Category Archives: Los Angeles Angels

MLB Breakout Predictions: AL West

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Caption: AL West teams

by Ryan Harless

Ryan Harless is a third-year undergraduate at BGSU from Hillsboro, Ohio. He is majoring in Sport Management with a Journalism Minor. Baseball and golf at all levels are his primary interests but he is also interested in combat sports, hockey, basketball, and football.

February 26, 2023

We’ve finally made it to the end of the series! Welcome to part six (of six), of my predictions for the breakout star on every Major League Baseball (MLB) team in 2023. We have finally made it all the way to the American League (AL) Western Division.

This division has been dominated recently by the Houston Astros, but last year the Seattle Mariners made a surprising run in the postseason.

Kicking off this list, however, are the Oakland Athletics. The A’s lost 102 games last season and they have nowhere to go but up.

I expect a large part of their rebuilding process is going to be Paul Blackburn. Twenty twenty-two was Blackburn’s first year entirely in the Majors, as he had spent all or parts of the last 10 years on various Minor League teams.

Over his nine seasons in the Minors, Blackburn had a 3.66 ERA in 721 innings. In his experience at the Major League level, he has struggled to keep on pace posting a 5.09 ERA over 249.1 innings.

Last season, Blackburn got his most starts in MLB since 2017 with 21 and he made the most of it, being named to his first All-Star team. He finished the season with a 4.28 ERA alongside his 89 strikeouts over 111.1 innings.

I predict that if Blackburn is able to stay healthy and make 25+ starts, he can go 12-8 with a 3.50 ERA. With Blackburn being a contact pitcher, he does have to rely on his fielders to be there for him when batters make contact so there is always uncertainty.

Finishing eight games ahead of Oakland were the Texas Rangers. This team spent around $350 million in one offseason to bring Corey Seager and Marcus Semien in to be their middle-infielders. They finished with fewer than 70 wins even with those two on the team.

The Rangers are another team looking to turn things around and I think a certain switch-hitting catcher might be a major key to their turnaround.

My choice for the 2023 breakout star of the Texas Rangers is Jonah Heim. Heim is entering his second season as the primary catcher for Texas. He played parts of the 2020 and 2021 seasons and was relatively inconsequential posting a 0 WAR (wins above replacement). But, this last season saw Heim play in 127 games, and post a 2.5 WAR.

Heim, as is the case with most catchers, is most valuable behind the plate and not in the batters box. Heim has posted an above average fielding percentage all of the last three years as well as having eight defensive runs saved above average.

I expect Heim to play in 130 games, have a caught stealing percentage above 30%, and have a 3+ WAR. With these numbers, I could easily see Heim starting behind the dish for the All-Star game this season.

This brings us to one of the oddest teams in all of MLB, the Los Angeles Angels. The Angels have had two of the top five players in all of the league (Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout) every one of the last five seasons and haven’t been .500 or better in any of them. Nor have they finished above third place in any of those years.

I think that another one of their outfielders could be one of the keys to their success this year. Jo Adell has struggled to get on his feet in his three seasons in the big leagues. But I feel that a lot of times, position players need 2-3 years of struggling in MLB to really catch hold and play to the height of their abilities.

I think this will be the case for Adell who has posted a career .289 batting average in six seasons of Minor League play. Adell played 88 games in 2022 which was 50 games more than his previous high and while he didn’t produce amazing numbers, there were flashes of greatness.

Adell has the tools to be a star both in the field and at the plate, and I think he will do just that in the 2023 season.

I expect Adell to slash .250/.300/.350 with 18 homers and somewhere around 50 RBIs and 20 stolen bases.

Finishing 2nd in the AL West last season were the Seattle Mariners. This is a team that is amped up and ready to make another postseason push and they have the talent to do so.

I think this team will make it to the American League Championship Series (ALCS) and maybe even their first World Series ever.

I think the player that is going to have a true breakout season and propel them there is Luis Castillo.

Castillo has already proved himself as one of the better starting pitchers in all of MLB, but I think that this will be the year that he wins a Cy Young award.

Castillo has played six seasons in the Majors but is yet to make the leap from good to great. Part of that has not been his own doing. He started his career with the Cincinnati Reds and only had an ERA above 3.98 in one season. And outside of those two seasons, he never had an ERA over 3.40.

