In a race for a playoff spot, every edge matters. Yet all too often, for reasons that extend beyond a player’s statistics, managers and general managers fail to make the moves that could improve their teams, allowing subpar production to fester at the risk of smothering a club’s postseason hopes. In Baseball Prospectus’ 2007 book It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over, I compiled a historical All-Star squad of ignominy, identifying players at each position whose performances had dragged their teams down in tight races: the Replacement-Level Killers. I’ve revisited the concept numerous times at multiple outlets and have adapted it at FanGraphs in an expanded format since 2018.
When it comes to defining replacement level play, we needn’t hew too closely to exactitude. Any team that’s gotten less than 0.6 WAR from a position to this point — prorating to 1.0 over a full season — is considered fair game. Sometimes, acceptable or even above-average defense (which may depend upon which metric one uses) coupled with total ineptitude on offense is enough to flag a team. Sometimes a club may be well ahead of replacement level but has lost a key contributor to injury; sometimes the reverse is true, but the team hasn’t yet climbed above that first-cut threshold. As with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of hardcore pornography, I know replacement level when I see it. Read the rest of this entry »
A double-whammy of injuries and underperformance has hampered the Angels in their bid to make the playoffs before Shohei Ohtani hits free agency, but one bright spot has been the play of Mickey Moniak. The former number one pick of the 2016 draft looked like a bust when the Phillies included him as one of two outfielders in last year’s deadline acquisition of Noah Syndergaard, and his late-season cup of coffee in Anaheim didn’t exactly dispel that notion. But since his promotion in mid-May, he’s been one of the majors’ most productive hitters, producing a 170 wRC+ in 165 plate appearances.
Moniak sent the struggling Yankees reeling with a big night on Tuesday in Anaheim. In the first inning, he clubbed a two-run homer off Domingo Germán, and while he struck out in the third with the bases loaded, he followed Ohtani’s RBI triple with an RBI single in the fifth to cap the scoring at 5–1. He also added a single of Albert Abreu in the eighth, giving him three three-hit games in the first five of the second half and extending his hitting streak to 10 games. Read the rest of this entry »
The Angels started off Independence Day by announcing that Mike Trout had suffered a broken hamate bone in his left wrist and will miss at least the next four-to-eight weeks. That cuts short what had been his healthiest season since 2016; Trout had played in 81 of the team’s 87 games, and the costovertebral dysfunction in his back — something that’s going to remain a long-term issue — didn’t prevent him from playing center field daily. That wasn’t the only firework for the Angels, either; later that day, Anthony Rendon fouled a pitch off his lower leg, a painful enough blow that he needed help standing up and getting off the field. And if that weren’t enough for the fans in Orange County, Shohei Ohtani was pulled from his start with a then-undisclosed injury and walked off the field accompanied by a trainer — true horror movie material. His issue, at least, did not turn out to be serious, but it wasn’t the most festive holiday. Dropping the second of three games against the Padres, right after Juan Soto served a small but spicy helping of trash talk, removed any silver lining.
Angels announce that Mike Trout is going on the IL with a left hamate fracture.
That’s a massive blow for the Angels, who are already dealing with many injuries.
Rendon’s X-rays of his shin came back negative, so for now, his injury is being diagnosed as a shin contusion. It’s still possible he ends up on the Injured List, but it appears that he’s avoided a significant injury. Thankfully for the Angels, they have better depth at third base than just a few months ago after the low-key acquisitions of Eduardo Escobar and Mike Moustakas in recent weeks. Neither are likely to replace the production the Angels are hoping to see from Rendon, but the position will likely not be a disaster in his absence.
Ohtani’s injury is connected to a blister, believed to be the result of the treatment for a cracked fingernail that pushed his start back by a day. Blisters have been tied to pitchers missing significant amounts of playing time; Josh Beckett is a primary example. But if this is just due to Ohtani’s acrylic nail deteriorating over the course of the game, it doesn’t seem like anything concerning. He did, however, indicate that he won’t pitch in the All-Star Game, which stinks for viewers but is pretty small potatoes in the big picture. In any case, we basically already got the big All-Star-esque moment earlier this year, when Ohtani faced off against Trout with the WBC on the line. And even if Ohtani ends up missing a start with the Angels, there’s no problem with him continuing to hit.
