Orange County Register

Baseball analyst Jayson Stark had this to say about the Angels’ recent slump in his ‘Rumblings and Grumblings’ column at ESPN.com. (Deeper in the column is a note on what the market might bear for free agent first baseman Mark Teixeira this winter — 10 years, $230 million might be setting the bar too high.)

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Scouts who have watched the Angels lately keep reporting they’re in “a malaise,” or they’ve lost “that extra edge” that drove them to the biggest division lead in baseball. But if that’s true, who could blame them? They could let owner Arte Moreno bat cleanup at this point and still win the West.

What you have to wonder, though, is whether a 15-game lead could actually be dangerous for a team this good. So we decided to take a look.

We found eight teams in the wild-card era that entered September with division leads of 15 games or more. The bad news for the Angels is this: Only one of them — the 1998 Yankees — won the World Series. But here’s the good news: Half of those teams at least played in the World Series. And all told, those teams played 18 postseason series and won 11 of them.

So if the Angels use these final weeks purposefully — and Mike Scioscia does everything in life purposefully — this should be a good thing, not a bad thing.

The Angels are the only team in the AL with three starters (Joe Saunders, Ervin Santana and Jon Garland) in the top 15 in innings pitched. So this is an opportunity for those three, plus K-Rod, to recharge. And that’s a scary thought for the rest of the league.

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So the question is:

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