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Jayne Kamin-Oncea-USA TODAY Sports
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The Angels are in a decent enough position for the playoffs, considering the number of teams they trail at this late juncture. They might not have things as easy as some of those teams they are chasing, though, and there isn’t a whole lot of time left in the season to do something about that. Los Angeles sits 4.5 games back of the AL West-leading Astros and four games behind its second place team, the Rangers, who also happen to possess the second Wild Card. They’re also three games back of the Twins, who trail Texas by one game for that spot, and are only a half game up on the Indians, who are surging at the right time.
It’s a busy fight for two spots, and the Angels certainly have a chance at taking one of them. As of Tuesday morning,Baseball Prospectus calculates their postseason odds at 11.2 percent, with most of that coming via the Wild Card race -- hey, no one said it was a great chance. They need to win to make this happen, obviously, but they also could use one of the Astros or Rangers dominating their remaining head-to-head matchups. The Angels’ winning also has to outdo whatever the Twins and Indians manage over these next few weeks, so there are a lot of moving parts independent of the Angels that they’re relying on.
They should probably start with winning their own games, however. The Halos are suddenly just one game over .500 after a 10-19 August that they’ve followed up with a 5-5 run over their last 10, including Monday’s 10-1 blowout at the hands of the Mariners. In spite of this, they can still fix it all, because the Angels have series left against not just the Rangers and Astros, but also a four-game set against the Twins. If they can avoid tripping over themselves again in the meantime, the Angels just might be able to control their own destiny by the last series of the season, which just happens to be against Texas.
- The Rangers took the first game of the four-game series against the Astros, closing Houston's AL West lead to just a half game. You're watching the beginnings of a rivalry that your grandkids are going to be all about, and that's in partly due to Texas' recent surge through the standings.
- Torii Hunter danced across not one, but two Instagram posts.
- The Cubs have Jon Lester and Jake Arrieta, which is great! The problem is that it's just about all they have on the pitching staff at this point, thanks to the schedule and an overworked bullpen.
- There are five general manager openings across MLB, all with their varying positives and negatives.
- Even if Johnny Cueto can't recover his form, the Royals won't be doomed by him in October. They were great before Cueto, you know.
- The Mets might use Matt Harvey to piggyback their other starters in order to keep him from overuse without letting a layer of rust settle in on him before October.
- Is David Ortiz a Hall of Famer? After exhausting research, we've come to a conclusion.
- Speaking of Ortiz, he has an outside shot at becoming the all-time home run leader for the Red Sox,but he'd have to pass some Ted Williams guy to do it.
- How much stock can you put into the performance of players in September since rosters have expanded? Apparently, more than you might think.
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