3 dream starting pitchers for the Angels to trade for this offseason

2) Dylan Cease

According to Bob Nightengale of USA Today, the White Sox are not shopping Dylan Cease but are listening to offers for their ace. The Angels and White Sox have connected on a big trade before (Lucas Giolito) and could easily do it again for another arm.

With Chicago primed to enter a full rebuild, this is the Angels chance to land a somewhat. controllable arm that can lead their rotation. The right-hander is under team control through the 2025 season, so the Halos would have one more guaranteed year with him than they would with Glasnow. This would definitely mean that Cease has more trade value, but he pitched poorly enough in 2023 to the point where maybe the Angels do have enough to land him. This is a dream, after all.

In 33 starts this season, Cease had a 4.58 ERA in 177 innings pitched. As discouraging as the year was for Cease, there are plenty of reasons to believe the 27-year-old will be just fine in 2024.

First, he's one year removed from finishing as the AL Cy Young runner-up to Justin Verlander. He has shown that he has clear Cy Young upside which is rare to find. Second, his strikeout numbers were still quite good. His K% dropped from 30.4% in 2022 to 27.9% this past season, but he was still in the 84th percentile in whiff rate and the 77th percentile in K-rate according to baseball savant.

Lastly, Cease had a 3.72 FIP and a 4.07 xERA which suggests he wasn't nearly as bad as his ERA indicates. Playing for a bad White Sox team that played poor defense behind him clearly played a huge role. He'll be harder to get with the extra year of control, but maybe this is the kind of deal the Angels dangle a player like Mickey Moniak who has a lot more team control in.

3) Mitch Keller

Mitch Keller isn't quite as proven as Dylan Cease, but he's a 27-year-old developing into the frontline starter that the Pirates hoped he'd be. His 4.21 ERA in 32 starts and 194.1 innings pitched this past season might not jump off the page, but Keller was another victim of poor circumstances behind him (3.80 FIP, 3.70 xFIP) and seems to only be getting better.

Keller was extremely inconsistent which is another thing that led to the inflated ERA. He had five starts this season in which he allowed six or more earned runs. He also had five starts this season in which he delivered at least seven shutout innings. He even threw a complete game shutout this season.

Keller went at least five innings allowing two runs or fewer in 19 of his 32 starts. In 17 of those starts he went at least six innings. Pretty much half the time Keller was giving his team 6+ innings of two earned runs or fewer. That's quite good. For reference, Shohei Ohtani didn't even do that in half of his starts in 2023. There are obvious things for him to improve on, but he showed real flashes.

The Pirates dangled Keller at the deadline but opted to keep him around. Like Cease, he's under team control through the 2025 season. With the Pirates often being too cheap to pay their own players, there's a chance they watch Keller walk for nothing if they don't trade him. Moving him now while they're still not close to winning would give them the best return. Again, I'm not sure the Angels realistically have enough to land a pitcher with more than one year of control, but he's someone they certainly should look into acquiring.