Those Reds teams did little to help Castillo with run support so his win-loss records look a little sketchy. But, finding his home in Seattle, I expect him to put up league-leading numbers, especially if he is able to master his changeup which is already one of the best in all of MLB.

I expect Castillo to go 15-3 with a 2.85 ERA in 180 innings to go alongside 200 strikeouts. As I mentioned above, I also anticipate him winning the AL Cy Young Award.

This brings us to the 2022 World Series champions, the Houston Astros. The Astros won the second most games in MLB last year, trailing only the Dodgers by five wins. I can only imagine that the Houston organization is taking this year as another World Series or bust year.

I think that this year, they are going to have more help from one of their quieter returning players, Chas McCormick.

McCormick has played two seasons for Houston batting around .250, but like I said before, I think a lot of hitters need a few years in the big leagues to get the swing of things. I’m sure he will bounce back just fine.

Over four Minor League seasons, McCormick slashed .278/.362/.402 which shows that he is more than capable at the plate. He is yet to show off his power numbers that he had in college (9 homers his senior year) but that should come with age.

I look for McCormick to slash .275/.360/.390 with 8-10 homers and 120 hits. He should develop into a great everyday outfielder for Houston.

A Well-Oiled Machine

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By Ryan Harless

Ryan Harless is a third-year undergraduate at BGSU from Hillsboro, Ohio. He is majoring in Sport Management with a Journalism Minor. Baseball and golf at all levels are his primary interests but he is also interested in combat sports, hockey, basketball, and football.

October 13, 2022

Since the late 1980s, baseball has evolved from the steroid era to the sabermetric era. During that time, there has been one true star whose career began in 2001; yet he remains relevant today – Albert Pujols. Since batting .204 prior to the All-Star break, he reached a seemingly impossible mark by hitting his 700th career home run. In doing so, he joined Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Barry Bonds as the only members of the 700-home run club.  

Entering the 2022 season, it looked like this was going to be the classic farewell tour for Pujols. He was finally back with his long-time teammates Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright, for the first time in over a decade. After the 2011 season, Pujols was signed by the Los Angeles Angels for 10 years and $240 million. He never truly lived up to his potential in Los Angeles, only being an All-Star once, hitting around .256, and striking out almost twice as much as he walked. It seemed like his return to St. Louis was going to be a merciful end to Pujols’ playing career. But that’s where baseball fans were wrong.

Through the first three months of the season, Pujols batted a measly .181 with 4 homers, leaving him 17 shy of the 700 mark at the All-Star break. With Pujols being the only current player with a reasonable chance of hitting 700 homeruns, fans became hopeful. But after the first half of the season, most wrote him off. Alicia de Artola of Fansided doubted that he would be able to reach 700, questioning just how much he had left in the tank given his age. But “The Machine” was going to go out on his terms, slashing .318/.377/.671 since July 4th. Not only was this enough to make us reminisce about Pujols’ first stint with the Cardinals when he was consistently one of the best hitters in all of baseball. It also made him the BEST hitter in baseball (outside of Aaron Judge who was on another planet) per plate appearance.

Doing this, Pujols also helped the Cardinals clinch the National League Central Championship. Unfortunately, the Cardinals fell in two games to the Philadelphia Phillies in the Wild Card round of the playoffs, cutting Pujols’ chances short of further padding his stats. However, it is just difficult to fathom how the 42-year-old Pujols could play his best baseball of the past decade, as he neared the end of his career. It’s just one of the things that you look at as a baseball fan and think, “how can you not be romantic about baseball?.” A fun stat to put into perspective is how many home runs 700 is, Pujols’ average homerun trot over his career is around 26 seconds per. This means that over the 22 seasons Albert has played in, he has spent a little over 5 hours rounding the bases for his home runs.

Albert Pujols was by far the longest-tenured player in the MLB today debuting one year before pitcher Oliver Perez. He truly was the last of a dying breed and I don’t know that we will ever get to see someone dominate the majors for the first decade of their career. The only star in today’s game with similar dominance is Mike Trout. Who knows, maybe in another decade someone will be writing a similar story about Trout. But right to the very end of his illustrious career, ‘The Machine’ was the story.

