Our division preview series begins with a trip near the happiest place on earth.
2024 Record: 63-99
I want to welcome everybody to the wild AL West, a division oh-so-winnable for the best of best. Our season preview series will come to you in four parts for each club over the next few weeks. Each club will get a week, starting with the bottom of the 2024 table and working our way up. We’ll have pieces on the present and future of each club, with the first of these articles herein to focus on the pitching staff as we anticipate it, then the position players, then the farm systems. Lastly, we’ll have an overall prognosis for the club, as well as a projection of a miniature If It All Goes Right/Wrong for each club and how they stack up against the Mariners.
We begin today with the dregs of the division a year ago, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, Orange County, California, U.S.A., Esq., MGMT.
Unless otherwise stated, the embedded projections come from FanGraphs, who as always we appreciate and recommend you read and support.
Pitchers
2024 Team Pitching Statistics: 4.57/4.68 ERA/FIP, 10.6% K-BB%, 6.8 fWAR (29th)
Key Additions: LHP Yusei Kikuchi, RHP Kyle Hendricks, RHP Kenley Jansen, RHP Robert Stephenson
Key Departures: RHP Griffin Canning, LHP Matt Moore, LHP Patrick Sandoval
In spite of their last place finish a year ago, which was the worst season in franchise history by both total losses and winning percentage, the Halos reached down from heaven to bless a few new pitchers with wings. For nearly a decade, the touch of an Angel has been less cherubim and more Azrael on the pitching side of things.
This year’s club, however, features a new ace, as well as a longtime former ace in search of a rebound. Yusei Kikuchi’s career has been fascinating, but the veteran southpaw from Japan has finally hit his stride in the past couple campaigns. His third taste of free agency earned him a three-year deal with Anaheim, where he’ll look to maintain the command improvements he seemed to pin down at last after inconsistencies in both Seattle and Toronto. Far on the other end of the spectrum of the Japanese fireballer is The Professor, Kyle Hendricks, whose 11-year tenure as the rock of the Chicago Cubs finally expired this winter. Like Kikuchi, Hendricks is in his mid-30s, albeit on a low-cost deal that only guarantees a roster spot for the Dartmouth product for a few months. His ability to control the class of the NL Central disintegrated in 2024, but a fresh campus affords Hendricks a chance to teach fresh faces the lessons grown stale at The Friendly Confines.
The rest of the rotation are familiar faces with correspondingly familiar feats and flaws. Veteran LHP Tyler Anderson rounds out the elder millennials of the rotation, entering the final season of his three year contract with glee that he might win a fast pitch competition with a teammate once again despite his heater velo averaging a number beginning with eight. On theme, save for Kikuchi and returning uncertainty Reid Detmers, Anderson is part of a rotation that seems designed around making the opposition put the ball in play.
The danger of an Angelic ascension in 2025 rests heavily on a quartet of pitchers age 26 or younger. Detmers has 75 big league starts under his belt, yet much like Griffin Canning, who finally departed Orange County for the orange and blue of Queens, Detmers has been a frustratingly inconsistent performer due to both results and health issues. Kikuchi actually makes a lot of sense as a signing when you consider him as a mentor for Detmers in the school of “your stuff is really good, I promise eventually it gets better.” No pitcher in MLB with at least 80 innings in the bigs had a higher BABIP allowed (.357) than Detmers, while just three had a worse strand rate (62.9%) and six had a worse HR/FB% (17.1%). That’s just 0.2% better than the pitcher with the worst HR/FB% in MLB (min. 350 IP) since 2021, a Mr… Yusei Kikuchi.
Youngster Caden Dana debuted against Seattle a year ago and got shell-shocked a bit, as in classic Angels form a top prospect was blitzed up the minors. The now 21 year old is likely to begin in Triple-A Salt Lake barring injury, but his consistent handling of the high minors thus far indicates readiness to return. That leaves the other two youngsters in the gang, José Soriano and Jack Kochanowicz. Both flamethrowers sit in the 96-100 range with their sinkers, yet they are liable to lead the league in plate appearances ending in anything other than a strikeout. Expect grounders early and often, and at times this will lead to wriggling out of jams for both arms. But punchouts reign for a reason, namely that they minimize the impact of contact on the game. A defensively dubious legion awaits in The Big A, putting major pressure on these youngsters to be precise. —JT
One of the Angels’ big off-season moves was signing veteran closer Kenley Jansen, perhaps hoping they could trick unawares Dodgers fans into the Big A with a few well-chosen billboards around the LA area. The Angels plan for the veteran to shepherd young flamethrower Ben Joyce into the wilds of CloserLand, where Joyce, for all the otherworldly talent in his right arm, too often found himself lost among the cliffs of command in 2024. Watching the relationship between one of the game’s all-time greats and an ascendant great will give Angels fans an actual storyline to follow in 2025 – especially as the inevitable happens, and Jansen makes way for Joyce.
Beyond that, the bullpen is about what you know from the Angels, who have taken the approach of building their ‘pen like the meme of a guy holding a butterfly asking “is this an MLB reliever?” They’ve cycled through seemingly endless arms in the ‘pen, using a variety of strategies: they’ve tried drafting for it, including their famous Oops, All Pitchers! draft of 2021; they’ve scraped the waiver wire, setting up a home for journeymen pitchers; and they’ve gone for quantity over quality in trades. One of those quantity moves might work out, as Ryan Zeferjahn (acquired in the Luis Garcia trade) has wild command but truly tantalizing stuff. Another promising hurler is Robert Stephenson, who underwent Tommy John surgery a month into last year, which was the first of a three year deal based on a few (admittedly brilliant!) months in Tampa Bay against a lot of years of mediocrity. Honestly, though, the track record isn’t in the Halos’ favor (we remember ye well, Ty Buttrey). This is an organization that lacks a guiding philosophy in their pitching, and it’s nowhere more evident than in their constantly churning, meme-adjacent ‘pen. —KP
2025 FanGraphs Depth Charts projections: 4.36/4.39 ERA/FIP, 8.4-3.4 K/9-BB/9, 11.6 fWAR (25th)
For yet another year, the Angels project to have a pitching staff that cannot carry their club to the postseason. In the 11 years from 2014 – their last postseason appearance and penultimate season with a winning record, Anaheim’s pitching staff has only thrice out-produced its position players by fWAR – 2021, 2022, and 2024. Though you might interpret that as a trend in the right direction, the top five pitchers from that 2021 staff are no longer in the organization, and swingman José Suarez is the longest tenured member of this group. A year later and you’re once again only seeing Detmers and Suarez giving meaningful performances and still with the org. In the last decade, the pitching staff in the island of a sea of over 12,000 parking spots squandered the physical primes and underpaid early days of the sport’s two brightest stars – and Mariners fans know well the crushing weight of squandered stardom. It would take extraordinary breakouts and resurgences on the positional player side for the 2025 Angels staff to squander anything nearly as consequential.