Zach Neto's recurring flaw is preventing Angels from capitalizing on his other improvements

The Los Angeles Angels have made their high hopes for Zach Neto clear when they rejected the Boston Red Sox's advances for the budding star during the offseason. Back-to-back 20-20 seasons had Neto placing among MLB.com's top-10 shortstop rankings, showing off his dynamic power-speed combo. Still, there were areas, particularly cutting down on the K's, in which the club was hoping Neto would improve in order to vault to another level.

In the early going, Los Angeles saw some development from the young shortstop, but not nearly enough. Neto improved his walk rate, generating free passes 13.3% of the time over the first month of the season.

That was a marked improvement over the 6.2% career rate he carried into 2026. However, it hadn't helped the 25-year-old up his offensive game because with that increased plate discipline came an increase in strikeouts that drove his batting average down to the lowest levels of his career.

Neto has been heating up of late. Over his last 12 games, he's clocked four homers and posted a .903 OPS. That's the good. The bad is that he capped off this stretch wearing a golden sombrero during his last contest on May 24, striking out four times in four at-bats against the Texas Rangers.

Angels are seeing Zach Neto stagnate, and his rising strikeout rate is a problem

During Neto's hot streak, he still struck out an alarming 32.1% of the time. He hit just .227 as a result. So while he's still walking at a solidly above-average clip and posting a substantially better mark than ever before in his career, those gains have been nuked by his failing batting average, which has been harmed by his 31.2% season strikeout rate.

Rather than making real changes, Neto is robbing Peter to pay Paul. After playing 84 games in 2023 as a rookie and posting a .225/.308/.377 line, Neto responded with a .249/.318/.443 mark in 2024 and a .257/.319/.474 line in 2025. After making tremendous growth from 2023 to 2024, he pretty much ran in place from 2024 to 2025.

Neto looks like he's stuck in quicksand again this year, though in a bit of a different manner. His .223/.332/.427 slash line through 54 games so far in 2026 shows he hasn't really made progress, but rather has just rebalanced how he's arriving at the same spot.

The clearest visualization of this is Neto's wRC+ by year, going from 115 in 2024 to 116 in 2025 to 114 this season. Those are good numbers, and if that is the neighborhood he lives in throughout his career, he'll be a very good player, but he won't become a franchise cornerstone.

The real issue is that while the walks are good, if it comes at an increased strikeout rate, then they truly hold no value. When Neto was striking out around 26% as he did prior to this season, we wanted to see that number come down and him embrace making more contact while also walking more.

Instead, what we're getting is a player who is on a perilous path with the strikeouts. Neto snapped himself out of a slump that he carried through the end of April and the beginning of May by not being as hard on himself as he normally is.

To fix this will take much more. In fact, the increase in walks seems like a mirage as he's actually chasing more now, 31.9% versus 30.1%, and whiffing more, 30.3% versus 29.1%, and foreshadowing a crash in the base on balls, which would then set him hurdling towards a strong regression.

What needs to happen is that he needs to develop some real plate discipline and fix the holes in his swing. If he does, the sky is the limit. If he fails, stagnation is the best-case scenario, and it's even possible that he regresses. The latter would be damning for the Angels' present and future.

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