Angels Baseball: Three steps to save the 2020 season

The Los Angeles Angels have dropped their first two series of the season but with over 10% of the year now gone, the team needs to right the ship quickly.

This is hardly the way the Los Angeles Angels wanted their season to start. Knowing that every game counted in the reduced schedule, no team wanted to get out of the gates with a 2-5 record.

The worst part is knowing that the Angels had a unique opportunity. The Astros have been bitten by the injury bug, as have the Rangers. The Mariners are in a rebuilding phase. With two playoff spots guaranteed per division, all the Halos needed to do was take care of business.

Sure, we all understood that it was an uphill battle. The Angels rotation lacks a front-line starter on paper, and we knew that would represent an obstacle when competing in the division. We knew there were players that needed to rebound offensively to make this work.

There was always the possibility that this team could play above potential. And in some cases, that has happened, but those efforts have been offset by others where the Angels have underachieved.

That all said, the Angels season hasn’t been completely lost. After all, we are talking about a seven-game stretch to start the season, and teams do slump. Despite the slow start, the Angels sit just 1.5 games out of first place, with the Astros coming to town this weekend.

However, the 60-game schedule represents the team’s biggest obstacle, with limited time to rebound. That means the Angels need to figure things out quickly so that they are not left behind.

As such, we opted to look at three areas where the Angels could immediately improve to possibly salvage their 2020 season.

3 steps to fix Angels season: Extends starting pitcher outings

Dylan Bundy got off to a rough start on Thursday, surrendering a three-run home run in the first inning, but he settled in nicely from there. Despite the tough first, Bundy would give up just one hit and walking a single hitter through his next five frames. He would finish with eight strikeouts on the night and left after throwing just 90 pitches over six innings of work.

While Bundy inevitably wore the loss on the night, the end results didn’t come as down to his efforts. Unfortunately, the final score was determined by another bullpen meltdown, but we’ll get to them in a minute.

Through seven games, Bundy’s two starts represent the only two on the season where an Angels starter has completed more than five innings. That doesn’t include Matt Andriese, who passed up his own start to throw 5.2 innings of mop-up after Shohei Ohtani melted down last Sunday.

Outside of Bundy, there are also question marks as to what pitchers could go further into games. Ohtani, who made his first start since 2018 after Tommy John surgery, may still be handled with kid gloves due to his long-term potential on the mound. The same could be said of Griffin Canning. Andrew Heaney was lifted after his stuff dipped following his second turn through the lineup on Wednesday, despite the fact that he was sitting at just 64 pitches. And then there is the pair of Patrick Sandoval and the soon-to-return Julio Teheran, both of whom were slowed by the coronavirus. The latter is expected to join the rotation next week but never had the opportunity to throw in a live game at summer camp.

There’s something to be said about the need to be cautious with the starters given the shortened summer camp. The rash of pitching injuries across the league has already shown the shortcomings of not properly stretching out workloads. However, the season length also limits the available time to amply build-up these guys as well. It’s a tough line to walk, but it may come down to a decision of weighing the value of contending in 2020 or protecting arms for 2021 and beyond.

If the Angels want to succeed in 2020, they have to shorten the bullpen game by stretching out their starters. Instead of relying on the middle relief corps to overachieve, challenge your starters to do so. That gives you a chance to line up your bullpen and get into the high leverage guys before those situations have already been blown.

3 steps to fix the Angels season: Get the middle of the lineup going

To be fair to the pitching struggles, some of the burdens of the slow start needs to fall on the lineup as well. While some players are already starting well (Mike Trout, David Fletcher, Brian Goodwin), others have been slow out of the gate.

That is perhaps no more obvious that the production the team has seen from the middle of the order.

Entering play on Thursday, Angels hitters in the three through six holes in the lineup have combined for a .171/.238/.360 batting line. While they have accounted for six home runs, 12 runs, and 14 RBI in that span, they’ve also fallen victim to the strikeout 27 times.

Outside of the strikeouts, some of those struggles can be chalked up to bad luck. While the Angels place seventh in the league with a 49.4% hard-hit rate from that group, they also sit dead last in BABIP, with a mark of .165 from those hitters. As such, they also rank 28th in wRC+ with 70 and last in wOBA with a .261.

While the Halos have seen a decent uptick in runs scored, more consistency from this part of the lineup will take some of that pressure off the pitching staff and put it on the Angels’ biggest strength.

The good news here is that there is only up to go in most of these regards, and the Angels have enough talent to get the offense rolling. Hitters like Justin Upton, Shohei Ohtani, Albert Pujols, and Anthony Rendon are not going to struggle for long. When they get hot, the Angels will too.