But if injuries to Rendon and Ohtani aren’t big deals, the one to Trout most certainly is. The three-time MVP broke the hamate bone in his wrist while swinging at a Nick Martinez pitch in the eighth inning on Monday. While far from a career-affecting injury, it’s one that will keep him out of the lineup for one to two months. The Angels are heavily reliant on the production they get from their two megastars, so losing one of them for somewhere between a third and two-thirds of the remaining season is a particularly unwelcome sight. The team is right around .500 and just four games behind the Yankees for the last wild card spot, so we’re talking about a group with legitimate October aspirations. But the Angels aren’t alone; the Blue Jays, Mariners, Red Sox, and Guardians are all within two games of them in the standings, meaning every win has a lot of playoff leverage. Read the rest of this entry »
Last season, Shohei Ohtani had one of the greatest seasons in history that did not result in taking home an MVP trophy. His misfortune in 2022 was running into one of the best offensive campaigns that anyone living can remember, with Aaron Judge putting up a 207 wRC+ and 11.5 WAR without any known pitching skills to utilize. Most writers still don’t vote entirely or even primarily based on WAR-type metrics, so Judge setting a new American League single-season home run record, with 62, was also quite helpful. Fast forward to 2023, and Judge’s toe injury has basically ended any chance of him repeating his MVP feat, but Ohtani has been doing his best to ensure that even a healthy Judge would have had trouble doing so.
Ohtani’s never been a shabby hitter, with a .265/.364/.554 line, 146 wRC+, and 80 homers over the last two seasons. Those are star-level numbers, but not historic ones. This year is another matter entirely. He’s cranked his offense into overdrive and now stands at .306/.390/.670 with 31 homers as the Angels have played past the halfway point of the 2023 season. Over at Sports Illustrated, Emma Baccellieri made a solid argument that Ohtani’s June may have been the best month by an individual in major league history. He has crushed 10 homers in his last 16 games and now leads all of baseball in round-trippers, three more than Atlanta’s Matt Olson.
With a few exceptions — he’s not stealing 131 bases, and Chief Wilson can rest comfortably with his 36 triples — achievements of the past aren’t safe from Ohtani’s onslaught. And with the recent surge in his power numbers, he is now on a real approach pattern to eclipsing Judge’s AL home run record. This mark has been in Yankees pinstripes in one form or another since 1920, when Babe Ruth broke his own record that was earned wearing a Red Sox uniform.
So will Ohtani pass Judge? Well, I’ve got a projection system, and it would be a crime to not ask it. Read the rest of this entry »
The Angels did some bargain shopping over the weekend, adding veteran infielders Eduardo Escobar and Mike Moustakas to the roster from the Mets and Rockies, respectively. Escobar, who has triple-slashed a .254/.305/.432 line this year and was a part-timer in New York after the team turned to rookie Brett Baty as the starter at third base, was acquired for two pitching prospects, Coleman Crow and Landon Marceaux. Moustakas has performed adequately as a role player for the Rockies this year, splitting time between first and third and pinch-hitting, and fetched minor league pitcher Connor Van Scoyoc in return.
Assuming the Angels aren’t simply quickly acquiring third basemen from 2018 as part of some mad scavenger hunt, the urgency here reflects their desperate need for infielders. In most seasons, the preseason plan to have Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani and precisely nothing else go wrong with the other 24 players has gang aft a-gley by this point of the season, like most of the best laid plans of mice and men, despite Disney selling the Angels to Arte Moreno 20 years ago. Nobody writes a paean to a team with a .537 winning percentage, but this ordinary level of respectability, if the first half ended today, would represent the franchise’s best first-half winning percentage since the 2015 season. At 42–37, Los Angeheim stands just a game out for the last wild card spot, so now is pretty important.
“Now” is also a bit of a problem when it comes to the roster. While this may be the season the Angels finally write the proof to the hypothesis “.500 Team Plus Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout = Playoffs,” parts of the roster have crumbled in recent weeks. And while the lineup has scored 5.3 runs per game in June, more than 20% of that total came in Saturday night’s 25–1 humiliation of the Rockies; the Angels are at a decidedly meh 4.4 runs per game in recent weeks otherwise. The infield increasingly looks like a rickety structure that could collapse with a firm gust of wind. Jared Walsh, who looked in 2021 as if he could hold down the fort at his peak for three or four years, struggled in 2022 with thoracic outlet syndrome, and his return this year was poor enough that he was sent down to Triple-A Salt Lake. Read the rest of this entry »
There are two predominant fastball types in the majors these days: the four-seamer and the sinker. The cutter usually gets categorized as a fastball too, and for some pitchers, like Corbin Burnes and Kenley Jansen, it certainly is one. Then again, most pitchers use their cutter as a secondary or tertiary offering, and the average cutter comes in at 89 mph; that’s closer to the average changeup than the average four-seamer. The cutter defies simple classification. Then there’s the split-finger fastball, which is nothing more than a misnomer. It’s an offspeed pitch, no doubt about it, and therefore “splitter” is the more widely accepted label nowadays.
