Will roster upgrades add fuel to get the Angels to playoffs?

Mike Trout runs past the Giants' dugout.

Staff Writer

April 1, 2021 5 AM PT

Year after year, for six seasons straight, the Angels have sputtered across the finish line, always trailing the pack in their unsuccessful attempts to return to the playoffs.

Like a flawed sports car, their problems have varied. In some cases, it was as though they had a faulty ignition, doomed by slow starts from which they couldn’t recover. In others, they would spring a leak in the bullpen, or stall out at the plate.

This year, new general manager Perry Minasian didn’t reengineer the entire team. In many ways, the Angels enter 2021 built in a familiar way: a strong top half of the batting order, a pitching staff lacking a true ace and a team badly needing reliable depth from the bottom of the roster.

The biggest difference, the Angels are hoping, is that the front office has found enough spare parts to finally make a postseason push — that their string of subtle offseason moves and late flurry of acquisitions will keep the club competitive all the way to this year’s final stretch.

Ahead of Thursday night’s season opener, here are three observations about how they might stack up.

Big changes in the bullpen

The alterations came slowly at first — an offseason trade for closer Raisel Iglesias and a one-year contract with left-hander Álex Claudio. Right before the start of camp, more new faces arrived in Junior Guerra and Aaron Slegers. But it wasn’t until the final week of spring training that Minasian fully took a sledgehammer to the bullpen, optioning Ty Buttrey to the minors and acquiring five veteran arms (two of which, Steve Cishek and Tony Watson, will start the season on the MLB roster).

Of the eight relievers on the 26-man roster, only one (Mike Mayers) was on the team last year, when the Angels blew an MLB-high 14 save opportunities.

Buttrey and the injured Félix Peña are expected to eventually play a role on the back end — Peña likely sooner, as he’s set to return from a hamstring injury in the middle of April — and Chris Rodriguez, who made the team at age 22, is one of the Angels’ top prospects. But Minasian and Co. decided that new blood was needed.

“We wanted to be active,” Minasian said. “We wanted to add to this bullpen.”

The reconfigured group is projected to be 15th-best among MLB bullpens by Fangraphs. It stills lack an abundance of top-tier options. But for a team that last year had four relievers (with a minimum of 10 appearances) pitch below replacement level (as calculated by Fangraphs’ win-above-replacement statistic), a deeper collection of simply average to above-average arms could be enough to represent improvement.

On the mound, José Quintana releases a pitch.

Solidifying the starting rotation

In 2019, the last full-length MLB season, the Angels had eight pitchers make 10 or more starts. Five finished with a negative number of wins above replacement.

It was the ultimate example of the franchise’s most consistent problem the last half-decade: starting pitching, where the team ranked last in total WAR the past six seasons.

They’ve tried to rectify that problem in a couple of ways. In the offseason, they acquired José Quintana and Alex Cobb, pending free agents projected to have unspectacular but serviceable seasons. Also, Andrew Heaney and Griffin Canning have focused on better sequencing their pitches and maximizing their arsenals (similar to how Dylan Bundy produced a breakthrough 2020 season by leaning more on his off-speed pitches).

Shohei Ohtani is the wild card, trying to return to a full-time pitching role after elbow and forearm injuries. But on the whole, it’s not hard to envision a group that ranked 29th in rotation ERA last season taking a step forward — even if it’s only a small one.

Will the depth be enough?

This seems like the overriding question for the Angels in 2021. After suffering so often from underperformance at the bottom of the roster — negating even Mike Trout’s historic production — the Angels’ stockpiling of established depth options (both on the pitching staff and among position players such as outfielder Juan Lagares, utility man Jose Rojas and others who are beginning the season at the alternate training site) should give them more stability.

Maybe it won’t matter. After all, they still lack proven high-end starting pitchers. They’re still relying on aging veterans such as outfielders Justin Upton and Dexter Fowler to produce. And they’ll likely need others such as Bundy, first baseman Jared Walsh and new shortstop José Iglesias to replicate career-best 2020 campaigns.

In other words, it remains an imperfect group, continuing to narrow the distance between superstar leaders Trout and third baseman Anthony Rendon and everyone else.