Zach Neto needs more than just a Pokémon card luck to turn his season with the Angels around

Overall, it’s been a pretty disappointing, if not all that unexpected, start to the 2026 season for the Los Angeles Angels. The team is already well underwater, and while there have been bright spots like Mike Trout’s resurgence and José Soriano looking like he could win a Cy Young, shortstop Zach Neto has been a disappointment.

The 25-year-old is hitting .221/.335/.409 with six home runs and 18 runs batted in. His OPS is .744, so the overall numbers aren’t atrocious by any stretch, but the Angels had to be hoping he’d take a step forward towards the superstar echelon.

He had been really struggling lately, though, and it seems Trout was able to help Neto break out of his funk with…Pokémon cards? Hey, whatever works. Before a game a few nights ago, Trout and Neto opened a pack of cards, and Neto apparently got a rare Charizard card. Trout predicted that the box of cards would bring them both home runs, and that’s exactly what happened as they both went deep in that game.

Zach Neto's Pokémon luck needs to translate to key weaknesses

Baseball players are as superstitious a bunch as they come, so don’t be surprised if those two keep on opening packs of Pokémon cards before games going forward.

While it’s a fun story for Neto, it may take more than Pikachus and Charmanders to get him to cut down on his strikeout rate. Neto has struck out 55 times in 149 at-bats. That’s nearly a third of the time for the non-math majors out there. He’s in the top five of MLB when it comes to strikeouts, and while he’s always been a guy who strikes out quite a bit (149 in 2025 and 140 in 2024), he’s going to have to cut down on them if he wants more consistent results at the plate.

That’s not the only major issue. He’s also struggling against non-fastballs. While he has a .262 batting average and .538 slugging percentage against the fastball, he is hitting just .206 with a .353 slugging percentage against breaking balls and is hitting a paltry .125 against offspeed pitches.

That provides a pretty clear blueprint for opposing pitchers against Neto: throw him the soft stuff and make him prove that he can hit it. He hit .242 and .224 against breaking balls and offspeed pitches last season, although his expected batting average suggests he got a little lucky when it came to hitting the soft stuff.

Neto is still a solid player, no doubt. The Pokémon cards may have given him the psychological boost he needed to get things turned around, but now he has to clean up some very tangible things at the plate if he wants to take the next step in his career. 

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