2022 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 a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Los Angeles Angels.

Batters

The good news: the Los Angeles Angels have Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen. The bad news: the Los Angeles Angels play a sport where you have to give almost as many shots to Luc Longley and Stacey King as Jordan and Pippen. The Angels are a very star-driven team, and if something terrible happens to a star or two, it’s going to be hard to eke out first place in a division with four plausible contenders. If you can ensure that Mike Trout, Shohei Ohtani, Anthony Rendon, and Noah Syndergaard all have full, healthy seasons, I think this is the team that can make the Astros sweat the most this summer. If not, I think the Angels’ playoff relevance will be on life support by the trade deadline. That is, assuming that Rob Manfred’s dystopian fever dream of every mediocre club getting a chance to knock off a 100-win team in the postseason by winning two of three games comes to pass.

What more can you really say about players like Trout and Ohtani at this point? They’re great! And some of the supporting cast ain’t half-bad either; ZiPS likes the team’s catching situation and thinks Jared Walsh is just fine as long as he’s in his prime years.

The problem is that what’s lousy about the team’s offense is really lousy. The depth chart graphic makes two-thirds of the outfield look all hunky-dory, but the truth is, it’s just Troutflation buttressing Brandon Marsh, who ZiPS is somewhat ambivalent about, and Justin Upton, who keeps starting for reasons the computer cannot comprehend. The shortstop combination is quite unimpressive as well, and while his 2021 performance in the upper minors turned his projection around, ZiPS doesn’t think Jo Adell is starting corner outfielder levels of good.

If the Angels want to do more than simply tour the country as Shohei Ohtani and His Merry Band, Featuring Mike Trout, they need to more aggressively address these positions than they did before the lockout. As blasphemous as this may sound, they also shouldn’t give unlimited rope to David Fletcher in 2022; he was awful last season after being far more swing-happy. He still made a ton of contact, but a lot of it was bad contact, pushing him closer to the Ozzie Guillen side of the spectrum than the Luis Castillo/Placido Polanco end of things. If he has a .600 OPS next May and is happily hitting unhittable pitches weakly into the dirt, I’d rather demote Fletch back to a utility role and see what Michael Stefanic can do.

Pitchers

The rotation could be respectable in 2022, something it definitely was not after Ohtani this past season. But that will require very healthy years from both Ohtani and Syndergaard, which shouldn’t be taken as a given at this point. Lose one or both of those guys for a significant stretch of time and the wheels come off fairly quickly, as the Angels aren’t blessed with a whole lot of “good-in-2022” depth, though ZiPS is actually reasonably optimistic about Reid Detmers, who performed admirably for a pitcher who was rushed through the minors very, very quickly in 2021.

Once you get past the names on the graphic and the struggling and injured Griffin Canning, any hope of adequate reinforcements fades quickly. ZiPS sees a lot of better-than-replacement-level talent out there but the team is short on names you really want starting for you in a pennant race. A lot of pitchers filtered through the Salt Lake Bees in 2021 as the Angels desperately sought cheap depth and most of them pitched terribly — Salt Lake didn’t have an ERA of six by sheer misfortune.

The rotation — and really, the whole team — looks like the expected result of an organization that will spend in big, short bursts but otherwise acts as if they’re in no particular hurry to build around an inner-circle Hall of Famer in his prime years. The Angels should never have started 2021 with the rotation they did, and if this is actually the group that begins the 2022 season, it will constitute a major failure of imagination.

ZiPS really likes Raisel Iglesias, Aaron Loup, and Mike Mayers in the ‘pen but is concerned about the depth afterward. It’s unfortunate that Chris Rodriguez will likely miss most of 2022 due to capsule surgery because the computer was getting fairly excited about the prospect of him on the team, at least as a reliever. The Angels could use a few upgrades here, but I’d still prioritize adding another arm in the rotation if I had to choose.

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 2022 due to injury, and players who were released in 2021. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a big band orchestra that only plays nu-metal versions of baroque cantatas, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.36, similar to the post-June substance-enforcement environment.

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 that 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 assuming that the designated hitter will continue in force in 2022.

ZiPS is agnostic about future playing time by design. For more information about ZiPS, please refer to this article, or get angry at Dan on Twitter.