By Jeff Flinn - AngelsWin.com Contributor
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*Chatwood pitched a great game, going into the 8th inning with a shutout. Santana struggled early, but righted himself and shut the Royals out from the 3rd through 6th innings to keep the Halos in the game. Joel Pineiro wasn't bad at all, except for one inning.
*Rodney actually had yet another clean inning on Monday, closing the game this time. Now if only he could ever be consistent for any stretch of time. Walden got a nice breather after a 35 pitch outing in the Sunday game for the previous series.
*Hitting wise, the Halos came back from a 6-1 deficit after two innings and 8-5 deficit after seven innings to win on Monday 10-8. That's twice on the road trip where they were down at least 5 runs and came back to win the game. The RISP BA was at .270 for the series (9-33). It continues to slowly improve. Aybar, Trumbo, Abreu, and Hunter all had a solid series. Trumbo had another long HR on Monday, and seems to be getting more comfortable vs. righties. Mathis had another 2 hit game on Tuesday, his 3rd two-hit game in about a week's time period. Abreu has a bunch of doubles lately. The Halos hit 4 HRs on Monday. The Halos also stole 4 bases in the series, including Aybar's 13th and 14th, Trumbo's 5th, and Bourjos' 6th.
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*Joel Pineiro had one big hiccup inning on Tuesday night, that was mitigated by his throwing error on a potential GIDP ball. Santana struggled for the first 2 innings on Monday, giving up six runs and having little to no command.
*Downs finally had a poor inning, although the HR is still questionable as we speak.
*The defense committed three errors in the series, and wasn't as reliable as they have normally been so far in 2011.
*The offense still has a nasty habit of leaving the bases loaded (5 for 28 in those spots so far in 2011). I thought bases loaded spots were the ones to usually benefit from....my mistake. And they were abysmal against mediocre command pitchers on Wednesday, not taking one single walk!!! Abreu K'd THREE times against righties on Wednesday. He still only has TWO HRs. The Angels continue to make EVERY SINGLE unknown pitcher look like Cy Young! You STILL just never know what this offense is going to do from game to game.
