Spend enough time in a baseball clubhouse and you're bound to hear it, from a manager whose team gets off to a rocky start, a hitter in an April slump, a pitcher who loses his first few decisions.
"It's not how you start," they say, "it's how you finish."
Unless, of course, you were the 2006 Angels, who lost 10 of 12 games from April to early May and eight of nine in mid-May to fall to 17-28 on May 22, 6 1/2 games back in the American League West.
That team went 54-29 after July 1, the best record in the major leagues in that span, but played catch-up all summer and finished two games behind division-champion Oakland, out of the playoffs.
"April is just as important as any month of the season," Angels pitcher Kelvim Escobar said. "I remember 2006, we started horribly, and we had the best record for the last four months, but we could never catch Oakland. You don't want to start the season like that."
The Angels, hit by a barrage of injuries this spring, could face just such a predicament early in 2008. Many think they'll win the AL West, but the road to their fourth division title in five years could begin with an uphill climb.
The Angels, who open the season Monday night at Minnesota, have a much tougher April schedule than Seattle, the only AL West team expected to challenge them.
The Mariners play 20 games against second-division Texas, Baltimore, Tampa Bay, Kansas City and Oakland and eight games against playoff contenders Cleveland and the Angels.
The Angels play 15 games against contenders Cleveland, Seattle, Boston and Detroit -- they face the Red Sox and Tigers on the road -- and only 14 games against second-division Minnesota, Texas, Kansas City and Oakland.
And while the Mariners bolstered their rotation by adding ace left-hander Erik Bedard and right-hander Carlos Silva, the Angels will play the first month to six weeks without ace John Lackey and possibly the entire season without Escobar, a pair that combined for 37 wins last season.
Escobar, who has a shoulder tear, will decide in mid-April whether to undergo season-ending arthroscopic surgery. If he doesn't have surgery, the earliest he would return would be June.
Lackey, who went 4-0 with an 0.58 earned-run average against Seattle last season, will be out until at least May because of a triceps strain.
