Angels Baseball: Three potential obstacles to the 2020 season

The Los Angeles Angels have an outside chance at making the postseason in 2020, but some obstacles could get in the way.

As the Los Angeles Angels put together their plan to build a contender in 2020, they knew they had to do something to not waste the best years of Mike Trout. The luxury of having the game’s best player is that you have something to build around. However, up until now, the team has been unable to perform that task.

The Angels last made the postseason in 2014, mostly due to a run of bad luck when it comes to keeping their pitching staff healthy. Team success is determined on the back of pitching, and the Halos have been proof positive of that fact with their recent failures.

So the team set out this winter to address its biggest need, the pitching staff. While the targeted big fish like Gerrit Cole, Zack Wheeler, and Stephen Strasburg, but came away empty-handed. Instead, they turned their attention to smaller additions and spent heavily on adding Anthony Rendon to the lineup.

Now, with a shortened season set to kick off on July 24th in Oakland, the Angels enter into an off circumstance where they have the offensive firepower to compete with the best teams in the league, but a question of whether they made enough moves with their pitching staff to make a difference.

If things break right, the Halos can find themselves in the playoff hunt. However, there are a few obstacles that could throw a wrench into the works. Let’s examine those a bit closer.

2020 Angels Season Obstacles: Pitching Health

As previously mentioned, the Angels have had a rough go of things when it comes to their pitching staff. Injuries have tanked the team’s hope over the last several years. In fact, the Halos have had exactly seven pitchers throw more than 170 innings in a season since 2014 and not since 2015 have two starters achieved the feat in the same season.

The lack of innings from their starting pitchers have made it awfully difficult for the Angels to make any noise in the division and is the biggest factor for why the team has failed to make a postseason appearance since 2014. That’s one reason the team was adamant to add starting pitching this winter.

Unfortunately, the Halos were unable to add a frontline starter, but they managed to still make some solid additions to their staff even if they lacked the appeal of Gerrit Cole or Stephen Strasburg.

In Julio Teheran, they found a consistent arm that has a proven track record of eating innings. Likewise, they plucked former top prospect, Dylan Bundy, from the Orioles in hopes of a reclamation project. Added to the plethora of depth arms and prospects looking to make the jump, the Angels profiled to have a solid amount of depth. The hiccup of depth though is that team’s ideally don’t want to use it.

As the Angels enter 2020, the team will feature a six-man rotation consisting of some mix of Teheran, Bundy, Shohei Ohtani, Andrew Heaney, Griffin Canning, and one of the said depth pieces in the sixth spot. The problem there is that Ohtani is returning from Tommy John surgery, Canning had elbow issues both at the end of last season and at the beginning of Spring Training, and Heaney has his own challenges with making starts.

All that adds up to the question of whether the Angels can keep their staff healthy over the course of the season, even in a shortened format. The benefit of a six-man rotation and the shortened season is that innings will be limited, but so too will be the ramp-up to get those arms ready.

If they can keep everyone healthy and solve some productivity issues with Bundy, the Angels could be dangerous. If not, there is always next season.

2020 Angels Season Obstacles: Will role players regress?

In addition to Anthony Rendon stepping into the fray and becoming a solid contributor for the Angels, the team will also need to lean heavily on the other pieces of the lineup. This holds especially true for those players that far exceeded their previous production a season ago.

The Angels got career years out of Tommy La Stella and Brian Goodwin in 2019. While La Stella only appeared in 80 games last season, he set career highs in HR (16), RBI (44), runs (49), and fWAR (2.0). On the other hand, Goodwin also had career bests in HR (17), RBI (47), runs (65), and fWAR (1.9).

It goes without saying that both players will figure prominently in the team’s plans for 2020. However, can both players maintain that production, or should the Angels expect the pair to regress to their career norms?

For instance, La Stella has never hit more than five home runs in a single season and only once prior produced a higher wRC+ than the 122 he put up in 2019. With that said, his baBIP of .282 was in line with his career norm of .291. However, he saw a huge uptick in his hard-hit rate, from a career average of 33% to 43.2% in 2019.

Goodwin doesn’t have the overall track record of La Stella to play off of, but he also saw an increase in hard-hit rate (37.8% vs 365). However, while his hard-hit rate increased, his home runs per flyballs hit actually dropped to a career-low 13.8%. He did see an increase in doubles, hitting 29 a season ago, but if that becomes a trend, the team can expect his home runs to drop.

The good news for the Angels is that the team does have other options available should either player regress. In particular, David Fletcher is able to take reps from La Stella and uber-prospect Jo Adell is looming over Goodwin’s shoulder and nearing his MLB debut. Ideally, the Angels would like to put that off a season, but if Goodwin struggles, Adell could be called up to step up.

Long story short, the Angels have an opportunity to be dangerous in 2020, but they’ll have to address these questions along the way to truly compete for a playoff spot.