Bruce Jenkins was at it again in the Chron today, writing about Billy Beane’s guts and “desperation” as he works to build a team to compete against the Los Angeles Angels, “baseball’s model of excellence, surpassing the Red Sox and leaving the Yankees in a little pile of dust.” I don’t know what criteria Jenkins uses to judge excellence, but he certainly doesn’t look at the numbers.

With a .622 winning percentage through Monday, the Angels are on a pace for 100 wins, the traditional mark for excellence in teams. They lead the American League West by 22 games with six games to go.

But the Angels, despite having baseball’s best record, aren’t nearly as good a team as they appear to be, because as strong as the Angels’ record is, it reflects too generously on a team that has had a great deal of luck. A dominating team normally has its share of dominating performances. The Angels don’t have that. Offensively, they rank in the bottom half of the league in runs scored per game. The offense is ninth in runs scored, 11th in on-base average, ninth in slugging percentage. The declining Vladimir Guerrero for most of the season had a stat line more similar to the declining Bobby Abreu than any current MVP candidate. Chone Figgins is having the worst season of his career. Mike Napoli has been hurt, leaving catching in the hands of non-hitter Jeff Mathis. Garrett Anderson has rebounded but is not the player he once was, and Gary Matthews has been an almost total loss.

The offense, then, has boiled down to the great Guerrero; Howie Kendrick’s imitation of a Robbie Cano season, interrupted by injury; Torii Hunter, who is having one of his best years without being a threat to any of the league leaders, and the recently-acquired Mark Texiera, who, admittedly, has been sizzling.

The pitching staff, taken as a whole, has been solidly above average, ranking fourth in earned-run average. Strikeouts are key to succeeding in the postseason — if David Ortiz doesn’t put the ball in play, it can’t go out of the park — and the Angels aren’t the best at getting those, ranking sixth in the league in that category. Ervin Santana and John Lackey can dominate at times, but Jered Weaver has been uneven, and Joe Saunders and Jon Garland are the kind of pitch-to-contact types who can really get undressed by a top offense.

Given the basically average overall performance of the Angels’ roster, if you didn’t know their record, there would be no reason to guess that they were on a 100-win pace. Their expected won-lost record, based on runs scored and allowed, is only 86-70, a pace for 89 wins. That’s not good enough to win the wild card in most seasons, and it strongly suggests that, as the old song goes, the Angels are building up to an awful letdown if they run into a team that’s actually as good as its record in October. Most teams do not exceed their projected records by eleven wins in the course of a season.

To their credit, the Teixeira trade shows that the Angels aren’t fooling themselves. They added a patient, powerful, middle-of-the-order bat they have been missing all season, a switch-hitter who also happens to be a Gold Glove defender at first base. Teixeira may have been worth a couple of extra wins to the Angels for the two months he was in the lineup beyond what Kotchman would have contributed (Kotchman is also a good fielder). That said, he doesn’t solve all of their problems — a slugging catcher or shortstop with a bit more pop would have more directly addressed their needs. Still, Teixeira was without a doubt the best player on the market, he cost them little — a first baseman who hadn’t developed into a star, and a Double-A righty middle reliever, baseball’s most fungible brand of prospect. The Angels still might not be the team they’ve pretended to be, but with the Texiera deal they did take a step closer to merging their record and their reality.

I’ll grant a few items of Jenkins’s argument. Arte Moreno is a great owner, one who understands that, more than marketing, winning is what puts fannies in the seats, and one who spends money to produce an organization that is first-class from top to bottom. I like rookie GM Tony Reagins’s moves so far; he is aggressive in a way Bill Stoneman never was. And Mike Sciocia is a great manager, one who gets the most out of his horses, and is perhaps the best in the majors in game-management. (I still cringe at memories of the job he did out-managing Dusty Baker in the 2002 World Series.) But Sciocia’s style – putting the ball in play and being very aggressive on the basepaths — is one that works great if the team is hitting .280, not so great below that. (The Angels are currently hitting .267.)

But Moreno, Reagins and Sciosia are only as great as the players they draft, sign and develop and it is here that the Athletics have more than a little hope of breaking the Angels’ “dominance.” Whether it’s old-school experts such as Baseball America or the more number-crunching analysis of Baseball Prospectus, both rank the Athletics organization as having the better prospects. It’s true that some of Oakland’s are quite young, with a maturity date of 2009 or later, but it’s also true that three of the pitchers in the Athletics’ high-A affiliate’s starting rotation are ranked among the top 100 prospects in the game. And the Athletics’ riches don’t end there.

So cheer up, Athletics fans!  Don’t let Bruce’s gloom get you down!