Los Angeles Angels Of Anaheim Baseball Team

The crop for this year's first-year player draft was considered by some analysts to be among the weakest in years. That may explain why the Angels decided to spend their 10th-round selection on a guy who has played only 10 games in the last three years and already has another steady job. But it may turn out to be the shrewdest pick in the draft if Jake Locker's career goes the way the Angels think it will.

Two and a half million dollars a season. That was the difference between what the Angels offered Mark Teixeira last winter to stay in Anaheim and what the New York Yankees paid him to move to the Bronx. Chump change in baseball's high-rent district, where Teixeira lives. He'll pay three times that much just in taxes. In reality, however, the two sides were much further apart. Like 2,100 miles apart.

As the Angels reached the halfway point of the season Monday, the club had five .300 hitters in its starting lineup and led the major leagues with a team batting average of .280. The explanation? Mainly a renewed emphasis on having the hitters show more discipline at the plate. "It's something we started in spring training," hitting coach Mickey Hatcher said before Monday's game against Texas. "We really emphasized having better at-bats.

Catching his breath every few moments, Jim Adenhart explained to the hushed crowd that the greatest day of his life was when his nine-pound, three-ounce baby boy was born. Then, in detail, he relayed his final conversation with his son last week, after Nick Adenhart had pitched the best game of his brief major league career.

That damned car wreck. Every time I walk toward the front gates at Angel Stadium, past the somber memorial circled with Angels baseball caps, I get angry, and that's what I think. Why did it have to happen? Why did three young friends, so full of life, have to face such a terrible end? We know a lot now about Nick Adenhart, the talented Angel who died on April 9, hit by an allegedly drunk fool of a driver hours after pitching a great game.

The Angels did not expect Bobby Abreu to hit 35 home runs this season. Though he averaged 22 homers over the last nine years, Abreu played his home games in hitter-friendly Yankee Stadium and Philadelphia's Citizens Bank Park. He also turned 35 in March, an age when power usually tends to tail off. But the Angels did expect more power than Abreu has supplied so far, which is none. Abreu has a .302 average, .397 on-base percentage and 12 runs batted in but no homers in 116 at-bats.

A year ago, Sean O'Sullivan was pitching for Class-A Rancho Cucamonga, the Angels' California League affiliate whose biggest rival was the Dodgers' Inland Empire club. "Every time we played those guys," O'Sullivan said, "we stepped it up a bit." Monday night, the 21-year-old right-hander found himself in another rivalry, this one on a far bigger stage, under brighter lights, and with much bigger stakes, and he responded just as he did in the minor leagues: He stepped it up a bit.

It is not exactly a death in the family, because it is baseball. Plus, the dearly departed is alive and healthy and will be doing quite well financially, thank you. But when the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim take the field at Angel Stadium on April 6 for opening day 2009, the roll call will be, most likely, missing one familiar "here." After 14 full seasons in Anaheim, Garret Anderson will be wearing somebody else's uniform.

The Texas Rangers officially conceded the American League West on Wednesday at 3:01 p.m. The club hit the send button on an e-mail news release entitled "2009 Texas Rangers Team and Individual Accomplishments." The Angels cannot clinch the division for another few days, but the Rangers evidently feel they have accomplished all they can this season. Frankly, they're right. So on to the playoffs, and to the endurance tests that can sap a starting pitcher of all his strength by the fifth or sixth inning.

The Angels concluded two days of organizational meetings Thursday, assessing the current state of the team and discussing what they need to accomplish this off-season. And while General Manager Tony Reagins said he came away from the meetings pleased, he didn't come away with a firm payroll figure for 2010. "I have an understanding of where we'll end up financially. And that's about it," said Reagins, who chose to keep that understanding to himself. Salary figures probably dominated the meeting because the Angels have 12 key players who will be without contracts at the end of the season.