Archive for 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. Read the rest of this entry »

With Anthony Rendon now under contract in Anaheim, our depth charts project Angels position players for 30.0 WAR — fifth-best in the major leagues, and within a half-win of second place. Anaheim pitching, however, is projected for just 13.1 WAR (eighth-worst). No team projected to finish in the top half in WAR is expected to finish with so little of their total coming from their arms (the Twins, who’re projected for 14.9 pitching wins and 45.2 overall, are closest). Given that imbalance, it’s not entirely unexpected that the Angels would spend this latter part of their offseason trying to get arms wherever they can. This week, they got Matt Andriese in a trade with the Diamondbacks in exchange for minor league right-hander Jeremy Beasley.

Andriese, 30, has played in parts of the last five major-league seasons for the Rays and Diamondbacks but has yet to spend a full season at the major league level since making his professional debut in the San Diego system back in 2011. Last year, his first (and, as it turns out, only) season in Arizona, was also his first season pitching exclusively in relief. Andriese acquitted himself adequately in that role, posting an 85 FIP- and 107 ERA- over 70 2/3 innings, mostly ahead of Archie Bradley and Greg Holland. Perhaps most appealingly, he posted a 50.3% groundball rate in a season where the league average was just a touch below 43%. Read the rest of this entry »

A few days after the Minnesota Twins further emptied what was already a depleted bin of free agent starting pitcher options, one of the most pitching-starved teams in baseball opted to improve themselves behind the plate. ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported late Thursday that the Los Angeles Angels had reached an agreement with former Twins and Astros catcher Jason Castro, signing him to a one-year deal.

Catcher Jason Castro and the Los Angeles Angels are in agreement on a one-year, $6.85M deal, pending physical, sources tell ESPN. Castro rounds out an Angels lineup that added Anthony Rendon and should have top outfield prospect Jo Adell in the big leagues early this season.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) January 3, 2020

Castro will slot in as the starting catcher in Los Angeles, delivering a boon to a team that had the fourth-worst group of catchers in the majors last season in terms of WAR. Five backstops combined for -0.6 WAR, and the only one to finish the season above replacement level — Dustin Garneau — signed a minor league deal with the Astros this winter. Max Stassi, the presumptive starter behind the plate before the Castro signing, offers some of the best framing skills in baseball, but his wRC+ of 5 — not a typo — was the third-worst in the majors out of all players with at least 100 PAs last season. Stassi was league-average with the stick in 2018, so there is some hope he can bounce back in that area as a backup, but asking him to catch 100 games was never going to be a wise strategy for the Angels. Read the rest of this entry »

Since 2016, only one other team has lost more players to the Injured List than the Los Angeles Angels. They’ve cumulatively lost over 5,600 days to various injuries during the last four seasons, the second highest total in the majors behind the Padres. And a significant number of those injuries have decimated their pitching staff.

The pitchers listed above account for over 2,200 days lost to injury over the last four years, nearly 40% of the team’s cumulative total. And that doesn’t even take into account the relievers and other less established starters who also lost time to injuries, or Tyler Skaggs’ tragic passing earlier this year (the days listed above include his 2019 IL stint, not the season days following his death). The Angels’ trouble keeping their pitching staff healthy has been one of the major reasons they haven’t come close to sniffing the postseason since 2014 despite employing the best player in baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

Entering the 2019-20 offseason, Gerrit Cole and the Los Angeles Angels seemed as natural a fit as any potential pairing in the free agent market. Cole just finished a historically great season and was free agency at 29 years old in search of a record-setting contract. The Angels, meanwhile, had the least valuable rotation in baseball by WAR and are a large-market team that plays in the same area where Cole was born and raised (and where he played his college ball). In terms of need, in terms of finances, and in terms of mutual interest, matching the two up made perfect sense.

But it wasn’t to be. It was the New York Yankees who inked Cole to his gargantuan new contract late Tuesday night, with the two parties agreeing to a nine-year, $324 million deal. The Angels then made a hard pivot to the best remaining free agent, signing third baseman Anthony Rendon to a seven-year, $245-million contract. The benefits of adding Rendon are abundant — at perhaps the deepest position in the sport, Rendon might be the best, and adding a second superstar to a lineup that already includes Mike Trout will at the very least make this an exciting offense for years to come. Throw in top prospect Jo Adell, two-way stud Shohei Ohtani, and maybe even a bounce-back year for Justin Upton, and this offense could be quite scary. The signing of Rendon unambiguously makes the Angels oodles better, but it’s worth mentioning that it doesn’t address the biggest hole on the team. And if Los Angeles is going to get Trout back to the postseason in the near future, that hole is going to need filled quickly.

Read the rest of this entry »

Anthony Rendon is stoic on the field. Watching a Nationals game during his tenure, there was always opportunity to play a fun sub-game: watch Rendon for a grimace, or a sigh, or any indication that he was upset. You could go whole games without seeing it; he was simply out there working, staying in the moment, comfortable in himself and focused on the next pitch, the next ball to field, the next rally.

While it’s probably unfair to generalize a player’s on-field demeanor to their life, it’s a natural impulse. And so I can’t help picturing Rendon and his wife celebrating his new deal with a head nod, or perhaps a knowing smile, and a glass of wine on the patio. Staying in the moment; focusing on the next task at hand.

