What can surprise addition Nicky Lopez bring to the table for the Angels?

What a whirlwind the last 24 hours have been for the Angels! The team has seen a shocking release, cutting ties with former first-overall pick Mickey Moniak, allowing Ryan Johnson to make history as the 24th player to ever make his big-league debut without playing a single inning in the minors, and has made a surprising last-minute signing.

The addition of Nicky Lopez demonstrates just how crazy the few days in the lead-up to opening day can be. This is the time of year when roster cuts are happening, minor league free agents are opting out, and minor trades are made.

After weeks of dormancy, the baseball hot stove flares up one last time, and the player-movement merry-go-round goes into overdrive one last time before the regular season proceedings get underway.

In the Nicky Lopez signing, the Angels are adding a player who they believe fills a void on their roster, and in the process gives us a hint at how they view the strengths and weaknesses of the roster.

Nicky Lopez is an important Angels' addition for reasons other than what you may think

To understand the significance of the Nicky Lopez addition, one must first understand who he is as a player. Primarily a middle infielder by trade, Lopez can also play some at the hot corner and has 15 innings of experience in left field under his belt.

For his career, the 30-year-old owns a .248/.312/.314 line and has never hit more than 2 homers in a single season, despite getting near regular playing time earlier in his career with the Kansas City Royals.

The bat has never been the intriguing part of Lopez's game, though he does have some decent contact skills to go along with an acceptable 7.5% career walk rate. Instead, it's the glove that has been his calling card during his big-league tenure.

While he's mostly been a sub-1 fWAR player throughout his career, Lopez had one of the strangest seasons in 2021, where his offensive production was a career-best 104 wRC+, yet wasn't the primary driver of his value. which was worth a whopping 5.5 fWAR.

Instead of the bat, it was his mind-boggling defensive performance that drove most of that value. As a shortstop, he totaled a whopping 25 outs above average. In the years since, he's posted OAA numbers of 14 in 2022, 9 in 2023, and 5 in 2024 across all positions he's played, with only diminished playing time standing as a reason for the slight decline.

Simply put, Nicky Lopez is an otherworldly defensive player, and that tells us something about how the Angels view their starting rotation. The Halos employ a lot of pitch-to-contact starters who rely on the ground ball to get outs.

There were 57 qualified starting pitchers last year, and amongst them the median ground ball rate was the St. Louis Cardinals' Eric Fedde with a 42.1% mark. The Angels have a pair who are slightly above that, Yusei Kikuchi with a 42.6% rate and Kyle Hendricks who came in at 44.5%.

In addition to those two, Jose Soriano and Jack Kochanowicz, both of whom feature power-sinkers, were well-above the mark. Soriano posted a 59.7% ground ball rate, which would have ranked second to Houston's Framber Valdez if he had thrown enough innings to qualify. Kochanowicz's 57% mark wasn't far behind.

Only Tyler Anderson with a 37.4% ground ball rate in 2024, was significantly behind. The Angels recognized one of their rotation's strengths is keeping the ball on the ground, however, the infield defense with the likes of Luis Renigifo and Yoan Moncada, projected for big roles, had left something to be desired.

This isn't to say that Lopez will play a huge role, but his defensive ability is notable and should augment the starters' performance whenever he's in there. As an added bonus, he's a contact-heavy left-handed bat on a team that lacks options from the left side following Moniak's release.

By bringing in Lopez, the Angels are making it clear that they're trying to find an identity and build a cohesive and complementary unit where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. After being maligned for many years, the Angels are making smart baseball decisions that will pay dividends over time.

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