2020 ZiPS Projections: Los Angeles Angels

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for eight years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Los Angeles Angels.

Batters

Any lineup with a healthy Mike Trout will be hard-pressed to be terrible, and the Angels are no exception. During his career, Los Angeles has never ranked worse than 20th in position player WAR. Trout once again gets the Mickey Mantle top comp (his comp usually alternates between Mantle and Willie Mays). There are a lot of corner outfielders on Trout’s comp list because you run out of marginally comparable center fielders fairly quickly, another fact that shouldn’t surprise anyone.

Adding Anthony Rendon is a huge deal, giving the team a legitimate superstar to pair with Trout for the time being. Even baking in Trout’s injury risk, ZiPS’ 11.8 combined WAR projection for Troutdon Angels would have ranked 20th among teams in 2019 and 23rd in each of the two prior seasons. Once you have Trout and Rendon, you can build an average-or-slightly-better offense by just finding a horde of below-average players who are legitimate major leaguers to put around them.

The Angels haven’t always met challenge, but the supporting cast going into 2020 is at least acceptable. Shohei Ohtani’s not an offensive superstar, but an above-average designated hitter with pitching upside is a star. Andrelton Simmons had a weak 2019, but he’s not that far past age-30 and was coming off two five-win seasons. The rest of the lineup projects as below-average, though I think ZiPS may be too pessimistic about David Fletcher, who is as good a contact hitter as nearly any non-Tony Gwynn player I can remember. Brian Goodwin is a nice story, but like ZiPS, I’m not sold on him as a real plus as a starter in a corner outfield position; his long-term role is probably that of a good fourth outfielder.

There’s kind of an unfinished feeling to this offense. It’s good the Angels went after the true superstars this winter, but I still have a hunch they need one more spare outfielder, and it’s hard to take the team seriously as a top-tier contender while they refuse to make a hard decision about Albert Pujols at first base. With these projections suggesting a team with win totals in the high 80s, the choice to play a replacement-level first baseman is definitely the type of decision-making failure that can cause a team to miss the playoffs.

Pitchers

Behold, the physical manifestation of “meh.” Baltimore’s pitching isn’t meh — it’s more of a Lovecraftian elder god or eldritch abomination. But the Angels are meh.

If everything goes according to plan, the pitching will be adequate, or at least not bad enough to prevent the team from making the playoffs. They could have five league-average starting pitchers plus Ohtani, and many teams won’t be able to field even close to six vaguely interesting starters. The problem is the lack of upside after Ohtani. There’s no one else in the rotation I can see having a serious breakout. It’s just a sea of rather boring middlingness. ZiPS isn’t being terribly pessimistic either; it’s projecting Dylan Bundy to regain some value outside of Camden Yards and has seen enough from Julio Teheran to feel confident he’ll beat his FIP yet again. The catch, of course, is that neither Bundy post-bounce back nor Teheran beating his peripherals by a half-run makes the rotation very exciting.

It’s a similar story when it comes to the bullpen, with ZiPS projecting most of the relievers to finish with an ERA+ north of 100 without anyone really stepping forward as a star.

It’s worth noting that ZiPS is finally sold on Hoby Milner, who I believe has a better projected ERA+ than any other pitcher signed to a minor-league contract, at least so far in the ZiPS rundowns. Milner’s major league tenure has been kind of iffy so far, and he’s primarily remembered at this point for being the pitcher who Gabe Kapler notoriously called from the pen without the benefit of warming up. Milner’s a tallish, scrawny lefty with an unimpressive fastball who gets as far as his slurve takes him. He’s assisted by a deceptive pitching motion — he’s a sidearmer who falls somewhere between the arm slots of Scott Saurbeck and Brad Ziegler. There’s no reason to like Milner from a scouting standpoint, but he did improve dramatically in 2019, striking out 13 batters a game while allowing fewer than two walks in the minors, significantly better numbers than his professional history at any level.

Overall, I’m disappointed the Angels couldn’t close a deal with a big name pitcher this winter. Bundy and Teheran are fine, and only one team could sign Gerrit Cole, but the Angels shouldn’t have let the Blue Jays land Hyun-Jin Ryu with just a four-year, $80 million contract.

There isn’t a lot of depth in this group and as in past seasons, if the Angels get bitten by the injury bug more often than their fair share, the pitching could unravel quickly.

Prospects

The projections think that Jo Adell should be starting right now, but it’s reasonable for the Angels to give him a bit more seasoning in the minors. Adell missed significant time last season due to leg injuries and he didn’t dominate in his month at Triple-A the way he torched the low minors. But if it’s May and he’s hitting .290/.350/.500 for Salt Lake and no call-up is imminent, I’ll start complaining. In terms of rest-of-career projections, ZiPS has Adell right around Aaron Judge, Christian Yelich, and Luis Robert, forecast to hit .270/.350/.500 with 30 homers a year in his prime.

A large part of the team’s farm system improvement comes from Adell; the methodology of THE BOARD has him worth 37% of the system’s total future value. ZiPS likes Brandon Marsh the next-best among Angel prospects, but doesn’t think he’ll hit for quite enough power to be a significant contributor if he’s in a corner outfield spot. The computer’s completely out of love with Jahmai Jones, to such a degree that even finally sticking at second base wouldn’t be quite enough to save him as a future starter.

Of the players who aren’t quite advanced enough to get a projection, Jeremiah Jackson strikes me as the one likely to get the best ZiPS debut, possibly as soon as next year. The same can’t be said for Kevin Maitan, who is looking like a bust; he didn’t get an official projection, but I have his translation for 2019 at .167/.212/.233, which is…yeah.

One pedantic note for 2020: for the WAR graphic, I’m using FanGraphs’ depth charts playing time, not the playing time ZiPS spits out, so there will be occasional differences in WAR totals.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned, players who will miss 2020 due to injury, and players who were released in 2019. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in June to form a ska-cowpunk Luxembourgian bubblegum pop-death metal band, he’s still listed here intentionally.

Both hitters and pitchers are ranked by projected zWAR — which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those which appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR.

ZiPS is agnostic about future playing time by design. For more information about ZiPS, please refer to this article.

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