Where the health of a fish’s bones and mussels are the alpha and Omega-3s.
2025 Prognosis / If It All Goes Right/Wrong
Catch up on the pitchers, position players, and prospects here, here, and here.
The Angels are in a really awkward position. They’re still employing Mike Trout, a generational talent when he’s healthy, but their desperate attempts to bolster their big league roster through a short-sighted draft strategy over the last few years has left their farm system pretty barren. They failed to read the room when Shohei Ohtani had a foot out the door in 2023 and watching him leave in free agency without a playoff appearance to show for his time in Anaheim should have been a moment for serious introspection. Instead, the Angels doubled-down on their position and lost 99 games in 2024.
By bringing in guys like Jorge Soler, Yusei Kikuchi, Kenley Jansen, and Yoán Moncada, they’re continuing to act like a contender filling in a few gaps on their roster, but those moves have only meaningfully changed their pre-season projections by a couple of wins. Winning 75 games instead of 71 isn’t really much of an accomplishment when what they really need is a complete tear down. The organization is going to stay in this weird no man’s land as long as owner Arte Moreno continues to think this team is in win-now mode instead of embracing their failures and resetting the direction of the franchise.
2025 FanGraphs Depth Charts projections: 75.1-86.9, 5th in AL West, 9.4% playoff odds
2025 PECOTA projections: 74.3-87.7, 4th in AL West, 4.9% playoff odds
The Mariners’ pitching staff outclasses the Angels by more than five full wins and have an even larger margin at two key up-the-middle positions (catcher and center field). Granted, moving Mike Trout to right field just shifts some of that production to a different position but Julio Rodríguez would have been projected for more fWAR than Trout in center anyway. The Angels do have marginal advantages at three of the four infield positions and at designated hitter but their depth is so shallow that the Mariners hold the advantage when you look past the major league roster. —JM
If It All Goes Right
Think of your greatest enemy. Do they know you exist? Are they an active, targeted executor of malice towards you, or is their cruelty augmented by the fact that your daily affairs mean nothing and less to them? For the majority of their existence, the Angels have been in a one-sided relationship with consequence, one filled with envy and irony that’s led me to question whether anyone was watching the Rally Monkey’s back paws curl while it raised those signs with the front.
Until this year. This year, the chip on the shoulders of Anaheim’s dozens of reclamation projects and veteran stalwarts crashes into someone else’s storybook instead of shredding their own. A rotation anchored by Kikuchi, whose stellar conclusion to the year augured another All-Star appearance, was able to click. Reid Detmers emulated Kikuchi in style first, then substance as his punchouts finally came in sequence, while the collection of contact-managers thanked Christopher Lloyd and his seraphim fleet for their encore performance. They weren’t world-beaters, but with maturity beyond his years, Logan O’Hoppe coaxed the best out of a staff that only needed to keep its club close, knowing any lead was safe with its record-setting setup man and closer, the Cheese-Cutter combo of Ben Joyce’s cheddar and Kenley Jansen’s old reliable.
With almost any lead safe, the inexperience and inconsistency of the rest of the ‘pen was an issue the Halos could overcome, because through Him all things are possible. Him, of course, being the Divine Piscine, Mike Trout. Relegated to right field, Trout’s off-season of rehabilitation at last met with a more manageable defensive workload, allowing him to resettle into a Nelson Cruz-type role. No longer swiping bags or robbing gap-shots, Trout’s defensive coddling occasionally made the denizens of Orange County agitated, but 140 games for Trout for the first time since 2018 was the difference between another October at home and a bye through to the Divisional Round. Trout’s move down in the order to the three-hole was controversial from Ron Washington, but the veteran manager wanted to emphasize to his star the role to play: hit it over the fence so you can jog around the bags. Between Trout, Taylor Ward, Jorge Soler, and a long-last realized Jo Adell, the Angels had four sluggers with over 30 bombs, munching on ribbies as they sequenced things brilliantly to knock in their scrappy collection of veteran infielders.
The players who’ve left, or those still present but not participating, enemies in the division and around the sport, they might not notice or care that Anaheim’s 89-win season put them atop the melee in the AL West, the narrow victors in a year of extreme parity in the American League. But it meant everything to the Angels and their fans, fuel for a new generation of faith in the Halos. —JT
If it All Goes Wrong
With the exception of the pandemic season in 2020, the Angels have ranked in the top 10 among MLB teams for most injured players for the past decade per Spotrac’s injury tracker, and in the top three most injured teams in half of those years. With the stars-and-scrubs model they’ve employed for the better part of the decade, the Angels have been playing with hellfire given their injury track record. Younger players theoretically get hurt less, but the Angels have historically fielded injuries to both their older core (frequent IL fliers Trout and Rendon) and the under-25 crew (Shohei Ohtani, Logan O’Hoppe, and, most recently, Zach Neto). There’s too much luck and idiosyncrasies in the curious machine that is the human body to say with finality if a team is good or bad at preventing injury, but given all the other data coming out of the black box strapped into Arte Moreno’s private plane that is the Angels, it wouldn’t be at all surprising to see them again among the most injured teams in 2025, which could quickly sink any hopes of climbing out of the AL West’s cellar.
The other thing the Angels have to fear is what any rebuilding team–even if the Angels are adamant they’re not rebuilding–has to fear: the uncertainty of whether or not the young core they’ve invested in will evolve into impactful big-leaguers. The Angels’ insistence upon drafting MLB-adjacent players to prop up their aging core means they’ve outsourced most of the hard work of developing young players to their respective colleges, whether as a side effect or by design. Much of the Angels’ hopes rest on shortstop Zach Neto, whose shoulder couldn’t quite bear that burden, requiring off-season surgery, as did catcher Logan O’Hoppe the season before him. O’Hoppe returned to a plummet in his power; the Angels will hope for a rebound from him this season, and for no such similar fate to befall Neto, who had a breakout power season after a swing change despite modest hard-hit rates.
But the biggest thing that could go wrong for the Angels is the thing that has gone wrong, is going wrong, and will continue going wrong: their grasping, bumptious, blinkered, overly-tanned, underly-mustached, Robert Goulet-as-Scrooge cosplaying owner, Arte Moreno. Mariners fans have justifiable beef with their ownership, but at least Stanton and Co. allow the baseball people to make baseball decisions vs. Moreno’s meddling, miserly ways. Studying every aspect of the Angels, from the big-leagues pitchers and hitters to player development, reveals a chaotic organization that lacks a unifying philosophy; the leadership is not leading. The only reason Moreno doesn’t hear more calls for him to sell the team is there simply aren’t enough Angels fans left to make much noise. Until he hands over the reins to someone with vision, the Angels will remain where they are: neither in heaven nor hell, but in Arte Moreno’s purgatory dressed up as contention. —KP