Only Two MLB California Teams Will See the Postseason

With the Dodgers losing at the hands of their rival Giants tonight 4-3, they have now ended their pixie-dust-and-crazy-money-powered run at the postseason in 2012. Hard to say they will always play second fiddle to the Giants in the future, because I don’t think that will be true for 2013. However, they are out, and their fans are of course, very disappointed. But what about the Angels fans with MVP-candidate Mike Trout, and new signees Albert Pujols and CJ Wilson? They’ve gotta be hating life right about now as well.

This is the NL West on May 27th:

 

Sure it was a while ago, but that’s pretty hard to keep up a 68% winning rate, shoot even the Nationals and Reds, who own the best records in baseball, have a 60.2% win% right now so you might be able to see why this was perceived as unsustainable. Fast forward to September 22nd and it’s all:

 

I know, right? The Rockies’ win% got better. Oh, and there was a 18.5 game swing between the Giants and the Dodgers. Holy moly.

Now for the Angels, who never really had a 7.5 game lead or anything but whatever on July 2nd:

 

Would ya look at that, the Angels with a 2.5 game lead for the #4 spot. Things were looking great. Mike Trout was reminding us how unathletic we were at his age, Albert Pujols wasn’t being crappy April Pujols, things were great in Anaheim (as my wife likes to point out, it’s not Los Angeles). And then, well we all saw yesterday:

 

I like to think this was more of a wth run by the A’s than a Red Sox-ian or Braves-ian collapse by the Angels. They do have the 5th best record in the AL (better than the AL Central winning Tigers), so they really got beat out by a team that played out of their minds, but I’m sure their bullpen knows they could’ve done better.

Both playoff teams from California will be from the Bay Area. Let that sink in, because we probably didn’t think that’d be the case in July, much less in May.

So fortunately… but actually unfortunately, when the local teams lose, especially down here, the crowd moves on, and that means I get to hear about the NBA and NFL non-stop now which is going to be super annoying. If you’re in a baseball playoff town, you should feel lucky. It really could be a lot worse for you.