The Angels battle with the Rays and the Cubs for the best record in baseball, but they don’t battle anyone for the AL West division title. With a sixteen-game lead over the Rangers, the Angels are looking as sure as any team to make the playoffs. Here are the five top fantasy stories that have come out of this team this year.

1. Joe Saunders picks up a little magic. There’s a good chance he wasn’t even drafted in your league. But if you picked him up, and held on to him, your fantasy team took the full benefit of his 12-5, 3.07 ERA pre-all star break record (including his 5-0, 2.08 April). A look at his skill and luck metrics could make a textbook example of what luck can do for a pitcher, but he’s also used enough skill to show that it’s not all BABIP behind his good year.

Saunders has been able to pitch into ground balls 47.2% of the time this year, which is pretty good, and not far off from what he’s done throughout his career. Where he’s really shone is in giving up line drives–something he’s only done 14.8% of the time this year. That leads all starters in the major leagues, with Brandon Webb posting the next-lowest rate at 15.5% (and Webb complements that with a 66.3% ground ball rate). What’s disconcerting is that that 14.8% rate is a not inconsiderable span away from the 20.7% and 20.1% he posted the previous two years.

But anyway. Saunders’ ERA could regress this year, or it couldn’t (for what it’s worth, he hasn’t been as good since the all star break, giving up more ER and going winless in August). Either way, he has put together a great year that’s been welcome on any fantasy team, and even more so to the Angels–a 14-6, 3.37 ERA record from your fifth starter sure is nice.

2. Ervin Santana dispels some voodoo. The Santana of The West has long looked like he could develop into an excellent starter, as he’s improved his strikeout rate to a career-high 8.97 K/9 this year (and coupled it with a career-low 2.14 BB/9), but the rap against him has been that he’s been better at home and worse on the road. That truism reached epic, disastrous proportions last year, as we can see by this graph of his home-away ERA splits:

Last year his road ERA was literally off the chart–and this year it’s right in place with his home ERA (along with his home-road WHIP and home-road opponent average). It looks like we’ve seen a young pitcher sort out a big problem coming in to this year, and he’s very truly blossomed, pitching his second and third career complete games (one of them a shutout), and making a run for the AL strikeout title (his 176 is currently 9 behind A.J. Burnett’s leading 185).

3. K-Rod keeps the lights out. This is why people draft closers in early rounds. Francisco Rodriguez is having a historic year as the Angels’ closer, as he just notched his fiftieth save, which is fifteen more than the runner-up in saves this year, and only seven away from the single-season record. It’s not exactly a surprise, since K-Rod posted 45, 47, and 40 saves in the three years leading up to this one. His strikeout rate is actually a bit lower than both his career line and the three previous years, but it’s still an overpowering 10.08 K/9, so we can’t be too disappointed. Good luck prying him from the owner who has him in a K-eeper league. Ugh. Sorry.

4. Vlad switches to a cardboard bat. He still leads his team in average, home runs, RBI, and runs, even (Mark Teixeira has higher numbers for the season, but more on him in a second). But the problem is that Vlad’s average is .287, his HR total is 23, his RBI 78, and he’s scored 74 runs. That’s the lowest average he’s posted in his twelve-year career, and those counting stat totals are the lowest he has posted since his injury-shortened 2003 season with the Expos. I mean, it’s Vlad. We expect him to post something like last year’s .324/27 HR/125 RBI, or the year before’s .329/33/116, or the .317/32/108 the year before that. Come to think of it, he is thirty-two now, and he’s apparently been bothered by some knee problems, but I doubt anyone expected this much of a decline this year, when his .500 SLG is his lowest since 1997.

5. Mark Teixeira comes to town. Vlad’s decline made it all the more important that the Angels bring in a powerful hitter. Who better to acquire than the man who is becoming baseball’s roaming slug monster? It may seem suspect to put Teixeira as one of the top Angels stories, since he’s only played 24 games for them, but I want to make sure he gets mentioned somewhere, since we didn’t include him in Atlanta’s top five. With Teixeira on the team, the Angels have a new season leader in average, home runs, runs, and RBI, and with him on your fantasy team, you have a player who’s hitting better than Vlad, has more home runs than Manny Ramirez, and is in the top ten of RBI totals. Teix has established himself as a top-tier first baseman, and you can bet on him commanding a high price next year, for fantasy and major league owners.