

Yeah Ward, Jones and Alcantara are the only guys of the bunch where if everything comes together, they'll be superstars. We drafted a lot of high floor players that are good for depth, but we don't have a lot of potentially elite talent.

Why do you do this to yourself?

Season over.

OP needs to STFU and read the board.

Sorry that I don't read every thread. This discussion may have been done as a post in a non-related thread, but I don't think I've seen an entire thread dedicated to Trout's august this offseason.

Bingo. Players are going to go through slumps over the course of a season....that's a given. Too many games, too many plate appearances. Trout being Trout was basically the only reason this team was still sniffing playoff contention the last weekend of the season IMO

I've spent the entire offseason bashing the front office. At this point I've given up, and I'm basically asking for the impossible. For Mike Trout to be near-perfect for all 162 games of the season.

Very insightful...thats some deep sh!t right there man....

Quote mining. He has to play well consistently, all year. And I know that's almost an impossible thing to ask for, but with how our team is built..it's the only way we succeed this year. 

It's worth it now because of the single team option. I mean who the hell watches non-Angels games? 

And still no one replies........ Cause overall, it wasn't just Trouts injury it was a complete $hit Storm of a Month!

Well that's my point. Trout is the only guy we can depend on to be consistent all year long and lead the team, if he goes down with a bad stretch we can't expect anybody to pick him and the team up offensively.

I guess the blame really goes to the front office for putting us in that situation.

Lol. F#&k Trout. We should trade him.

Yup, it was Mike Trout's absolutely horrendous August that caused us to not win the World Series in 2015. Can you believe it? His OPS+ was only 91! 91! That's like... 10% below the average... 10%!!! We never should have signed that guy... /s

Nobody is saying that. Stop shit posting.

Pretty tough to expect a guy to be great every single month of a long MLB season.

He was atrocious in august. All he had to be was average. Not that much to ask for the supposed ''best player in the league'' and ''once in a generational player''.

Last year we were in the playoff race until the final series of the season. A lot of things went wrong for us last season, but the one thing that still rubs me the wrong way was Mike Trout's august.

It seems like nobody here wants to talk about it, but it's worth discussing. If he didn't totally disappear that month, we would have been in the playoffs. I'm not saying he had to have a 1.250 OPS that month like he did in June/July..but if he was just average in august..we easily make it to the wildcard game. He had a .680 OPS in august.

One things certain this year, Trout has to play well for us to even sniff the playoffs. And he has to play well consistently. We can't have our best player disappearing for an entire month offensively. Especially when mostly everybody else on our team is average to subpar offensively.

If we still had Borjous, yeah. No doubt about it. No point in putting our best defensive outfielder in left just because we have nobody there though.

 

1. Los Angeles Angels (+30 runs from Opening Day last year) — This is what happens when you swap Erick Aybar for Andrelton Simmons. That, andKole Calhoun has proven himself as a plus right fielder.

 

ranking 7nth overall. Defense going to need to be great to make up for the lackluster offense and pitching.

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/previewing-the-best-and-worst-team-defenses/

 

 

No ****ing clue how much the upgraded defense will correlate to wins though.

 

It'll be negated by the crappy bullpen. This season rests solely on our run prevention, not run production. 

Not sure where people are getting this steady 4 year decline. He had a down year last year but the previous 3 were pretty strong offensive seasons.

Yeah, this. He averaged 4.5 WAR a year from 2012-2014, it was only last year that was bad. You know damn well that he's going to play lights out this year to get some of that $92m he left on the table back, great move by the Rangers.

http://ftw.usatoday.com/2016/02/ian-desmond-texas-rangers-bet-on-himself-and-it-cost-him-nearly-100-million

 Former Nats general manager Jim Bowden said he’s “never seen a worse contract for a player.”

“That’s a shocking number,” Bowden added. “What a great job by [Rangers general manager] Jon Daniels to hang around long enough to get Desmond for one year at eight. So he went from 107 million to losing 99 million over the last 12 months? You want to talk about a humbling sport?”

Ruthless article, especially the ending. 

Quick! Someone have Eppler compare sacrifice bunting with Trout on deck to "vegetables and exercise".