The A's were not good today in any way. Offensively, they chased a lot of bad pitches (yes, Ervin Santana had something to do with this) and down 4-0 in the 8th began the inning with each of 4 batters swinging at the first pitch. Following Cliff Pennington's 2B as the second batter of the game, 16 consecutive A's were retired. then when Oakland loaded the bases in the 6th, Seth Smith chased a slider in the dirt to strike out.

Defensively, Bartolo Colon missed a one-hopper back to the mound that would have ended the 3rd inning, instead opening the door for the Angels to score twice, then in the 5th deflected a ball that had he let it go would have been an easy 4-3 putout instead of an RBI infield hit. Cliff Pennington's attempt to keep a ball on the infield with a runner at 2B and two out was also an epic fail, and really nothing rolled quite the A's way defensively unless Josh Reddick was throwing -- Reddick did get his major league best 5th outfield assist today.

Meanwhile, Lady Luck apparently took out a lot of money in Vegas on today's game, which I am submitting to the league as an official "conflict of interest" complaint. (I expect Bud Selig to form a committee and issue a decision within 3-4 years.) Colon's line looks ugly, and here I'm not just referring to his waist. On paper, it's 6.2 IP, 12 hits and 4 ER, but in reality he was generally bounced and rolled to death -- Albert Pujols alone had 3 consecutive infield hits, and aside from Mike Trout's impressive HR to CF in the 7th, very few of the hits off of Colon were hit all that hard.

Really, it was just "one of those days" combined with Santana doing his usual number on the A's for 7.2 scoreless. As banged up as the A's are right now, a split in LAA and a split in TEX would make for a very respectable road trip, and then you come back home-ish to visit the Giants, where you draw Barry Zito, Ryan Vogelsang, and a struggling Tim Lincecum.

The hard part will be to get one in Texas. I'm a big Tommy Milone fan and even I don't relish the vision of him facing the Rangers' lineup in Arlington, but that's tomorrow's assignment with Brandon McCarthy going on Thursday. Steal one in Texas and it could be a pretty good week all told. The question is how this lineup will do it.