So, back to those two fastballs. The four-seamer is essentially the “throw it as hard as you can” ball; if you hear someone use the generic term “fastball” to describe a particular pitch, this is the one they’re talking about. In terms of grip, a four-seamer isn’t all that different from the way any other fielder throws the baseball. The sinker, on the other hand, is a more specialized weapon. As the name suggests, it has more movement than a four-seam fastball, and it’s more useful for inducing weak contact than blowing the ball past the opposing batter. Yet, modern pitchers have been taking that “throw it as hard as you can” approach with their sinkers as well. Over the past four seasons, the average sinker is only 0.6 mph slower than the average four-seamer.
Thus far in 2023, 52 starting pitchers have crossed the 50-inning threshold while using both a four-seam fastball and a sinker at least 3% of the time. Of those 52, 83% throw both pitches within 1 mph of one another. All but two throw both pitches within 2 mph of one another. As you might have guessed, I’m here to write about the two exceptions, the two starting pitchers who throw their four-seamer and sinker nearly 3 mph apart: Shohei Ohtani and Dean Kremer. Read the rest of this entry »
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Los Angeles Angels. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the third year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but I use that as a rule of thumb.
A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.
All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »
If he never played another game, Mike Trout would waltz into the Hall of Fame. With three MVP awards, 10 All-Star appearances, and the number five ranking among center fielders in JAWS — all complied in fewer than 1,500 games spread across 13 seasons — he’s already accomplished more than most enshrinees. Hell, he recently surpassed Ken Griffey Jr.’s 83.8 career bWAR, in over 1,200 fewer games (he did so in fWAR early last year). So far this season, however, Trout is off to one of the worst starts of his career, and it’s fair to wonder if we’re seeing the tail end of his time as one of the game’s elite players.
Trout, who’s two months shy of his 32nd birthday, had a big night in Anaheim on Wednesday against the Cubs. In the top of the fourth, he robbed Ian Happ of a home run, then followed up by homering off Jameson Taillon in the bottom of the frame, his 14th dinger of the season. He added to his highlight reel via back-to-back pitches in the seventh inning, making impressive running catches on flies off the bats of Miguel Amaya and Matt Mervis.
Shohei Ohtani had a weird night in Baltimore on Monday, at times spectacular and at times unsettling. As a hitter, he went 4-for-5 with a huge three-run homer and three runs scored in the Angels’ 9-5 win. As a pitcher, he matched a career high by serving up three homers and allowing five runs in seven innings, continuing a string of shaky outings. One can’t blame the guy for having some mixed emotions.
Ohtani the pitcher was not at his best, yielding a two-run homer to Adam Frazier in the second inning, erasing a 1-0 lead. He walked Jorge Mateo to lead off the second inning, then allowed a two-run homer to Anthony Santander, costing him a 3-2 lead. By the time he got around to giving up his third homer of the night, he at least had a 9-4 lead and the bases empty in the fifth inning when Cedric Mullins took him over the wall; he would retire seven of the eight batters he faced after that to end his night on the mound. Read the rest of this entry »
Logan O’Hoppe has been one of the bright spots of the Angels’ up-and-down season, but unfortunately, the 23-year-old rookie catcher may have played his last game in 2023. On Sunday, the team revealed that O’Hoppe will need surgery to repair the torn labrum in his left shoulder, an injury that is expected to sideline him for four to six months.
The 23-year-old backstop first injured the shoulder while swinging the bat last Monday in Boston, but he remained in the game and played the next three as well. “It felt fine after it popped back in, in Boston,” he told reporters on Sunday, describing what sounds like a subluxation, not unlike what Fernando Tatis Jr. frequently experienced before undergoing surgery last September. “I mean, you hit three or four balls over 100 [mph], you think you’re fine,” he added.
Alas, O’Hoppe reaggravated the injury while hitting a single in the ninth inning of Thursday night’s 9–3 loss at Yankee Stadium. He fell down in obvious pain after hitting a hot smash down the third base line, recovered to run to first base on what otherwise would have been a double, then exited for a pinch-runner.
The Angels put O’Hoppe on the injured list on Friday, and by Sunday his season was in jeopardy. Only after he undergoes surgery on Tuesday will the prognosis be more clear, though for the moment he and the Angels have some optimism that a return in late August or September will be possible. Read the rest of this entry »