The next task is now teaming up with Mike Trout to win the World Series. The Angels signed Rendon to a seven-year, $245 million contract tonight, making him the third highest paid player in baseball on an annual basis, behind only Trout and Gerrit Cole (and tied with former teammate Stephen Strasburg, though without the deferral chicanery). The contract, first reported by Jon Heyman, is straightforward: seven years, $35 million each year, with a full no-trade clause and no opt outs. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the last unsigned stars available, third baseman Anthony Rendon found his new home Wednesday night, signing a seven-year, $245 million with the Los Angeles Angels as first reported by Jon Heyman. Rendon, who finished third in the National League MVP voting and made his first All-Star appearance in 2019, hit .319/.412/.598 for 7.0 WAR in 2019, all career bests. A key member of the World Champion Washington Nationals, Rendon’s departure leaves a giant hole in D.C.’s lineup.

That Rendon has achieved this much is a fantastic comeback story given the obstacles he faced early in his career. While it’s hard to characterize a first-rounder as a true underdog, Rendon had multiple ankle surgeries in college from injuries and partially broke his other ankle in his second professional game for the High-A Potomac Nationals in a non-contact injury. But since 2015’s knee and abdomen injuries, he’s managed to stay healthy and crucially, the injuries didn’t appear to thwart his development. Over the last four years, Rendon’s only averaged 15 missing games a year. That’s not Ripken-like, but it’s enough to put the injury worries on the back-burner.

Among position players, Rendon has been fourth in WAR over the last three years, behind only Mike Trout, Mookie Betts, and Christian Yelich. Read the rest of this entry »

The Giants made two acquisitions Tuesday evening, signing pitcher Kevin Gausman to a one-year contract and acquiring infielders Zack Cozart and Will Wilson from the Los Angeles Angels for future considerations.

These moves aren’t quite as earth-shattering as the Gerrit Cole signing, but both have short term upside for the Giants, which is consistent with the team’s goal of not completely gutting the roster while rebuilding.

Kevin Gausman is a long-term favorite of mine, and the $9 million the Giants will pay him in 2020 strikes me as a reasonable risk to take given the upside he represents. His stint with the Braves in 2019 is one he’d be happy to forget thanks to the 3-7, 6.19 ERA line he put up in 16 starts. It’s very easy to lose sight of the fact that his 4.20 FIP was nearly two runs better than his actual ERA, which was inflated by a .344 BABIP. Gausman’s strikeout rate had faded in recent years, dipping to a lackluster 7.3 K/9 in 2018, so his 9.6 K/9 in Atlanta was roughly a 30% improvement, which generally portends pleasant results rather than what actually happened.

When looking at Gausman’s 2019 hit data, the ZiPS projection system expects a BABIP of .309 rather than his actual .334. That’s still on the high side, but is enough to drop his batting average against in Atlanta from .290 to .252. Batters actually had the lowest exit velocity against Gausman since 2015 at 86.9 mph, which partially explains why even a struggling Gausman didn’t see his homer rate tick up. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I had some fun putting Austin Hedges into generic NL and AL lineups. It wouldn’t have been fun for those lineups, of course: Austin Hedges is a terrible hitter! He cost lineups something like 30 runs over a full season, and that’s with him replacing the worst hitter on the team.

So while the mental gymnastics of seeing how much damage Hedges would do was fun, it was a macabre kind of amusement. Look how bad your team could be at offense without being worse at baseball overall! That doesn’t really get the people going.

With this lineup approximating tool assembled, though, there’s no reason to limit its use to Hedges. Instead, let’s put Mike Trout in some lineups — all over lineups — and see if we can create some fun statlines.

I’ll be honest, this exercise started with me wondering what the Astros would look like with Trout. So to start, I plugged Trout into the Astros’ regular lineup. Their team now looks like this:

First of all, hoo boy. That’s almost too hot to print. I wasn’t really sure where to put everybody; I briefly considered having Altuve bat seventh, and it didn’t even look all that wrong, which should tell you everything you need to know about how good the lineup is. (I left Chirinos in as the catcher because I’m using 2019 season stats for this exercise, but that hardly matters to the results.) Read the rest of this entry »

The Royals aren’t known for their analytics department. They have one, of course. It’s not as though the organization is the Flintstones while everyone else is the Jetsons. That said, they’re still viewed as being old-school. In the eyes of many, scouting still rules the roost in Kansas City.

Just how true is that perception? According to the team’s longtime general manager, it’s far less accurate than it once was. Which isn’t to say that Dayton Moore has cast aside his roots in an attempt to become something he’s not. What he’s done is adapt to the changing times.

“My background is my background,” Moore told me at last month’s GM Meetings. “I’m not going to be ashamed of that. I grew up in a very traditional way. I grew up as a coach. I grew up as a scout. But the game has changed since I came to Kansas City in 2006.”

Moore remembers meeting with, among others, saber-smart baseball scribe Bradford Doolittle. That “created a pathway to us developing an understanding of analytics.” He went on to hire Michael Groopman as a baseball operations assistant in 2008, then promote him to Director of Baseball Operations/Analytics in 2015. In Moore’s words, Groopman “came in and built our analytics program.” Read the rest of this entry »