Division Preview: AL West

Yesterday, we kicked off our look at each division by going through the NL West. Today, we’ll do the AL version from the land of pitcher’s parks.

The Projected Standings

Team	Wins	Losses	Division	Wild Card	World Series
Mariners	88	74	45%	25%	9%
Angels	87	75	36%	27%	8%
Athletics	83	79	14%	21%	3%
Astros	78	84	5%	9%	1%
Rangers	73	89	1%	2%	0%

There are two pretty strong contenders at the top, two somewhat interesting teams hanging around the middle, and a likely also-ran. The top of the AL West is unlikely to be as strong this year as it was a year ago, but the low-end of the division should be somewhat better, and the race is open enough to remain interesting all year long. Let’s take a look at the teams.

Seattle Mariners

The top-end of the team’s roster has been good for a while, with the team’s big three of Felix Hernandez, Robinson Cano, and Kyle Seager producing nearly the same combined WAR last year as the Angels top three players; the Mariners finished 11 games back of first-place Anaheim because their supporting cast was not nearly as strong. This year, there are reasons to think that the secondary pieces could be better, with the team importing Nelson Cruz to try and fix their long-term DH problem, and expected maturation from young kids like Mike Zunino, Brad Miller, James Paxton, and Taijuan Walker. It’s a roster with young upside mixed in with some proven performers, which is why they come out as the slight favorites according to our preseason forecasts.

But while a healthy Mariners team would have a strong chance of making the postseason for the first time since 2001, few contenders are as susceptible to injury as Seattle, especially on the position player side of things. Their dual platoons in left and right field — which include a guy who has no MLB outfield experience — mean that the team is carrying no real backup center fielder, and it doesn’t take many dominoes to fall before Endy Chavez or James Jones are getting regular playing time in Safeco once again; two of the main reasons the Mariners fell short of the Wild Card a year ago. There’s no real in-house alternative if Logan Morrison is unproductive or injured, two of the words that most accurately describe his career to date. Mike Zunino’s primary backup has a career .202 wOBA, which comes in a small sample, but he put up a .290 wOBA in the PCL last year, so…

They have a bit more depth on the pitching side, especially in the bullpen, but are counting on both Paxton and Walker to set career highs in innings pitched, and J.A. Happ hasn’t exactly been an innings-eater in his career either. The team’s relievers were excellent last year, but could very well be worked significantly harder this year, and if Fernando Rodney ever decides to show his age, things might not go as well protecting leads as they did a year ago.

But if they avoid a couple of major injuries and get even reasonable performances from the young kids, this team should be good enough to make a real run at the division title. And if they get to the postseason, throwing Felix Hernandez every few days puts you in a pretty decent position.

Anaheim Angels

This isn’t quite Mike Trout and the seven dwarves, but as the Angels expensive supporting cast gets older and less productive, it’s starting to feel like it. Trout projects for the same overall value as the Angels three next best position players combined, and if he misses any substantial time, this team instantly becomes mediocre at best. This is the closest thing baseball has to a one man band, at least among teams with a real shot at the postseason.

It’s a testament to how good Trout is that a roster prominently featuring Johnny Giavotella — on purpose — is projected near the top of a decent division. But you probably don’t need too many more paragraphs extolling Trout’s virtues. He’s the best player in baseball and it’s not close, and being that good means that Mike Trout has the ability to cover a multitude of Arte Moreno’s sins.

The Angels success or failure will likely boil down to just how much production they can wring out of those past mistakes. There’s still enough contact and power in Albert Pujols‘ game to have a strong year. C.J. Wilson can still generate groundballs and an average number of strikeouts. Jered Weaver is still a pop-up machine. If these guys can push their remaining skills towards the top-end of their range, the Angels could be the division’s best team, but there’s plenty of room for all three to crater as well.

Last year’s team was successful because unheralded youngsters like Kole Calhoun and Matt Shoemaker turned in some big performances. The Angels will need a few more of those — perhaps from Giavotella or Andrew Heaney — if they’re going to win 90 games again, which is probably not something they should want to be counting on. But with Trout around, the rest of the roster only needs to be not-terrible to keep this team as a contender.

