Why The Projections Don’t Like The Angels

Last year, the Los Angeles Angels won 98 games, the third-highest total in the 54-year history of the franchise. They earned it, too, finishing second with a plus-143 run differential and baseball’s highest runs scored per game (4.7). They had — and have — the unquestioned best player in the game in AL MVP Mike Trout, who is headed into his age-23 season, they found a surprising breakout pitching star in Garrett Richards and they built an outstanding bullpen on the fly during the 2014 season.

Despite a disappointing showing while being swept in the ALDS against the Royals, it was a successful year for the Angels, and their main competition, the A’s, followed up their season-ending slide with a series of difficult-to-understand moves that may have set Oakland back. On the surface, the Angels would seem to be poised for another successful run in 2015.

And yet the projections don’t quite see it that way. Steamer, one of the most respected projection systems, has the Angels as only an 84-win team, five games behind the Mariners in the AL West. Have the Angels really done anything to make themselves 14 wins worse than last year? Probably not. But the projections can’t simply be tossed aside as frivolous, either — and here’s why.

Projection breakdown

Let’s understand the projections for a minute, and where they come from. At FanGraphs, staff writers project playing time for each player on every team’s depth chart. That playing-time input combines with Steamer’s individual projection to inform a player’s expected WAR. (That is, a player expected to receive 500 plate appearances will be more valuable than an identical player expected to receive only 200 plate appearances.)

WAR doesn’t exactly equal actual wins, because unpredictable batted-ball luck and sequencing of events will always have something of an impact on real-world game outcomes, but it’s been proven endlessly that there’s a very strong correlation between the two; that is, teams with high WAR totals are generally also teams with high win totals. For example, the three teams in 2014 with the highest WAR totals were the Nationals, Angels and Dodgers, all playoff teams. The three lowest WAR teams were the Astros, Padres and Diamondbacks, all disasters. You don’t have to love WAR, but the fact remains that it works very well.

Projections tend to go with the more likely outcomes than outliers, so the Angels were never going to be looked at as a 98-win team again, through no fault of their own. (The most projected wins right now are 91, and someone always tops that.) That accounts for a few wins from that deficit of 14, but when you look at what the Angels achieved last year and what the projections see for them in 2015, the issue becomes clear.

In short, the projections don’t like the Angels pitching, at all — particularly the rotation.

The offense still looks excellent, and that’s largely due to Trout, who is projected for eight wins on his own, easily the most in baseball. (To put that in perspective, the five-win gap between Trout and the second-best Angel hitter is more than the best offensive player is worth on 21 of the other 29 teams.)

The slight decline projected in the offense can be almost entirely attributed to the change at second base, where reliable longtime starter Howie Kendrick was traded to the Dodgers in exchange for young lefty Andrew Heaney, who had just come over from Miami. Kendrick had been a consistent three- to four-win player for the Angels, and now he’s being replaced by eitherJosh Rutledge (acquired from Colorado minutes after Kendrick departed) or Grant Green, neither of whom have distinguished themselves as big league players. (Recently signed Cuban import Roberto Baldoquin is likely to spend most or all of the season in the minors.)

Even without Kendrick, the offense isn’t going to be the problem. It was a good offense last year, and it’s likely going to be a good offense again this year. That’s why the trade made sense, because even though the deal weakened the lineup on both sides of the ball in 2015, it works for the long term. Kendrick was entering the final year of his contract, and acquiring the highly regarded Heaney is a plus, even if he’s likely to be more of a mid-rotation piece than a frontline starter.

But the Angels aren’t a rebuilding club, and while six years of Heaney is preferable to one of Kendrick, it’s unlikely that Heaney (who fared poorly in his first taste of the bigs last year and isn’t even guaranteed a rotation spot) is going to be as valuable as Kendrick would have been in 2015. And when you look at the rest of the rotation, you can see why the projections are so cautious.

Rotation questions

Though it seems overly harsh for a team that was so good last year, when you go through the rotation, it becomes easier to understand — there isn’t a single Angels starter who doesn’t come with considerable baggage right now. Jered Weaver, for example, is on the short list of best starters in team history; he’s also dealt with considerable velocity decline and last year put up the smallest difference between his strikeout and walk rates since 2007, the fourth straight year that mark has declined.

No one’s saying he’s not valuable — 213 innings of 3.59 ERA says otherwise — but last year we saw a Weaver who struggled to hit 88 mph, who allowed a career-high 27 homers and who saw his O-Swing% drop precipitously, an indication that hitters weren’t being fooled so often. You can ignore the 18 wins, because pitcher wins don’t matter (thanks to the great Angels offense, three Los Angeles starters, Weaver included, finished in the top nine in run support). Plus, it’s fair to note that Weaver has found a way to outperform his peripherals in the past. The point is just to explain that at 32, with a decade of professional ball on his arm, the fact that the projections are wary of him isn’t unreasonable. He’s now more of a solid No. 2 or 3 than the ace he once was.

It’s a similar issue with C.J. Wilson, except he didn’t start from as high as Weaver and fell far lower last year, putting up the worst year of his five-year career as a starter. Wilson’s second half was particularly problematic, as he whiffed only 2.6 percent more batters than he walked — the second-worst mark of any of the 136 pitchers who threw 50 or more second-half innings. Like Weaver, Wilson has been a successful veteran who may yet bounce back; also like Weaver, you understand the caution in projecting great things, though Steamer does see 1.4 WAR from Wilson as opposed to last year’s 0.6.

Let’s move on to the two bright spots from last year’s rotation, Matt Shoemaker and Richards. Shoemaker was a revelation as a 27-year-old rookie, coming out of basically nowhere to finish second to Jose Abreu in the Rookie of the Year balloting. The Angels are relying on him to repeat that performance in 2015. But after six mostly nondescript years in the minors and with a total lack of a track record prior to 2014, it’s far from a certainty that he will. Again, the hesitancy here is understandable.

Richards, who was having a breakout season, injured his knee in August and isn’t expected to be ready until May. He should still be very good, but the injury adds in some additional risk, and he’ll miss approximately 40 or so innings that the Angels will need to make up elsewhere. Those are innings will likely go to Heaney, the replacement-level Hector Santiago or the lightly-regarded Nick Tropeano; they won’t go to 23-year-old Tyler Skaggs, who was on his way to proving himself as a successful big league starter before blowing out his arm late in the season.

Outlook

Are the Angels really going to have the worst pitching in baseball in 2015? No, of course not. The projections are probably underselling Weaver and Shoemaker to some degree, and a full season of closer Huston Street (acquired in July) should help, though the subtraction of the traded Kevin Jepsen — who was nearly as good as Street, just without the opportunity for saves — could give some of that back. But with Wilson a huge source of concern, with Richards limited for the first part of the year, with Skaggs gone for the entire year and with Shoemaker having a ton to prove after one good season, the Angels are walking a tightrope in their rotation.

There’s no bias in the projections. It will be up to the Angels to prove them wrong on the field.