4 harsh truths the Angels may have to face regarding their young core's future

Going into the 2025 season, the Angels hoped to play competitive baseball while seeing growth and development from their young core. Perhaps even more important, the team needed to find answers as to who should and should not be part of the building efforts moving forward.

Getting answers and providing clarity is paramount, even if they aren't the answers the club would like to hear. Now, nearly two months into the season, some harsh truths may be staring them in the face.

Barring an immediate and sustained turnaround, the following four players will prove that they aren't the future building blocks the club had hoped for, indicating that the future is bleaker than the team had hoped.

Ben Joyce may never become the next great Angels reliever

When the team signed Kenley Jansen to pair with Ben Joyce in the late innings, it recalled a successful formula of years past, which allowed the club to develop dominant closers such as Troy Percival and Francisco Rodriguez.

Joyce had been sidelined with the ominous and mysterious diagnosis of "shoulder inflammation" since he landed on the 15-day injured list back on April 11th. He was later transferred to the 60-day IL after seeing no progress and being shut down a couple of times after attempting to play catch.

News broke on May 15 that he had undergone shoulder surgery and would be on the shelf for the rest of the season. Still, the exact nature of the surgery or the injury that necessitated it beyond inflammation is unknown.

This marks a long list of arm injuries for the 24-year-old flamethrower. While at the University of Tennessee, Joyce missed the 2021 season due to Tommy John surgery. With the Angels in 2023, he missed over two months with another elbow issue, ulnar neuritis, and finally, he was also shut down in September of 2024 with another bout of shoulder inflammation. His status for 2026's spring training is currently uncertain.

In his 34.2 innings of work last year, Joyce led all of baseball in average fastball velocity by a wide margin, coming in at 102.4 miles per hour, over a full mile per hour higher than runner-up Mason Miller's 101.1 mile per hour heater for the Athletics.

Unfortunately, human arms aren't designed to hurl projectiles upwards of 105 miles per hour as Joyce has done several times in the past, and the growing list of arm ailments he's bring a myriad of questions about his future to the forefront.

The Angels will have to find out if Joyce, who has logged just 98.2 professional innings (majors and minors included) after just one year and 32.1 innings in college, can ever hold up over the course of a big league season.

If he can, what will he look like? What adjustments may he have to make in order to stay healthy, and if he has to dial back the velocity in order to stay on the mound, will he even still be effective? These questions and more cast serious doubt as to whether or not the Halos can truly count on him as a foundational piece of the next contending Angels team.