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.

The Angels might have to come to grips with the idea that Jo Adell may never figure it out

Once upon a time, Jo Adell was MLB.com's No. 6 overall prospect, and Angels fans dreamed about an outfield consisting of superstar Mike Trout and the freakish potential of Adell joining forces with two-way mega-star Shohei Ohtani to form the core of the next great Angels' powerhouse.

Oh my, how that dream has been shattered over the years. Since that COVID-shortened season, Trout has suffered injury after injury, Ohtani bolted to the cross-town Dodgers, and the Angels are still waiting to see what they have in Adell, adjusting down their aspirations of future stardom to mere competence.

Today in 2025, the club is no closer to understanding who Adell will become as, or are they? Despite playing in parts of six seasons the 26-year-old Adell has racked up just 1189 plate appearances, approximately two seasons worth, as injuries and inconsistencies have impacted his ability to get regular playing time.

Standing 6-foot-2, 215 pounds, Adell is an athletic specimen with the requisite speed and power to become a five-tool player. In reality, he's shown very few tools on the baseball field as his baseball instincts lag far behind his physical gifts.

No matter how many adjustments to his leg kick or hand placement he makes, Adell simply hasn't been able to string together more than some brief flashes of production.

Offensively, his game in 2025 has taken a step back from an already alarming performance in 2024, as he's slashing just .204/.244/.381 on the season, watching his walk rate drop from 7.8% to a wholly unacceptable 4.2%.

Adell ranks in the 99th percentile in bat speed at 77.1 miles per hour, but that number doesn't mean very much given his lack of control of the strike zone. On the year, Adell ranks at the very bottom in chase rate, 35.5% (10th percentile), and whiff rate at 29.7% (18th percentile), which combined to unsurprisingly yield an underwhelming strikeout rate of 28.6% (12th percentile).

All the power in the world is meaningless if you consistently chase and whiff on pitches outside of the zone, and 2025's issues on these fronts are just more of the same from Adell.

The story in the field is similar. Despite above average speed and good arm strength, Adell typically grades out as a below average defensive outfielder who takes poor routes to balls and lacks the requisite instincts to make the best use of his athletic tools.

The longer these issues linger, the more clear it becomes that Adell shouldn't be a part of the Angels' future core. Mechanical adjustments will do nothing to fix instinctual issues like pitch recognition and plate discipline, and the body of work that proves Adell will never figure these things out in an Angels uniform is large and growing.

The Angels' hopes for Kyren Paris may be extinguished just as quickly as they were reignited

Kyren Paris entered this year's spring training as an afterthought. The 23-year-old infielder had gotten sporadic playing time in the majors the previous two seasons in the wake of a plethora of injuries to the big league club and failed to impress in the limited samples.

The youngster once had a lot of promise as a second-round pick out of high school back in 2019, and the early returns on his minor league career were impressive. Twitchy and athletic, he seemed to have the skills to make an impact on the big league level both at the dish and in the field.

Then 2024 happened. Paris struggled for the second season in a row in his limited big league action, but those struggles were also present in the minors. Through 60 games split between Double-A and Triple-A, he hit an anemic .167/.254/.278 while striking out an eye-popping 35.1% of the time.

To his credit, he sought out help in the offseason, linking up with Richard Schenck, reigning AL MVP Aaron Judge's personal hitting coach. Schenck rebuilt Paris's stance, opening him up and changing his hand placement, having him look like something of a mini-Judge in the batter's box.

As spring training rolled around, Paris started raising some eyebrows. Not only was he setting up like Judge in the box, he was crushing baseballs too. First, his performance was dismissed for being a small sample, then for coming late in games against inferior competition, but no matter what, Paris kept launching baseballs all spring, forcing his way onto the big league roster as a result.

That insane production continued into the regular season, at least for a couple of weeks; however, just as quickly as he arose from the ashes, he came crashing back down to earth. On the season, Paris owns a .198/.270/.405 line and a league-worst 41.5% K-rate among hitters with at least 100 plate appearances.

The issues plaguing Paris are the same as those that have stunted Jo Adell, and might be even more egregious. Paris's whiff rate of 45.5% is first percentile bad, and he does himself no favors with a 30.7% chase rate that's good for the 30th percentile.

There's more than just a few minor adjustments that Paris needs to make, and frankly this might be more than just mechanics. The situation surrounding him might not be as dire as that of Adell given his lack of big league experience, but these plate discipline problems existed in his game prior to the stance change.

Maybe the pre-spring training outlook on Paris's future was the correct one. What is for certain, if he doesn't change the narrative fast he'll soon prove himself not to be the building block of the future everyone hoped he could be.

Nolan Schanuel's failure to improve jeopardizes his status as a foundational Angels' piece

When the Angels drafted Nolan Schanuel 11th overall in the first round back in 2023 and promoted him to the bigs after just 22 minor league games, hopes were high that he'd be a major part of the club's future rise to contention.

Upon his promotion, Schanuel showed off some real skills, highlighted by an advanced feel for the strike zone that was well beyond his years, one which yielded a stellar 15.2% walk rate and a .402 on-base percentage over his first 132 major league plate appearances.

There were some concerns, though. Despite looking every much the part of a hulking, power-hitting first baseman, Schanuel hit just one homer and slugged .330 in his first taste of big league action.

That power outage continued in 2024, his first full season in the majors. In 147 games and over 607 plate appearances, he slashed .250/.343/.362 with 13 homers. The lack of power combined with some shoddy defense led him to produce just 0.7 fWAR.

During the offseason, Schanuel pledged to get stronger and improve his bat speed in order to hit for more power. Given the rest of his offensive profile, he didn't need to transform into a 30-homer masher to provide value, but did need to consistently drive the ball into the gaps and crush the occasional mistake.

Instead, it's been more of the same from Schanuel in 2025. He's slugging .357 through 41 games and his ISO sits at .098, worse than last year's .112 mark.

That bat speed improvement hasn't come, as his average of 68 miles per hour ranks in the sixth percentile. Unsurprisingly, his hard hit rate of 28.9% also ranks near the very bottom sitting in the eighth percentile, his barrel percentage of 3.3% is 12th percentile, and his average exit velocity of 88.0 miles per hour underwhelms at the 25th percentile.

All the while, Schanuel also continues to be a butcher in the field, with -5 defensive runs saved and -2 outs above average in just 348 innings of field work.

The combination of power production commiserate with that of a backup shortstop combined with horrendous defense paints the picture of a well below-average player. If Schanuel can not find his power stroke he's going to have to play gold glove caliber defense, despite first base not being a premium defensive position.

This still time for him to turn it around, however, the longer these issues linger the less and less likely it becomes that he ever finds a pathway to acceptable performance in these key facets. If he continues to stagnate, the Angels might have to face the real possibility that he isn't capable of being a contributor on a winning ball club.

More LA Angels News from Halo Hangout