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Given the distribution of hype over the course of baseball’s first half this season, you wouldn’t necessarily know it, but team that sits atop the American League, tied for the best record in the bigs, is the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, at 57-38, a .600 winning percentage. In itself, this is nothing new, since the Angels have been a top shelf team since 2002, but have rarely garnered attention commiserate with their success because they’ve featured low key stars like Garrett Anderson and Vlad Guerrero and play on the west coast, both of which work against them when it comes to capturing the imagination of our Bristolian sports gods. Perhaps more importantly, while the Angels win, they don’t win sexy, bashing the ball around the park.

Pitching and defense aren’t hot. They’re also often not enough to win in the postseason, against teams that pitch and catch the ball nearly or equally as well, but hit it, too.  Call it a third explanation for the lack of love, and perhaps the most important. 

Nearly two months ago, I wrote that the Angels seemed wise in hindsight to pass on a potential Miguel Cabrera deal last summer, because arms like Ervin Santana and Joe Saunders, who likely would have been included in a deal, have helped keep them afloat. And while LAA wasn’t burning out any bulbs on scoreboards across baseball, they were putting up enough crooked numbers to get the job done offensively.

Like the stock market, things have since gone downhill.

It’s not that the Angels aren’t a good team. They are. Very good, actually, if only because they rarely give anything away, forcing the opposition to beat them. But at this point, with the Angels comfortably ahead in the AL West, being chased by an Oakland team that doesn’t seem to be pushing for a title this year (see Harden, Rich), the question really centers around whether the Angels are good enough to outpitch and outscore teams in the playoffs. The former isn’t that big of a problem- the Halos have a killer rotation, and a solid pen backed by one of the game’s best closers- but as it seems to always be at this point of the year, the latter is a question mark.

Offensively, the Angels are something of a Jekyll and Hyde act. In April the Angels were one of baseball’s more productive offensive teams. In May and June, however, they scored only 201 runs. That’s only six more than the Dodgers managed over the same period of time. Yes, the Angels played one less game, but to be in the same ballpark as the Dodgers in anything related to plate performance is a very bad thing.

Some of this can be explained by out-of-character bursts of power. Casey Kotchman finished April with six homers and 19 RBIs. Since then, he has 3/25 and has slumped badly. Some can be explained by injuries. Chone Figgins has played in only 58 games, Howie Kendrick 50, and both Macier Izturis and Erick Aybar have missed time at short. With their full compliment of players, it’s no surprise to see the Angels have turned things around in July, creating more rallies, hitting more homers, and driving in more runs.

They’ll have to keep it up, because there are a lot of numbers that suggest the Angels are fortunate to be tied with the Cubs atop the baseball world. Their +21 run differential is a whopping 44 runs worse than Oakland’s, and among current playoff contenders, only Minnesota has a lower figure (+16). For those of you who enjoy fancier stats, their Pythagorean Over/Under- a metric used to measure how well a team’s record matches up with its statistical performance- is the highest in the Majors at 7.2. By contrast, the A’s have one of the league’s lowest scores, at -3.8. The implication is that the Angels have had a degree of luck in piling up as many wins as they have, while Oakland probably deserves to have a better record.

More signs the Angels have been living on the edge: How about Frankie Rodriguez and his 38 saves in 41 chances? Impressive, yes, but it shows how many close games the Angels have played. Overall, the Halos have 40 saves, vs. 31 for Boston, 29 for the Cubs, and 22 for the White Sox. It’s not that Rodriguez will suddenly start blowing games in the second half, but success in one and two run affairs tends to even out over the course of a season, even for good teams. The Angels are currently 18-13 in one-run games, and if that well is tapped too often, it’s easy for a team to suddenly find itself on the wrong end of a 4-3 result. The margin for error is that small.

The Angels are never going to be a monster team offensively, scaring the bejeezues out of pitching staffs, as Boston does. If at the plate they’re closer to the team they were in April and thus far in July as opposed to May and June, if Vlad Guerrero continues to play well after early season struggles, and LA can squeeze a little more from Torii Hunter, they’ll be players, good enough to beat anyone in October. (It wouldn’t hurt, either, for Gary Matthews Jr. to stop playing like the O.C.’s answer to Andruw Jones- save a stretch in early June he’s been awful…)

The talent is there, which is good because I don’t see much help coming at the deadline. The names, with the possible exception of Atlanta’s Mark Teixeira, just don’t make much sense. Good, not great. That could do the trick.

Hopefully they use the break to take a little BP.

Brian Kamenetzky hosts the Lakers Blog and Blue Notes: A Dodgers Blog for the LA Times.com. He’s a contributing writer to ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com. Write him at bk@sportshubla.com.

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