The Angels’ Roster Would Be Solid If It Were Just A Few Years Ago

As of this writing, the Angels are the worst team in baseball…even worse than the Colorado Rockies. They are currently playing on a below-70-win pace. They won 72 last season, 63 the year before, and 73 two years before that. One thing in their favor, they have never lost 100 games in a season. So there’s that.

For a while there (2018-2023) they employed two of the greatest players to ever lace up their spikes. And yet, they still couldn’t do anything. And yet, they have averaged more than 2.5 million fans per year for the last four seasons, and are on pace for the same this year as well.

Prior to the season owner Arte Moreno cited an internal fan survey that said winning is not a top-five priority for the fanbase. And that may be why he doesn’t seem to care who he puts on the field, or how far past their sell-by date they may be.

On Episode 2490 of the Effectively Wild podcast, hosts Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley discussed how good the Angels could be with their current roster if it just were another year, or maybe even another decade.

Let’s take a look:

Vaughn Grissom has 211 plate appearances for the Angels this year, which is 55 more than his previous career high with Atlanta in 2022. That year he accrued 0.8 bWAR, also a career high.

Jorge Soler is essentially the Angels’ everyday designated hitter this season. He was the 2021 World Series MVP with the Atlanta Braves. And yet you would need to go all the way back to 2019 to find a year in which he had more than 1 bWAR (he had 3.5 for the Royals).

Josh Lowe has played 60 games for the Angels this year. He put up 3.7 bWAR for the Tampa Bay Rays in 2023.

Yoán Moncada has come to the plate 130 times for Anaheim this year. But we are seven years from 2019, when he had 5.1 bWAR for the Chicago White Sox.

In 2021, while playing for the Pirates and the Padres, Adam Frazier put up 4.0 bWAR with a 176 hits. This year has played in 41 games with the Angels and banged out 17 hits.

Travis d’Arnaud has received limited reps at catcher this year, which is good because we are four years removed from when he was 2.8 bWAR player with the Braves.

Jeimer Candelario had 3.6 bWAR for the Detroit Tigers in 2021 when he led the league with 42 doubles. This year he has gotten 20 plate appearances for the Angels.

Nick Madrigal was once a hot prospect in Chicago, with both the White Sox and the Cubs. He has never lived up to his promise as a hit-first middle infielder, but he did have a 111 OPS+ in 2021. This year he 12 hits in the 15 games he has played in SoCal.

Alek Manoah pitched in the All-Star Game in 2022 when he came in third in Cy Young voting. This year the Angels have given him five starts. He has 9.82 ERA.

In 2022, Jordan Romano pitched in 59 games for the Blue Jays, and ended the year with 2.9 bWAR. He had 2.2 the following season. The Angels have ran him out of the bullpen 11 times for a 10.13 ERA before releasing him.

Trey Mancini is an incredible feel-good story. He came back from colon cancer, thought about retiring, had a daughter and decided to give it another go. The Angels put him on a minor league contract and he made his way back up, getting three hits in his debut with the Halos. But you have to go back to 2019 to find his best season. That was when he hit 35 home runs, drove in 97, and accrued 3.7 bWAR for the Orioles. After five games with the Halos, he was released in late June.

If we wanted to continue this exercise into last season, we could keep it going. Kyle Hendricks pitched for the 2016 World Champion Cubs and he made 31 starts for the Angels in 2025. We also could add Kenley Jansen, JD Davis, Tim Anderson, Chris Taylor, Taylor Ward, Andrew Chaffin, and Nicky Lopez to this list of players who were once something, but weren’t anything when the Angels elected to employ them.

Moreno may be right. Fans may show up regardless of who takes the field in their crisp white jerseys. Mike Trout may be enough of a draw to keep the faithful happy. But at some point he will retire (or demand a trade); at some point the fans will grow tired of watching retread players trying to compete with teams that have an actual plan for winning. If and when that happens, the Angels will need to do more than look to the past if they want to have any hope for the future.

PLAY BALL!!