Heading into the season most people would not have anticipated that the Angels and Athletics would both be playing over .550 baseball in June. The AL west was supposed to be Seattle’s right? Cue the Youtube clip of their manager freaking out after being swept by LA this past week. Suffice to say at least to this point the West has been a two team race between LA and Oakland. Each team has thrived with excellent young pitching and timely hitting. Heading into this weekend the Angels and Athletics had split their previous four meetings.

Last night Oakland ran into a familiar face they would probably prefer to avoid. John Lackey the Angels’ starter last night held a 12-3 lifetime record against Oakland. Last night he continued to wreak havoc on Athletics’ batters. In seven innings of work he struck out five batters and surrendered just four hits and one run. Lowering his season ERA to 1.70. At one point Lackey retired 15 straight batters. After the game Lackey tried to explain his success against Oakland, “It does seem a lot of them have been bigger games because we’ve been going against these guys for the division for a while, that may help a little bit.” Whatever the reason Lackey has made it quite clear over his first five starts of the 2008 season that he is healthy and back to his All Star form of 2007.

Maicer Izturis lead the game off with a home run the first of his career. Outside of Izturis’ homer the Angels were able to covert seven hits into three runs. Vladimir Guerrero and Jeff Mathis each drove in a run and the Angels lead 3-1 heading to the bottom of the eight inning. From there on in Jose Arredondo and Fransico Rodriguez each pitched an inning of shutout baseball with 14 pitches each. For Arredondo it was his eight consecutive inning of shutout ball, and K-Rod added another save to his league leading total of 25. With the win the Angels have won six straight and 13 of their last 17 games. The Angels also increased their record in games decided by two runs or less to 27-12 in 39 games. The win over the Athletics also increased the division lead to 4.5 games the biggest lead this season for L.A.

Today

Jon Garland (5-3, 3.99) @ Greg Smith (3-4, 3.56) - 6:05 PM PT

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