LA Angels Series Preview: Finding fresh air in Cleveland

Trade deadline pros and woes

The Angels are coming into this series fresh off a disappointing trade deadline that saw them acquire no starters to bolster their starting staff, but they did trade for Astros catcher Max Stassi who is noted as one of the better defensive catchers in the league. After spending money on offense first, and only, catchers like Jonathan Lucroy the Angels are feeling the burn from seeing their pitching staff struggle with little help from the backstop. The Angels catching unit has provided consistently terrible defense all year round, from run scoring passed balls to awful pitch framing and mediocre game calling, we’re seeing everything that can damage our chances at winning games in action.

Now, Max Stassi may not be the hottest trade target in the world, and he may not be someone who can directly bolster the starting staff, but what he can do is bring value to our starting staff from behind the plate. Stassi has worked with some of the best pitchers in all of baseball during his time with the Astros such as Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole. That experience isn’t something to scoff at, the knowledge he can bring to this starting staff is invaluable and may be what the Angels need to kick this staff into another gear. It may not kick the starters into “high gear” but what it can do is inch the starters into more viable form with an upgrade in game-calling, pitch framing, and overall defense.

This obviously isn’t the move everyone wanted to catapult the Angels pitching into an actual wild-card eligible team, but it does bolster the pitching staff in indirectly direct ways for a few years to come. The Angels still really need to upgrade the top end of their pitching staff, but that’s something that’s not going to happen until the offseason. For now we just have to survive through the season, through the false ups and painful downs, until we can see the Angels power up this staff.

Hopefully that’s what happens this offseason, because another offseason of the team standing pat or making mediocre signings that offer no improvements to the outlook of the squad will begin to legitimately drive fans away. But if that’s what it takes to get team owner Arte Moreno to finally open his wallet back up and spend big then maybe the awful stretch we’re going through and the fan base clamoring for a better team is exactly what we need.

Build Me Up (Buttercup)

Mike Trout disappeared when we needed him most and that might be the most awful part of this failed home stand. Against the Tigers Mike Trout has hit a pitiful .156/.348/.368 and during the Orioles series Trout himself left men on base in the double digits. It was an awful home stand all around, but the worst part was definitely watching Trout flail at the plate in high leverage situations time and time again. His swing has been going through ups and downs all season, but the slumps he’s been hitting this season may be the worst slumps he’s ever had in his entire career. The fact that he turns into a monster when he’s hot covers up the fact that he is one of the worst hitters on the team when he’s slumping.

Constant pop ups on pitches in the meat on the zone, constantly watching easy strikes go by, swings at non-competitive balls; we’re seeing a Mike Trout who is as far away from looking like Mike Trout as he’s ever been. He did have a home run against the Tigers yesterday, but aside from that he’s been almost non-existent in this lineup.

I don’t to make it out to seem like I’m blaming Trout for the failures of this recent home stand because we’ve seen how good this offense can be without Trout. It’s been all around team failures that have hurt the Angels, but Trout’s inability to contribute when needed most only makes it feel worse. Trout really needs to find his swing because the Angels are finally going up against teams that can actually play baseball. The Angels are the best team in baseball at making chumps look like Grade A talents, so one can only wonder how bad it’s going to get when a team that can actually play the game takes on the Halos.

It actually won’t be bad at all because the Angels are going to use this opportunity to build us up with a hot series against the Indians only to break us down later in the month. Classic Angels baseball.

Testing new waters

What else is there left to talk about? The team has recycled through this same narrative time and time again all season. It gets old very fast when the team flip-flops from “possible contender” to “way out of it” to “possible contender” over and over again. It gets extremely exhausting, especially from a writers standpoint, because you can only recycle the same script time and time again before it feels like there’s nothing left to talk about. The Angels starting staff isn’t going to be very good going into this series. We may see something interesting here or there if the team decides to give another young kid a shot like Patrick Sandoval, who is currently K/9 of 11 on the season.

I know Sandoval’s ERA doesn’t look the best in Triple-A (6.14), but in Minor League evaluations ERA isn’t the most productive stat to base evaluations off of. This is especially true in the PCL, which is a hitters league to the point of almost recreating the steroid era in baseball. I’m not going to try to sugarcoat things and act like his high ERA is a moot point, because it’s not at all, but his strikeout peripherals are still looking decent even in an over-the-top hitters league. He still needs to get a handle on his walks at the Triple A level, but aside from that point the Angels are hard up for starters and the season is practically over, so why not give him a go?

Maybe they don’t let Sandoval come in for a Major League look in this series, but at some point it would be good to see where he is at for the future development wise. Unless the Angels are protecting his value by leaving him in Triple-A, but if that’s the case they aren’t protecting too much value with his middling ERA. With the season essentially hitting the canvas and being down for the count the Angels would be apt to try whatever they can to help this starting staff survive 2019.

The Angels are in a point where they can start experimenting with the team, maybe not a ton of experimentation right now though since they are still numerically within a wild card spot. Something needs to be done to change up the formula that has been failing on this team all season, maybe not in hopes of reviving 2019, but with foresight in protecting their competitive chances in 2020 by seeing what factors may be in play for next season.

On that note maybe we’ll be seeing Jo Adell soon. If the Angels aren’t going to be competing that’s really the only thing that will keep fans coming to see the games. Plus, if Adell comes up and looks as good as he can be it will make the Angels off-season a little easier/harder. Easier in the sense that they’ll know they can roll into 2020 with Adell manning a corner outfield spot, yet harder in the sense that they’ll need to figure out where to make space for him given Justin Upton’s immovable (and awful) contract and the decision on Kole Calhoun’s option looming in the distance.

I’m not giving up on 2019 entirely, but at the same time it’s about that part of the season where we start moving past the failures of this year and look towards the positives coming in the near future.

Being an Angel fan is suffering