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Pearly Gates: An Angels Blog
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Wednesday, February 25, 2004

Lucky Us!

In response to this post over at 6-4-2:


Rob’s first point was that the Angels were lucky because they stayed relatively healthy. I can’t dispute that- they did stay remarkably healthy throughout the season. However, show me a championship team that didn’t keep its core intact throughout the season. Health is a prerequisite for a good season, and while it is certainly dependent on luck, the Angels were no luckier then any other World Champion.

Next we have the argument that players such as Benji Gil and Scott Speizio had career years. Benji Gil’s numbers looked like this: .285/.307/.431. If that’s a career year, then it wasn’t much of a career. (Actually Gil had much better season in 2001, putting up .296/.330/.447 in almost twice as many games.) As for Speizio, he did have a career year in 2002. His .807 OPS was by far the best of his career and he accounted for 17 win shares. As we all know he dropped back to earth in 2003 putting up only 12 win shares. That difference of 5 win shares represents just 1 win, so lets not overestimate Speizio’s value. If Rob wanted to make his point about career years he should have pointed out Jarrod Washburn or David Eckstien, both of whom took huge nosedives in 2003. But even that argument would have holes in it, as both played injured for most of the season. The Angels actually had a remarkably steady year in ’02. Very few players had career years and, similarly to the health issue, players steeping up and having career years is par for the course with championship teams.

This third point is pretty funny. He claims that the Angels were lucky because Kevin Appier had the last decent season of his long career. I have no clue how this relates to luck. Appier was acquired straight up for Mo Vaughn before the 2002 season. Trading an unproductive player for a productive one is not luck- it’s good management.

Finally we have the idea that the Angels’ young pitching (Lackey and K-Rod) was also somehow related luck. Once again I have to play the management card. K-Rod is a product of improved South American scouting that was put in place by the front office, and Lackey was a productive starter found in round 2 of the 1999 amateur draft. If these guy’s names had been randomly drawn from a hat then you could make an argument that the Angels were lucky in this regard. A strong farm system, however, is not lucky.


I think that anyone who looks at the numbers can see that the Angels were no more “lucky” then any other champion in the history of baseball. Luck does play a critical role in every team’s season, but as the saying goes “you make your own luck.” The 2002 season was long in the making through smart personnel decisions and a string of very successful drafts. And how do I explain the down year in 2003- bad luck!