This spring, the Angels banned the use of cell phones in their clubhouse. I read that news with great interest, since like so many people these days, I have a love/hate relationship with the little screen in my pocket. I really do feel like looking at it less often could help me out. What better laboratory to test the wholesome effects of less screen time than a high stakes sport?
Then I thought a bit more about the situation and laughed. Could cell phone usage bring the Angels to the playoffs? Signing Shohei Ohtani for a pittance couldn’t bring the Angels to the playoffs. Drafting Mike Trout, one of the greatest players in the 21st century, and then twice signing him to contract extensions has only taken the team to October once in Trout’s career. Maybe this was the wrong team to pin my hopes to. But fast forward three weeks, and who sits atop the AL West but the Los Angeles Angels, in the first year where they banned cell phones. Coincidence?
I mean, yeah. Thanks for bearing with me for that extended introduction, but this isn’t an article about the evils of technology. Instead, it’s about what’s gone right in Anaheim so far this year, and whether that should change our view of the team going forward.
It starts, as it always does, with Trout. Trout’s greatest weakness isn’t any ability; it’s availability. In the last eight years, Trout has missed 487 games, nearly 60 per year on average. He’s batted 3,089 times in that span, nearly 2,000 plate appearances behind Francisco Lindor, who leads the majors. The absences have accelerated of late; from 2021 through 2024, Trout appeared in only 266 games (1,133 plate appearances). That’s less than half of the available games. It’s hard to build a team around a superstar if he isn’t there.
This year, Trout has played in every game. He’s not off to a scorching start – .196/.299/.536 thanks to a .132 BABIP – but I’m not particularly worried about his production. Even with that horrid luck on batted balls, he’s running a 125 wRC+, and his contact quality is still sterling. The big risk with Trout is that he won’t be there, and while that’s not the kind of risk you can solve in April, every day that passes with a healthy Trout is a boost to the team’s playoff chances — or failing that, at least their chances of respectability.
Okay, so step one is to keep Trout healthy. That has eluded the Angels of late. But even when Trout has been a full go, there’s another problem the team has long struggled with: surrounding Trout with complementary hitters. In 2024, six of the 10 Angels who batted most frequently accrued less than 1.0 WAR. That was the third season out of four where they achieved that dubious distinction. By way of comparison, the Royals had barely enough offense to make the playoffs even with Bobby Witt Jr. and a dominant pitching staff, and they had only three such players in their top 10 (though seven in their top 14, to be fair).
Put simply, you can’t make a good offense out of one superstar and a bunch of second-division types. Before the season, that’s what I thought of the Angels, and our Positional Power Rankings agreed. We projected them in the bottom third of the majors at first, second, and third base, as well as center field. You can’t be a playoff team like that. If the Angels are going to be good, it’ll be because our projections were too low on those positions.
So far, so good. Kyren Paris has been the most productive Angel this year, and he’s done it playing second base and center field. Neither of those is his natural position – he’s a shortstop by trade – but both by the eye test and the early defensive metrics, he’s comfortable in both spots, and perhaps even an asset at second. Is he going to keep hitting .368/.467/.842? No, of course not. But after an absolutely miserable 2024, he’s leaning back into what worked for him early in his minor league career: power over contact at an up-the-middle defensive spot.
It’s pretty clear that Paris won’t keep hitting for this much power – he leads the majors in isolated power, for example. It’s equally clear that he can’t keep up his current approach without striking out more; he’s making contact at a 61% clip, and a paltry 12.5% when he chases outside the strike zone. But the bar for success here isn’t “be the best hitter in baseball.” It’s “provide a little help,” and I feel a lot better about his chances of doing that than I did a month ago.
Let me put it this way: I was deeply skeptical of whether Paris could play at the major league level, period. He had a career 10 wRC+ in limited major league playing time and batted just .167/.254/.278 across two levels of the minors in an injury-plagued 2024. He worked with Aaron Judge’s hitting coach this offseason, though, and maybe a little tweak was all he needed. Or maybe hitting coaches are overrated and he just needed to believe in himself, and get healthy again. Maybe both are true, or neither. I’m trying not to react too much to three weeks of performance, but his Depth Charts projection for the rest of the season has increased by 12 points of wRC+. In other words, this is meaningful new information about Paris.
Paris isn’t the only young Angel standing out so far this year at a position that was supposed to be a liability. Nolan Schanuel has powered up, hitting the ball much harder than he did last year, while keeping his trademark contact skills. As in Paris’ case, I’m not reading too much into Schanuel’s (solid) batting line just yet; instead, I’m more interested in the constituent pieces. Swinging harder and making louder contact without a spike in swinging strike rate? That’s about as positive as “constituent pieces” get.
Add those two to the Angels hitters who already looked like part of the solution – Logan O’Hoppe, Taylor Ward, and Jorge Soler – and you’ve got a credible group with which to surround Trout. When Zach Neto returns from a rehab assignment, he’ll bolster that group even further. The Halos are hardly an offense without weak spots – Jo Adell is off to a rough start in center – but at least in the early going, this looks like a much improved offensive team compared to 2024. I don’t think that the Angels will be among the major league leaders in runs scored this year, but I can absolutely see a playoff-caliber offense here.
