This has been a good week for the Dodgers. They went on the road, rolled into Cincinnati, and easily won the first two games. They lost last night (it seems John Ely’s luck is fading), but they still sit in first place.

So why am I concerned? The Angels. That’s right, the Angels. The Dodgers haven’t done well in inter-league play for the last few years, but with the Angels it is different. They play the Angels many times during the year, and they are two good teams, that seem to be well matched.

Theory though, never seems to match reality. I don’t know if it is the Mike Scioscia factor in that he just loves beating the Dodgers, or that the Angels just always have better pitching, but the Angels just always seem to take the series or the sweep.

The reason I’m concerned is that in my mind the Angels seem to serve as a litmus test of how the Dodgers are really doing. The Padres are the same way. In the last few years, if the Dodgers are going strong, they can beat the Padres and Angels. If there not doing very well, then they get beat, usually badly. Even when the Padres were horrible a few years ago, the Dodgers still couldn’t beat them.  Sure enough, the Dodgers didn’t finish as well in the standings.

So in my mind, if the Angels are a litmus test, they failed miserably this last weekend. Don’t get me wrong, the Angels and Dodgers may never face each other in the World Series, but still the Angels are a strong team, with good pitching, and a good representation of a high quality playoff team.  If they can’t beat them now, how will they beat anyone in the later rounds of the playoffs?

So are the Dodgers fine? Right now. Would I bet on them deep into the playoffs? Not right now. Not until they can beat the Angels.

We’ll see. I’ll take what I can get because they’re still better than the Giants…but I have some concerns.

Any thoughts? Do the Angels serve as a good litmus test of the overall team?

This entry was posted on Friday, June 18th, 2010 at 11:23 pm and is filed under 2010 Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.