When Will the Angels Be Competitive Again?

Unless the Los Angeles Angels win their final six games and somehow figure out how to get Major League Baseball to overturn the results of 15 others, the club will finish below the .500 mark for the 11th consecutive season. This postseason will mark the 12th in a row to not feature any Halos, and it has been 17 years since the last time they won a game in the playoffs. The Arte Moreno era is ending, with Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke taking over the helm. And while Kroenke has a mixed record as an owner, a mixed record would qualify as progress after Moreno. New ownership tends to represent a new beginning for a team, setting up an important question: Can the Angels return to playing October baseball in the near future? After all, while the team doesn’t have the same revenue as the Dodgers, it’s still located in the second-most-populous metropolitan area in the United States; theoretically, they have the resources to speed up the process.

I like to joke about baseball’s Anna Karenina issue, because I think the novel’s first line — “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” — is an even more appropriate observation for baseball teams than it is for families. All great baseball teams look kind of the same, but every lousy team looks different. As bad teams go, the Angels have never been spectacularly lousy; if they fail to at least split their last six games, 2026 will be the first time ever that the franchise has lost 100 games. Still, this is a franchise that hasn’t figured out how to play .500 ball while employing the best player of the 2010s and the likely best player of the 2020s. They even had both of those guys on the team for a while! That the Angels have tended to hover just below mediocre rather than being hilariously awful is probably one of the reasons they’ve never truly blown things up and tried something radically different. The Angels never reached a point where they just threw stuff against the wall to see what sticks, something the White Sox finally accepted a few years ago, and that the Rockies appear to be starting to accept now.

If the Angels were to compete again soon, where would the talent come from? At first blush, there’s no amount of squinting that can make the Angels look like they have the foundation of a solid team. Mike Trout is still pretty good, but he’s a galaxy away from the player he once was, and as hard as it is to believe, he turned 35 last month. Zach Neto is solid, but if you listed the rest of the starting lineup and told me that I was looking at the starting lineup for the Durham Bulls or the Round Rock Express, I might believe you.

To get a more comprehensive look at the team’s offensive future, I ran updated WAR and OPS+ projections for the Angels over the next five seasons. I’ve included pretty much everyone on the roster or in the high minors, as well as those top prospects who are at a minor league level where projections are practical. That leaves out intriguing players like Johnny Slawinski, Joswa Lugo, and Yilver De Paula, but we’re also talking about non-elite prospects at the very low levels, so the median outlook for their projections is going to be fairly low. Still, it’s worth keeping in mind that there are at least a few additional lottery tickets out there for the Angels.

To make a quick read of the table easier, I’ve highlighted all of the 3-WAR projected seasons in red and all of the 2-WAR projected seasons in yellow. I’ve also blacked out the seasons where a player isn’t under team control, or where ZiPS is highly confident that they won’t be in baseball based on their performance. Oh, and I threw in Anthony Rendon for the sake of curiosity:

There… isn’t a lot of color in that chart. ZiPS doesn’t see anyone beyond Neto as a key part of a contending team. Trout is almost certainly going to become less and less of a contributor in coming seasons, and Denzer Guzman and Christian Moore look more like complementary options than guys threatening to attend a string of All-Star games (though Guzman does have some decent projected upside). Even given the very real possibility that ZiPS is underrating Arjun Nimmala, that’s still a stunning lack of offensive talent in the organization.

Let’s move on to the pitching, where things do look a bit better. There are no borderline star seasons projected, so I’ve highlighted all the 100 ERA+ seasons in yellow:

Reid Detmers and Walbert Ureña both project as very good mid-rotation starters, and the latter is a long way from free agency. There may be No Such Thing as a Pitching Prospect©, but ZiPS does think Tyler Bremner is likely to be at least solid. None of the rest of the arms look amazing, but the Angels do have an interesting bunch of plausible bullpen candidates, though nobody who would blow your mind. If the Angels get lucky with either Grayson Rodriguez or George Klassen, and Najer Victor figures out the significance of that white house-shaped pentagon next to the batter, it’s a pitching staff they could make quite decent with a few splashy upgrades.

Sum it all up, and ZiPS sees the Angels as a 70-win team in 2027, with only minor growth from there based on their in-organization options. To that end, the team’s player development absolutely has to improve; the Angels only barely moved out of the bottom third of our farm rankings on the last update, the first time they’ve done so since 2020. That’s particularly concerning for a team that hasn’t contended in more than a decade. Hopefully the team will move on from a draft philosophy that emphasizes high-floor/low-ceiling prospects who can be promoted to the majors very quickly.

As for their options beyond the organization, could the Angels contend with a spending spree next year? I get asked that question fairly regularly in my weekly chats, so at least someone is interested in the answer, or at least wants to trick me into writing about the Angels. Let’s give it a spin.

A contending Angels team needs a high-end starting pitcher, a veteran bulk arm, and probably three additional good relievers. Here’s one set of potential additions:

Most of the names here are interchangeable with other options, but you can’t really fake signing Tarik Skubal and have to go with the real thing. ZiPS estimates that doing so would make the Angels a 77-85 team, but also one that just added more than $80 million in salary to get there.

As for the offense, it needs a lot of work and there is only so much they can practically do, even in an ultra-aggressive buying frenzy. Assuming that Trout stays at DH, they certainly need a couple of outfielders, and there’s no Aaron Judge to sign. The corner infield spots aren’t the weakest on the roster, but Teruaki Sato is one of the best players (possibly) available, and I’d like a bit more certainty at second base if we’re doing full-on win-now mode:

You may have noted the problem I’m running into for the quick-fix route: There’s a hard limit on just how many difference-makers there are available in free agency. These four signings probably add another $80 million to the payroll, and once you throw in the player benefits, the Angels would have a luxury tax payroll creeping into the $300 million range. Their projection would only improve to 83-79, and while that would be the team’s best year in a decade, it’s a pretty brutal projection to intentionally pay $300 million for.

In the end, the Angels don’t appear to have enough in-house options to make buying their way into contention a real possibility. That means that the road ahead will be a lot harder, with them eating some awful seasons without any pretense of contending, trying some new things, and taking some chances, all of which the franchise has struggled with for the last decade. As it turns out, needing to replace about 20 players on your roster isn’t something you can do quickly. By the time the Angels are good again, we might be talking about the next lockout!