2024 Team Previews: Los Angeles Angels
Going through all 30 teams, looking back at 2023 and ahead to the 2024 season through a fantasy baseball lens.
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Introduction & Links to All Teams Here
Angels Intro
It’s setting up to be a brutal season for the Los Angeles Angels. They were one of the big stories of the 2023 season, going for broke at the trade deadline just to quickly flame out of playoff contention, getting nothing for Shohei Ohtani, and trading away a couple of top prospects along the way. They played the last month of the season without Ohtani or Trout, and they ended up DFA’ing their best hitters to try to save some salary. A very strange and sad season for the Angels, and nobody expects them to project to be anything but very bad in 2024.
We got some clarity early on about Mike Trout, he’s not going anywhere. The Angels owe him about $37,000,000 per year for the next seven years, and even if he didn’t age another day from now until the end of that and he stayed healthy, it wouldn’t be a great contract for them, so that’s a pretty rough situation for them now - but that’s what you get!
They also have three more years of Rendon to pay for - and he’s making $38.5 million per year. So they are paying about a full cheap team’s payroll to two players who can’t stay on the field, and in Rendon’s case aren’t even that good when on the field. Let it be a lesson to all of us fans, the good times of having superstars have a downside - and that often turns into paying a ton of money to a player who doesn’t help your team all that much. I mean I’d rather have $37,000,000 Trout on my team than not, because hey - it’s not my money - but it does kneecap their short-term future. It is not a good time to be an Angels fan.
Despite that, still plenty of relevant players here for the fantasy game, so let’s get into it!
Hitters
Remember that I most of these posts several weeks before publishing them, but I don’t want to do much re-writing so I’ll make some fun edits along the way that you’ll notice.
Mike Trout
Age: 32
Pos: OF
There’s a slight chance they trade the aging Hall of Famer, but there’s so much money on the contract that it’s probably more likely that he just finishes out his career on a series of very bad teams, which is a shame - but here we are.
Trout hit the IL on July 4th, and played just one game after that - he tried it out on August 22nd but the hand just wasn’t ready to go and he went right back on the IL the next day, never to return!
When he was on the field:
362 PA, .263/.367/.490, 18 HR, 28.7% K%, 12.4% BB%, 2 SB
He now has three straight seasons with a strikeout rate above 28%, but the power hasn’t gone anywhere with that as he’s still posted 18%, 20%, and 16% barrel rates over the last three seasons.
His .854 OPS was the lowest of his career, and that’s something we cannot ignore. He was not a superstar hitter last season, although it’s not the most fair thing to judge by three months of games.
So Trout is going to slide further down in drafts than we’ve ever seen before. He’s not going to suddenly become a base-stealer again, and there really won’t be any hope for him having good hitters around him. What we can say confidently is that he will hit a good amount of home runs when he’s playing, and the batting average will probably be fine as well (I don’t think it will be a great batting average with the high strikeout rate and his aging, but he hits the ball so well it’s probably never going to be a bad average).
The percentile stuff:
At this stage in his career, Trout is much closer to an Alonso-type fantasy player than an Acuna-type. Even if we could somehow know that he’d play 140+ games next year, I don’t think we’d value him as a top-20 player, so we’d be starting in the third round or so before even baking in the huge injury risk.
My advice would probably be to just avoid him since the name value will certainly keep him in the top 50 picks or so and I just don’t think his upside at this point warrants using such a valuable pick on him.
A reminder on the projection stuff, we don’t bother much with guessing at injuries with projections. I’ll probably eventually knock Trout down to 450-500 PAs, but for now, we’re just projecting him as if he’ll play the full season. I think that’s the most useful thing to do, as it shows you the full capability of the player - and despite the history, it’s not like we should be guaranteeing the guy misses time. I wouldn’t draft him as if this is the most likely outcome, and he won’t show that way on the player rankings when they come out.
Comps/Rank-Around: Pete Alonso, Kyle Schwarber
JA Projection: 658 PA, 104 R, 40 HR, 92 RBI, 5 SB, .269/.372/.543, .915 OPS
Logan O’Hoppe
Age: 24
Pos: C
It was a rookie season cut short as O’Hoppe missed most of the season, going out on April 20th and not returning to the Majors until August 18th. He saw just 199 plate appearances in the Majors, but they were impressive:
.236/.296/.500, 14 HR, 23 R, 29 RBI, 0 SB, 24% K%, 7% BB%
His home run rate was one of the better ones in the entire league, although it probably would have come down if he had a full season’s worth of PAs.
The barrel rate checks out at 15.6%, and the 47% hard-hit rate and .346 xwOBA backs that up.
Unlike a lot of rookies, he was able to elevate the ball and he kept the average EV over 90 miles per hour, so I certainly believe in the power here.
We may see the K% come up a bit next year because he did have a pretty low 67% contact rate and his chase rate was below his swing rate (meaning he had a 52% swing rate, just slightly above the league average, but a 34% chase%, further below the league average). So maybe he goes to 26% or so next year with a league-average walk rate and not much in terms of runs and RBI being a catcher (won’t play every day in all likelihood) on a bad team.
But this is the catcher position we’re talking about, and I think O’Hoppe can hit .250 with 25 bombs, and that’s pretty enticing to me. I’ll be in on O’Hoppe, but I doubt he comes in very cheap next year - although it is shaping up to be an interesting position with a lot of the usual suspects aging out and a bunch of these young guys coming into play (O’Hoppe, Francisco Alvarez, Yainer Diaz, Endy Rodriguez, and Bo Naylor stand out as a high-upside young catchers for next year).
He’s going in as my #2 catcher right now, just barely behind Willson Contreras (only six catchers ranked thus far).
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Francisco Alvarez, Keibert Ruiz
JA Projection: 400 PA, 55 R, 25 HR, 58 RBI, 2 SB, .253/.316/.506, .821 OPS
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