Last week, Angels owner Arte Moreno made a bit of a scene by saying that the team’s fans aren’t “overly concerned with winning.” His claim, based on fan surveys, said that visitors to “the Big A” are more concerned about things like affordability at the ballpark. While there’s something to not wanting to spend an arm and a leg just to go to one baseball game, I feel like Angels fans would also like to win, but that’s just me.
That being said, in recent years the team has had Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani — and still employs one of them — but hasn’t really had much to show for it, as one famous tweet points out.
Their 11-year absence from the playoffs is the longest in baseball and they last finished over .500 a decade ago. Despite all that, there are still people attending Angels games. If Moreno means what he says on the affordability front, this year would be a good one to prove that he cares about that, since I don’t think the winning thing will be changing in 2026.
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Los Angeles Angels
2025 record: 72-90 (5th, AL West)
2026 FanGraphs projection: 74-88 (5th, AL West)
As mentioned, the Angels still do have half of their once all-world combination in Mike Trout. While he did appear in 130 games in 2025 having missed a lot of time due to injury in previous seasons, he’s definitely not the Mike Trout you remember. He was still a pretty good hitter, posting a 120 wRC+, that’s a far cry from where he was in his prime, not even factoring in that his defensive ratings have taken a dive. He put up only 1.8 fWAR last year, when the previous season he appeared in over 100 games — 2022 — he put up 6.0. Projections still expect him to be a decent hitter, but he had a hard enough time trying to drag the Angels to the playoffs at his peak, never mind now.
The issue with the Angels’ lineup in general is that, Trout included, they just don’t have a ton of guys you can project to be middle order stalwarts. FanGraphs projects seven Angels regulars to put up a wRC+ over 100 in 2026, which sounds decent. It’s just that the highest of those projections is Trout at 117. That’s lower than what Ben Rice is projected to do for the Yankees, and Rice is not the projected best hitter for the Bombers.
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That being said, the Angels do have some possible solid contributors. The likes of shortstop Zach Neto and first baseman Nolan Schanuel have the makings of solid contributors and are both younger than 26. There’s just not much going on in their lineup that makes you really take notice.
Their situation on the pitching front is somewhat similar: they have some guys that could put up solid numbers but no one who looks like a capital-A “Ace.” They did acquire Grayson Rodriguez from the Orioles and Alek Manoah, formerly of the Blue Jays. Both those guys have been top prospects in the not so distant past, so maybe they could mine some gold out of one of them.
Besides Rodriguez and Manoah, the Angels acquired a bunch of “oh hey, it’s that guy(s)” this offseason. Other additions for them in 2026 include Josh Lowe, Drew Pomeranz, Kirby Yates, and Jordan Romano.
One person you will not be seeing for the Angels this year is Anthony Rendon. If you look up the Angels’ roster, you’ll still find Rendon listed — probably with the injured list distinction — but he and the Angels came to an agreement to rework his contract, effectively ending his time with the team, and probably concluding his MLB career.
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In order to actually be a good team, the Angels would need to have guessed correctly on a bunch of coinflips. It’s technically possible, just hard to do. That being said, they’ll still probably take two of three over the Yankees in Anaheim in some stupid fashion.
More Pinstripe Alley MLB team season previews can be found here.
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