Are the Angels for Real?
The Angels have so far kept their superstars and rotation healthy and found some average players to compliment Trout and Ohtani. But can they keep it up all season?
Memorial Day is associated with the word tradition. It is holiday first created by emancipated slaves to decorate the Graves of Union soldiers who had given their lives to restore American democracy from those who loved slavery more than. Democracy. As such, the tradition of remembering fallen soldiers stands to this day.
The holiday's placement at the end of May makes it "the tradition beginning of summer," at least to those who don't live in a place where hot temperatures start six weeks before that.
And in my suburban town in northern New Jersey, the Memorial Day celebration will—after two years of being cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic—return to its traditional format: a small parade of classic cars, scouts, and the high school marching band; a remembrance of the town’s residents who perished in the two world wars outside of my son’s elementary school, and a town picnic with hot dogs grilled by the local Kiwanis. It’s tradition in my town.
And there is another tradition for baseball fans on Memorial Day—it’s the first day you can look at the standings with a clean conscience. As my partner on the Go Go Astros podcast Andy Tomczeszyn says “Don’t look at the standings before Memorial Day.” Well, it’s Memorial Day, and as ESPN.com writes today in an article headlined “Memorial Day MLB Standings Check,” getting to the late May holiday “gives teams time to play enough games to add meaning to what we're seeing happen in every division.”
So let’s check the standings in the AL West, and what do you, our Astros are in first place. It’s where they have been the vast majority of days since they took over the division in the 2017 season. It’s a reminder that we continue to cheer for a really good baseball team, and that the golden age of Astros baseball is continuing.
But what is most interesting in the AL West standings is the team in 2nd place—the Los Angeles Angels. And if you go beyond wins and losses, the Angels are even better. Their run differential so far this season is +42, 5 runs better than the Astros. Is this a surprise?
If you look at recent history it is. The Angels have not had a winning record since 2015, and have only finished 2nd in the AL West once since then. It has been a team that has constantly and consistently disappointed.
But if you look at the talent on the team it is not a surprise. The Angels have employed the most singular baseball talent of his generation. In fact, they employ both of them. The Angels have long been defined by the question of “how is it possible to employ Mike Trout and have such a lousy team.” In recent years, they have been defined by the question of “how is it possible to employ Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani and have such a lousy team?” This may be the year that they break through and challenge for the playoff spot that has eluded the Angels since 2014.
The Angels have been felled over the past seven seasons by a combination of three factors:
Their superstars have not been healthy
Their starting rotation has had a large number of injuries
They have not gotten steady performances from their non-superstars in their lineup.
This combination of factors have kept the Angels from contending in the AL West in recent seasons. But this year, so far each of these factors has worked in the Angels’ favor, and has helped them into playoff position. I explore each factor below.
Their Superstars Have Been Healthy
Mike Trout has not played 140 games since 2018 and has not played 150 games since 2016. In 2021, a calf injury to Trout that seemed like it would keep him out of the lineup for 4-to-6 weeks was actually a season ender.
Ohtani had only pitched in 12 games in the majors before his breakout 2021 season. And his injuries—mostly suffered on the mound—had limited him to a career high of 425 plate appearances before his MVP season in 2021.
So far, both of the Angels superstars have been healthy in 2021. Trout has played in 44 of the Angels 49 games, and is second on the team with 185 plate appearances. A healthy Trout is a productive Trout—and he leads the American League in bWAR at 3.0.
Ohtani has played even more; his 48 games played and 206 plate appearances lead the Angels. He has taken the ball each time through the rotation, and is second on the squad with 44.1 innings pitched.
Ohtani is not having as good a season this year on the mound or at the plate at he did in 2021, but his combination of above average hitting and above average pitching makes him extremely valuable. His 2.0 bWAR is 13th best in the American League.
This goes without saying, the Angels are a better team when their best players are on the field.
The Starting Rotation Has Been Healthy
The 2021 Angels gave starts to 17 different pitchers, and their team leader in starts (Ohtani) had only 23. And that was better than the previous full season. In 2019, the Angels had 19 different pitchers start a game for them with a team high of 18 (Andrew Heaney).
Over the last few seasons, the Angels rotation has been an odd combination of promising pitchers who get hurt (e.g. Matt Shoemaker, Garrett Richards) and pitchers who were good in other spots, but not in Anaheim (e.g. Dylan Bundy) and guys on their last legs in baseball (e.g. Matt Harvey, Julio Teheran). It’s not been pretty.
But this season, the Angels rotation has been healthy and looks solid as a result. The Angels employ a six-man rotation due to the need to keep Ohtani more rested due to his extra duties, and five of their starters have taken the ball every time this season.
And of those five pitchers, four of them have ERA+’s over 100, which means they are pitching better than the average major league pitcher.
So far, the best Angels pitcher has been Patrick Sandoval. And he represents something relatively rare in recent Angels history—the identification and development of a quality young player. The Angels acquired Sandoval from the Astros in the first Martin Maldonado trade in 2018. He made his major league debut in 2019 for a Angels team desperate for any starting pitching. And they remained patient with Sandoval through growing pains in 2019 and 2020, until he blossomed into a promising pitcher in 2021, when he got injured. But Sandoval has picked up his growth as a pitcher this season, boasting a 2.70 ERA in 8 starts, thanks in large part to a really effective changeup that gets swings-and-misses against both right and left handed batters.
