Should The Angels Have Re-Signed Dan Haren For 2013?

Mandatory Credit: Gary A. Vasquez-USA TODAY Sports

The title of this post is something Los Angeles Angels fans might be asking themselves in 2013. They hope they don’t. However, as the current starting rotation stands, there are still a lot of question marks that won’t be answered until well into next season.

Until then we have projections!

Over at Fangraphs, they have begun to release Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections. Today they dropped projections for the Washington Nationals where Dan Haren was projected to have a 2.9 WAR in 2013. A nice improvement from his disappointing 2012 campaign.

ZiPS also projected an ERA+ of 102 and a FIP of 3.50 for Haren during his 2013 campaign. All improvements from 2012 as well.

If these projections come to fruition, the Nationals would have a nice deal in Haren paying $4.4 million per win from him. Not bad considering the Angels are dropping $7.5 million in 2013 on Joe Blanton who, according to Fangraphs, has averaged 1.7 WAR the past four seasons.

Should we ask the question now or later?

Of course, ZiPS doesn’t take into consideration everything. For example, it doesn’t calculate Dan Haren’s bad back that has plagued him for two years now and landed him on the “day to day” list a couple times since 2011 as well as a 15-day DL stint in 2012.

This is also, interestingly, the second time Jerry Dipoto has rid Dan Haren from a team as a general manager. The first time being the trade that originally brought Haren to the Angels in the first place when Dipoto was filling in as GM for the Diamondbacks.

Which leads one to wonder if there is something about Dan Haren that Dipoto knows or sees that we aren’t catching.

Or maybe Haren is just a mean, mean man. Probably not. But maybe.

When the Los Angeles Angels ZiPS projections are released we’ll return to see how they stack up against players that left the Angels this off-season.