ANAHEIM – Matt Shoemaker won 16 games and lost four in 2014. That is in the permanent record. You can argue about how important the W’s are these days, an argument as old as typewriters, but Shoemaker was the AL Rookie of the Year runner-up.
Since then, neither the Angels nor Shoemaker have been undisputed in anything.
A start-by-start analysis for Shoemaker looks like a seismograph. Bad, real good, real good, real bad, real bad. That’s all it took for Shoemaker to descend to Triple-A Salt Lake for one start (good), and then he returned five days after that to face the Cardinals (bad) and the Dodgers (so-so).