The Angels rotation has also been buoyed by two free agents they signed this off-season. The big ticket free agent they signed was Noah Syndergaard. This seemed a risky signing with Syndergaard have just come off missing two seasons after Tommy John surgery, but Syndergaard has been remarkably steady so far. He is a different pitcher than in his younger days with the Mets. His strikeout rate is down (6.4 K’s per nine), but he’s been limiting runs by inducing tons of grounders.
Michael Lorenzen was mostly a reliever with the Reds, but the Angels saw him as a starting pitcher, and he has delivered for them. He has a 3.19 ERA and a 1.06 WHIP in 8 starts.
The Angels rotation has been steady, even if it has not been spectacular. But this is the type of performance from the starting rotation that the Angels have been desperate for for years.
Steady, Floor Raising Play From The Rest of the Offense.
The third way in which this Angels team is better than previous versions is that is has a higher share of what I will call “floor raisers.” These are players who may not be all-stars, but who make useful contributions to a winning team.
Last September, I published a post that looked at the percentage of plate appearances that each team had given in 2021 to the players who were at 100 OPS+ or more. The Astros had given 77.3% of their plate appearances at that point to those types of players—2nd best in the majors. And the Angels—they had given only 32.2%, fifth worst in baseball.
I wrote “the Angels have the best player in the majors this season in Shohei Ohtani, but they have been hurt by their inability to find average to above average players to build depth beyond they core of superstars.”
This season, the Angels have much more more successful in playing average to above average players. This season, they have given 1208 of their 1644 plate appearances to hitters who have an OPS+ of 100 or more. Having a healthy Trout has helped, but so has the improvement of left fielder Brandon Marsh. He slashed .254/.317/.356 last season for an OPS of .673. This year, he has slashed .276/.329/.393/ for an OPS of .722. That’s moved him from an OPS+ of 84 in 2021 to an OPS+ of 110 this season.
The breakout star for the Angels this season has been right fielder Taylor Ward. Ward is slashing .359/.472/.709, and his on base and slugging percentage are leading the American League right now. Ward seemed to come out of nowhere, as he had a negative career WAR before his breakout season. It is unlikely Ward will keep up this pace, but he has already contributed 2.3 WAR this season, which would have been 4th on the entire team in 2021.
Even the Angels lesser offensive players are still contributing. Andrew Velasquez has taken over as the Angels starting shortstop this season. At the plate, he is not much, as he has both a on base percentage and slugging percentage below .300. But in the field, Velasquez is a star. He leads major league shortstops in Fielding Runs Above Average and in Defensive Runs Saved. He is 2nd in the majors in Outs Above Average. Driven by his glove, Velasquez has been worth 1.1 bWAR so far this season.
Should the Astros Worry?
The Angels have proven to be the 2nd best team in the AL West so far this season. They have avoided the foibles than their predecessors have endured. And in an American League where only 6 teams enter Memorial Day with a record over .500, they seem like they could claim one of the six playoff spots available this season.
So Astro fans are well advised to cast an eye to Angels games to see how they are doing. They are their most formidable challenger for the division crown. But the Astros remain a big favorite over the Angels.
There are several reasons for this. First, as Alden Gonzalez of ESPN writes in the Memorial Day standings article cited above “it's hard for me to fully trust [the Angels] for one simple reason: Everything can fall apart with a major injury or two.” A team reliant on a pair of superstars needs them both in the lineup.
The Angels have done a better job this year finding average to above average players to fill in their lineup, but an injury or two could send them back to what we saw last season when they were grasping for waiver wire castoffs of AAA guys who are not developing to pitch too many innings or take too many plate appearances. And it is unclear if any of their AAA starters could hold their own in the big leagues.
The Angels thus have to keep up their health throughout the season. They have not done that in previous seasons. So it’s encouraging for them to do it over two months of this season, but not a sign that they will definitely be able to keep this up into September.
The Astros have fewer of these issues. As a team with a broad array of star level, if not superstar level players, they are less vulnerable to an injury to a single player. It would hurt them, but less than an injury to a key member of the Angels. Plus the Astros have shown a better ability over the years than the Angels to develop their own players into quality big leaguers. The Astros are deeper across the board than the Angels.
And that is a big part of the reason why the computers that calculate playoff offs have the Astros as big favorites in the AL West. Baseball Prospectus’s Pecota projections give the Astros a 84.1% chance of winning the AL West. Fangraphs gives the Astros as 87.2% of winning the division. And Baseball Reference’s model has the most confidence in the Astros. They say there is a 93.2% chance the Astros win the division.
Astro fans can cast an eye toward Anaheim for two reasons. One is that any team with Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout on it is fun to watch. And second, they may challenge the Astros for the division title, if everything goes right in Anaheim. It probably won’t, but the fact that it might may may this a more interesting AL West race than it’s been in several years.