The 2008 Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim season was the 48th season for the franchise. The regular season ended with the Angels winning their seventh American League West division title and setting a franchise record for single-season wins. In the postseason, they were once again defeated by the Boston Red Sox in the American League Division Series, the same team that defeated them in the 2004 and 2007 ALDS, as well as the 1986 ALCS.
General manager Bill Stoneman retired at the end of the 2007 season and was replaced by relative newcomer Tony Reagins. Reagins quickly made two headline roster moves, trading shortstop Orlando Cabrera to the Chicago White Sox for starting pitcher Jon Garland, and signing free agent outfielder Torii Hunter. Partway through the season the Angels traded first baseman Casey Kotchman to the Atlanta Braves for Mark Teixeira.
On September 10, the Angels clinched the American League West division title, their seventh in franchise history, and became the earliest team to clinch the division in its history. Three days later, closing pitcher Francisco RodrÃguez broke the single-season save record with his 58th save.
Famous quotes containing the words los, angeles, angels and/or season:
“The freeway experience ... is the only secular communion Los Angeles has.... Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)
“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)
““Christ, the Lord is ris’n to Day,”
Sons of Men and Angels say,
Raise your Joys and Triumphs high,
Sing ye Heav’ns, and Earth reply.”
—Charles Wesley (1707–1788)
“The landscape was clothed in a mild and quiet light, in which the woods and fences checkered and partitioned it with new regularity, and rough and uneven fields stretched away with lawn-like smoothness to the horizon, and the clouds, finely distinct and picturesque, seemed a fit drapery to hang over fairyland. The world seemed decked for some holiday or prouder pageantry ... like a green lane into a country maze, at the season when fruit-trees are in blossom.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)