Oakland Athletics

You know the story by now; the A’s blew up their roster after a second-half collapse, trading away their best player and best pitcher to collect a half dozen young players and kick off another era of an A’s-style rebuild. Only because the A’s don’t like rebuilding, they also made a series of win-now moves, trading for Ben Zobrist, signing Billy Butler, and picking up Tyler Clippard to strengthen their bullpen. The result was an off-season that began as one thing and finished as another, leaving the A’s in position to make a Wild Card run if things go well but a roster that still skews towards the future.

Nothing in baseball is ever as simple as this, but the A’s season may very well boil down to three of the off-season’s imports: Brett Lawrie, Marcus Semien, and Jesse Hahn. The left side of their infield is essentially one big gamble, betting on youth and past minor league performance over recent major league struggles; if Lawrie and Semien live up to the promise they’ve shown as prospects, the A’s two big off-season moves will look far better than many of the critics suggested at the time. Of course, both Lawrie and Semien were traded by teams looking to win in 2015 because of the risks they carry, and if either fail to produce, the A’s don’t have many good alternatives.

Hahn, meanwhile, could be the type of under-the-radar hurler that the A’s love, but his health track record is a legitimate concern, and while the A’s have a lot of arms who could fill his spot if he goes down, they aren’t the kinds of arms that contenders usually give that many innings to. With rehabbing starters A.J. Griffin and Jarrod Parker potentially available at some point in the year, the team might have more pitching depth in the second half, but they’ll need the back-end of their rotation to hold up until then.

There’s contender-upside in Oakland, but so many high-variance gambles that it’s also pretty easy to see this all going wrong and the A’s being sellers in July. If some of these young guys with good minor league track records play up to those levels, the A’s could even make a run at the division, but a Wild Card remains more likely, with enough risk that a disastrous implosion is certainly within the realm of possibilities.

Houston Astros

After years of being baseball’s worst team, the Astros have finally graduated enough talent to be interesting, though not quite enough to actually be good just quite yet. They’ve stockpiled enough useful pieces to avoid the black holes that have dragged them down the last few years, but still lack the kind of frontline pieces to really make a serious playoff run. Jose Altuve, George Springer, and Dallas Keuchel are very nice pieces to have in place, but you want them to be your 5th-7th best players, not your top three.

How quickly the Astros can make the leap from respectable to contender will likely depend on how quickly they can develop a few true star players. Springer perhaps presents the most potential to take that leap, though the Astros will have to help him figure out how to make a bit more contact to reach a higher tier of performance. Beyond him, however, this roster is surprisingly low-upside for a rebuilder, with a lot of low-ceiling guys who likely top out as average or slightly better than average players.

When I look at this roster, I don’t really see the kind of fruits one would expect from years of losing on purpose. There are some decent pieces in place, but you have to squint really hard to see the core of a future contender, buying into almost everyone’s best-case outcome and assuming that at least a few of the prospects on the farm will develop into All-Stars sooner than later.

The Astros are no longer awful, but I’m not sure the pieces that have helped move them from embarrassing to okay are the same pieces that are capable of moving them from okay to good. The Astros are going to have to find a few great players. I’m not exactly sure where those guys are going to come from.

Texas Rangers

In some ways, baseball just hasn’t been fair to the Rangers the last few years. No one could have survived the onslaught of injuries that attacked Texas a year ago, and now that they’ve got a bunch of guys on the mend, down goes Yu Darvish. If health had broken differently for this organization, they’d probably still be a Wild Card contender, or at least hanging on to the hopes of contention before their core aged them into rebuilding mode. Instead, a tidal wave of injuries have pushed them from the contender’s circle, leaving an expensive and declining core without much of a real chance to win in the short-term.

Most teams in this position probably should be looking to kick off a rebuild, but it’s not quite as clear how to the Rangers should go about doing that. The Prince Fielder/Shin-Soo Choo contracts aren’t going anywhere, and they’re probably stuck with a bad deal with Elvis Andrus too. With these of future commitments on the books, it’s going to be difficult to afford a winning team unless the organization’s farm system starts churning out some very good players in short order.

So realistically, the Rangers probably should just sit tight for a bit, hoping that Fielder, Choo, and Andrus play well enough to reduce the subsidy the team will have to pay to move their contracts either this summer or next winter, and figuring out what their rebuilding horizon looks like once they know how easily it will be to remove those deals from their books. 2015 is probably going to be another ugly year in Arlington, but there’s enough talent in the farm system to think that the team’s fortunes could change within a few years. Crossing the bridge to get to that point could be pretty rough, though.