3 Angels players we can lower the bar for in 2024

The Los Angeles Angels are a team fans can lower the bar for entering the 2024 season. The Angels have been a team many have expected to make the playoffs year after year with Shohei Ohtani leading the way, but the team disappointed every single year he was with the team. Now a Dodger, it's hard to expect much from the Halos.

Perhaps the Angels can find a way to win a few more games if they stay healthier, but the playoffs seem very out of reach barring several big moves that we haven't seen yet.

Expectations for this team are at a different place than they were entering the 2023 season, and expectations for certain players who were supposed to play big roles last season but didn't have gone down too. We can safely lower the bar for these three players. Anything good from them is great, but it's hard to expect it.

1) Tyler Anderson

The Angels signed Tyler Anderson last offseason coming off a career year. The southpaw was an all-star for the Dodgers and seemed to have revitalized his career. Immediately after arriving in Anaheim, things went downhill for the journeyman.

Simply put, Anderson was one of the worst starting pitchers in all of baseball, posting a 5.43 ERA in 27 appearances (25 starts) and 141 innings pitched. The only positive we could say about him is he stayed mostly healthy, but even then he ended his season on the IL with several other Angels players.

Anderson's 2022 season was clearly an outlier, and expecting him to be anything close to that version of himself is just setting yourself up for disappointment. He can be better than one of the worst pitchers in the game, sure, but that's not where the bar was in 2023.

Angels fans did not expect the 33-year-old to be an all-star again, but they did expect Anderson to be an innings eater who can keep his team in games consistently. The southpaw simply did not do that. It's safe to expect him to look more like the fifth starter he was before his year with the Dodgers than anything close to how good he was with them in his outlier season.