Or at least an offense good enough to send a team with good pitching to the playoffs, which brings me to the bummer part of this article. If you thought the offense had depth issues, the rotation and bullpen should absolutely terrify you. Yusei Kikuchi is the team’s nominal ace, but he’s off to a poor start, missing fewer bats than he ever has thanks to an across-the-board decline in stuff. Jack Kochanowicz still can’t strike anyone out. Tyler Anderson and Kyle Hendricks are a few years past being legitimate options for a playoff contender. The only bright side so far has been José Soriano, though to be fair he’s been quite the bright spot. Always a groundball machine, he’s missing more bats this year, with a rebuilt slider doing the heavy lifting.
Add it all up, and that’s something like two guys I’d be happy to see on my playoff team’s roster. Angels starters are 27th in baseball in WAR so far, and that’s with no injuries. This is the kind of rotation that only makes it to October if the offense and bullpen carry it. We’ve already covered the offense, which feels more like “finally solid” than a group that can elevate others. So, how about the bullpen then?
Well, here’s one way of looking at it: Angels relievers have combined for a 6.29 ERA and 5.63 FIP through 15 games. Kenley Jansen has been his usual solid self – six games, no earned runs, 30.4% strikeout rate – but after him, chaos reigns. Excluding position players pitching, 10 Angels have made relief appearances this year, and two of them have a FIP below 5.00: Jansen and new setup man Ryan Zeferjahn.
I say new setup man because Ben Joyce, who came into the season with that role, hit the IL with shoulder inflammation on Friday. That injury may have affected his performance – one strikeout in five games is not what you’d expect from a guy who throws 102. His absence has left a bullpen that was already light on established options scrambling.
The Angels tried a little bit of everything to assemble the options behind Jansen and Joyce. Zeferjahn was a trade throw-in, one of four minor leaguers the team got back in exchange for Luis García at last year’s deadline. He pairs good stuff and iffy command, a classic reliever profile, and looks like a competent middle relief option at the very least. Reid Detmers is trying to transition to the bullpen from the rotation, but I think he’ll return to starting should anyone get injured, and quite frankly, he seems to think that too; his velocity and pitch mix have hardly budged as a single-inning reliever compared to previous years of starting, and he’s missing fewer bats than he did in the past.
Not content with one marginal trade acquisition and one converted starter, the Angels have employed Ian Anderson in a combination of those two roles; they acquired him this spring in a change-of-scenery trade with the Braves that Michael Baumann described as “trading your pickle for your friend’s coleslaw.” Anderson has struggled mightily so far in his new role, though six innings is too small of a sample to say anything with much confidence. Of greater concern is the fact that he hadn’t pitched in the big leagues since 2022 and looked quite hittable in the minors last year.
You want waiver claims? Brock Burke got cashiered by the Rangers in the middle of last season before pitching 20 sublime innings for the Angels down the stretch. He has reverted to his Texas form early this year, struggling with walks, but he’s still surely one of the best options in this group. What about Rule 5 picks? Garrett McDaniels, whom the Angels plucked away from the cross-metro-area rival Dodgers this winter, has had a rocky start, walking five and hitting another in 5.1 innings of work. He’s a sinker/slider lefty trying to make the jump from A ball to the majors – realistically speaking, the team couldn’t have expected much out of him this year, but I feel safe in saying that he’s not going to be a breakout relief star the way that the occasional Rule 5 pick seems to be.
That leaves perhaps the most intriguing name of the group, Ryan Johnson, who was a second round draft pick last year and made it to the majors without appearing in a minor league game even once. Michael Rosen highlighted his funky repertoire this morning, and for someone who was most recently facing opponents in Conference USA, he’s had a reasonable transition to the professional ranks. But a top bullpen arm? We’re definitely not there yet.
Has this gotten rambly? Perhaps a little bit; trying to take stock of an entire team tends to end up that way. But I think that the general feel of each section matches how I feel about the team as a whole. Is this a playoff unit? I don’t think so. There are too many holes still, and I came away from my look at both the rotation and bullpen thinking “boy, this group needs some help from its counterpart.”
Given that the Angels lost 99 games last season, however, making the playoffs probably wasn’t a reasonable expectation. Is this a competent team? I think so. The Angels finished 28th in runs scored and 27th in runs allowed last year. I think that they’ll improve on both of those marks this year, and by quite a bit on the offensive side of the ledger. Is it because they banned cell phones? Probably not. But whatever the reason, I’ll never be mad about Mike Trout getting a better supporting cast. Perhaps it won’t be this year, but I’d love to see him get a few chances in the playoffs before all is said and done, and the early part of 2025 makes me more optimistic about the odds of that happening, if not this year than in the next few, than I’ve been in quite a while. Fix the offense one year, find some pitching the next. Sure, neither step sounds easy, but the first part of the plan seems to be going well so far.
