LA Angels: What went wrong this season for the Halos

Unfortunately, the LA Angels disappointed us this year.

A team who many had winning the AL West ended up going 77-85.

Lots went wrong for this team, but it’s always important to break down the biggest blunders of one of the bigger disappointments in baseball this year.

The LA Angels were done as soon as they started facing the amount of injuries in their lineup.

When Mike Trout went down, the LA Angels were still in it. It was just one injury, and he was likely going to be back in six to eight weeks. Justin Upton ended up going crazy for a month, and we were still in contention.

Then, however, those six to eight weeks were up, and there was still no Trout in sight. Upton went down himself. That’s a lot of money not on the field, and two players the Angels were obviously counting on this season.

Anthony Rendon was still constantly finding himself on the IL. Eventually, he went down for good. Upton finally came back, but the injury was clearly still affecting him.

Then he needed to be shut down, and so did Trout. We finally had Alex Cobb back from injury, but couldn’t receive any luck at all when it came to the position players.

With all of these injuries constantly happening, Shohei Ohtani had to go four and a half months with no lineup protection. Even Dexter Fowler went down right away, and Max Stassi found himself on the IL often.

‘How did the Angels miss the playoffs with Shohei Ohtani on their team?’

Well, teams didn’t have to pitch to Ohtani. They just started walking him because nobody hitting behind him could hit.

They never gave him anything good to hit, so Ohtani tried to win games on his own. He admittedly began to chase a little bit, but anybody in his situation would have. He was the only one who had a chance to be the hero and win games for this squad.

Ohtani pitched out of his mind this season, but few others followed. We should not have needed to rely on the lineup this year, but had to because the pitching was a bit of a joke.

The Halos placed top nine in the league in highest ERA (4.68), highest walks per nine innings rate (3.75), and highest WHIP (1.38). The pitching didn’t get it done by any means, and we had to give a bunch of young prospects auditions for spots on this team’s staff down the road.

It was what we should do when we had a combination of underperformance and injuries to our pitching staff. That’s not going to win many games for any team, however.

Overall durability and struggles on the mound absolutely destroyed this team. One of those was 100% in the Halos’ control, and needs to be fixed immediately this offseason.