Joe Maddon hire signals new hope for Los Angeles Angels

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By Pershelle Rohrer

October 24, 2019

Pershelle Rohrer is a first-year BGSU student from Logan, Utah. She is a Sport Management major with a minor in Journalism. Her primary sports interests are football, basketball, and baseball, both at the professional and collegiate levels.

The Los Angeles Angels hired Joe Maddon as their new manager on Wednesday, October 16. Maddon returns to Anaheim after previously spending 31 years with the Angels organization as a player, coach, and manager. He will receive $4 million a year as part of a three-year deal as the Angels look to rebound from a 72-90 season, their worst since 1999. 

Maddon was the bench coach for the Angels when they won their lone World Series title in 2002. He managed the Tampa Bay Rays from 2006 to 2014 – leading them to the playoffs four times, including their only World Series appearance in 2008. He was hired as the manager of the Chicago Cubs in 2014, led them to the playoffs in 2015, and brought them their first World Series title in 108 years in the 2016 season. The Cubs made the playoffs in four of Maddon’s five years as manager, but after finishing 84-78 in the 2019 season, Chicago decided to move in a different direction. 

The media looks at Maddon’s hiring as a positive for the Angels. Given Maddon’s previous accomplishments with Chicago and Tampa Bay, the Angels have expectations that he will be able to replicate that success with a team led by one of baseball’s best all-around players, Mike Trout. Maddon is “credited with changing the culture” in Chicago, transforming a young rebuilding Cubs team to championship contenders in just a year (“Joe Maddon agrees,” 2019, para. 12). David Baumgarten (2019) of The Atlantic describes Maddon as positive, nurturing, and charming, citing his willingness to allow young players like Javy Báez to play through their mistakes along with the witty stories he shared with the Chicago press. Descriptions of Maddon in such a positive manner emphasize the media’s belief that he has the potential to revive an Angels team that has struggled for over a decade.

When Maddon was hired in Chicago, the team was nearing the end of a rebuild, something that the Angels have avoided for years. Dave Sheinin (2019) from The Washington Post explains Los Angeles’ winning approach that replicates the Cubs’ mentality through their hiring of Maddon in 2014: “The Los Angeles Angels, by hiring Maddon on Wednesday to be their manager for the next three years, appear to be placing a similar bet on the now-65-year-old skipper – minus the rebuild” (para. 3). The Angels have missed the playoffs for five straight years, including four straight losing seasons, and they haven’t won a postseason series in ten years. Sheinen also suggests that hiring Maddon could put the Angels in the race for Astros pitcher Gerrit Cole this offseason. Similar to the Cubs’ signing of Jon Lester in 2014, Maddon could become an attraction for Cole, who is from Orange County, California, bringing them another star to play alongside Trout. The parallels between the 2014 Cubs and the 2019 Angels highlight the potential for Maddon to bring new life into the team where he spent the first 31 years of his career. 

Overall, the media looks at the Angels’ hiring of Joe Maddon as a move that could transform them from a struggling team to a contender. His history of success in Chicago and Tampa makes him a promising hire, and after thirteen years away, the Angels hope for an exciting homecoming and the return of a winning culture in Anaheim.

References

Baumgarten, D. (2019, October 10). Joe Maddon was doomed by his own success. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/10/joe-maddon-cubs/599731/

Bollinger, R. (2019, October 21). Angels to introduce Maddon as skipper Thursday. MLB.com. Retrieved from https://www.mlb.com/news/joe-maddon-angels-manager

Joe Maddon agrees to be new manager of Los Angeles Angels. (2019, October 16). ESPN.com. Retrieved from https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/27859727/joe-maddon-agrees-new-manager-los-angeles-angels

Kepner, T. (2019, September 29). Joe Maddon will not return to Cubs next season. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/29/sports/baseball/joe-maddon-cubs.html

Sheinin, D. (2019, October 16). By hiring Joe Maddon as manager, floundering Angels hope to replicate Cubs’ rise. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/10/16/by-hiring-joe-maddon-manager-floundering-angels-hope-replicate-cubs-rise/