2025 ZiPS Projections: Los Angeles Angels

For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Los Angeles Angeles.

Batters

For the first month of the offseason, the Angels have been one of the most active teams, acquiring Jorge Soler and the apparently-still-in-baseball Scott Kingery in trades, claiming Ryan Noda off waivers, and signing Travis d’Arnaud, Yusei Kikuchi, Kyle Hendricks, and Kevin Newman in free agency. Doing this tightens up the team’s secondary talent and adds to its depth.

The larger question is what the Angels actually intend to do with these moves. These are the types of things that should have been done back in the days when they had a healthy Mike Trout or were getting 8-10 wins a year from Shohei Ohtani. From 2018 to 2023, all the Angels had to do to contend was build a 75-win team around Trout and Ohtani, something they never succeeded at doing. Now, it looks like they have that 75-win team, except Ohtani isn’t around anymore and Trout is aging and injury prone. (ZiPS is projecting Trout to have around 300 plate appearances in 2025.)

There are certainly some bright spots for the Angels on offense. Even half a season of Trout puts real wins on the board, and ZiPS is optimistic about shortstop Zach Neto and their top-tier tandem behind the plate, the Apostrophe Boyz. But elsewhere, it’s just a rather uninspiring and mostly veteran team without much in the way of short-term upside. Sure, Anthony Rendon was once a star, but that hasn’t been the case since 2019, and considering he’s now in his mid-30s, it’s unrealistic to believe that he’ll be one again.

It’s shocking how many years the Angels have been at or near the bottom of our farm system rankings. In the last three full team rankings (2024 Update, 2024, 2023 Update), the Angels ranked dead last; they haven’t been higher than 24th in any update since 2020. On top of their failure to add complementary talent from outside the organization during the Trout-Ohtani era, the Angels also failed to develop much from within.

That said, there have been a few notable exceptions, the latest being second baseman Christian Moore, the top position player in their farm system. Like Neto and to a lesser extent Nolan Schanuel, Moore was nearly ready for the majors when the Angels drafted him. Perhaps the best way for a team to overcome its development woes is to draft players who don’t have much more developing to do. ZiPS projects Moore to be advanced for a hitter with little professional experience, and his very rudimentary defensive numbers in the minors were sound. But it’ll take more than pulling a quick two-WAR guy out of college every year to get this farm (and team) back on track.

Pitchers

Signing Kikuchi is a plus, though ZiPS isn’t yet fully on board with what he did with the Astros. (Steamer is a bit more optimistic.) Still, a contending team would ideally see Kikuchi as a no. 2 or a solid no. 3 starter rather than at the top of the rotation, which is where he is expected to slide in with the Angels. ZiPS is underwhelmed by Tyler Anderson – many of the this-time-is-different guys tend not to be so different after all – and sees middling performances from José Soriano and Reid Detmers. Honestly, looking at this rotation, I think I’d be much happier, if I were an Angels fan, to have Griffin Canning on the roster rather than Soler. The non-tendered Patrick Sandoval is out until late 2025 due to Tommy John surgery, so his surprisingly optimistic projection wouldn’t have helped the Angels in the short term.

Ben Joyce and Brock Burke get solid projections out of the bullpen, and while a lot of the pitchers expected to be in their bullpen are projected to have ERAs over four, most of them have significant starter experience recently, which fattens up that ERA projection a bit. Once you project them solely as relievers, Hans Crouse, José Suarez, Davis Daniel, and Chase Silseth all see their projected ERA/FIP numbers drop down into the threes. Silseth in particular gets an optimistic relief projection at a 3.41 ERA.

ZiPS doesn’t expect the Angels to have many pitching reinforcements in the minors, at least not ones who’ll be available immediately. For example, ZiPS projects top prospect Caden Dana to be more of a longer-term play, and it sees his low Double-A homer total as a bit fluky. (Also, am I the only one who has zero recollection of Johnny Cueto’s two starts with the Angels last year? I had to do a double-take when ZiPS placed him with them.)

The Angels were probably a better team than their 63-99 record in 2024, a season in which little went right for them. But even with their November moves, this doesn’t look like anything more than a 70- to 75-win team. If their goal is to avoid the AL West basement in 2025, the Angels are in pretty good shape. But for anything meaningful? Blech.

This is an organization that needs a specific, realistic direction and coherent roster management pushing the team in that direction, and I’m just not seeing it here.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time. The final team projections may differ considerably from our Depth Chart playing time.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2025 due to injury, and players who were released in 2024. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Norwegian Ukulele Dixieland Jazz band that only covers songs by The Smiths, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.11.

Hitters are ranked by 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. It is important to remember that ZiPS is agnostic about playing time, and has no information about, for example, how quickly a team will call up a prospect or what veteran has fallen into disfavor.

As always, incorrect projections are either caused by misinformation, a non-pragmatic reality, or by the skillful sabotage of our friend and former editor. You can, however, still get mad at me on Twitter or on BlueSky.