FanPost

So, where did it all go wrong anyway? I mean, besides all of our pitchers arms falling off...

Stay golden, Ponyboy. - Lindsey Wasson-USA TODAY Sports

A couple of days ago, there was an interesting exchange following yet another annoying loss in a season that was lost long ago.

The question that was being asked is, where did it all go wrong?

My pre-season prediction was that the 2018 Angels should pose a strong challenge for a wild card and were probably a favorite to win it. As we all know, the 2018 reality was that the season was over by June. Maybe earlier. I'm too depressed to go check. I stand by that pre-season prediction as being reasonable at the time.

So, where did it all go wrong anyway?

Well, the easy answer is the entire pitching staff's arms fell off and, of course, that's true.

As matthiasstephan put it,

We did have basically two rotations ...

But then they ALL got hurt.

Richards, Ohtani, Skaggs, Heaney, Shoemaker, JC Ramirez (and Heaney was on the DL by opening day).

Barria, Lamb, Tropeano, Bridwell, Meyer. We picked up Pena during the season.

Am I missing anyone? Only Barria didn’t hit the DL all year, right?

So, yeah, having the equivalent of two MLB starting rotations, not even counting relievers, on the DL pretty much doomed the season without anything else needing to be said. That's true. We don't need a lot of quantitative analysis to see that almost everyone's arms fell off.

That said, I think it's even worse than that.

The reason I was optimistic for at least being competitive for the wild card spot wasn't because I expected our pitching staff to stay healthy. I mean, sure, I was hoping we'd only lose half our guys not all of them, but that wasn't the reason.

The reason was because I thought we might be able to pull off an average pitching staff, or a bit better if we got lucky with health, and a great offense.

As we all know, at one point in our season our offense was the top offense in the league and it didn't seem crazy that they would be up there somewhere. A lineup of Cozart, Trout, Upton, Cron Pujols, Calhoun, Simmons, Kinsler, and Maldanado looked like a pretty good lineup on paper.

Now, it may surprise readers to find that the Angels are still #11 in terms of MLB offense. So, it's not like it was terrible, but it also wasn't as strong as it started out the season.

So, who's fault is that? I mean, aside from Scioscia, of course. We all know everything is all his fault.

In order to look at this question a little deeper, I followed in the footsteps of Isabelle Minasian over at Lookout Landing and compared the Steamer Projected fWARs to the actuals to date for those nine players. I added in Valbuena because he became an often used swiss army knife that represented our "depth", or lack thereof. These are the results. —Thanks to Isabelle for helping me with this.

pwdRDE6.0.jpg

I'll let you, our esteemed readers, decide how interesting this is, but I found it fun.

What I see is that as far as the offense goes, Cozart, Calhoun, and Valbuena really hurt us while Maldanado was not the big positive many of us thought he was last year. Those guys alone count for about 8 less wins in terms of negative fWAR compared to their expectations. That's a big deal. True, it doesn't make a difference in a pitching staff devastated world, but it might have been a problem even in a world where some pitchers arms stayed on.

I'm also going to give a special mention to Pujols. He was bad again this year with negative fWAR. True, nothing much was expected of him given Steamer projections, but a team committed to winning doesn't deliberately pencil into it's lineup a guy who is expected to be replacement level and can't even get that done.

That means about half our lineup performed worse than expected. That isn't good.

What IS good is the other half was pretty darn awesome. Trout exceed his already crazy expectations even with the time he missed. Ohtani was everything he was advertised to be and more. Simmons is a legitimate top 10 fWAR in the league player and never gets enough credit for that. Upton outperformed his steamer projections even if what most of us remember are his LOBsters.

What does this tell me? Well, nothing we don't all already know from watching the games, but it's fun to see it shown in the stats.

We may well have the best trio of players in baseball with Trout, Ohtani, and Simmons. They do a lot to pull this team up all by themselves...but that's also the problem. For too much of the year they've been all by themselves.

Eppler has some work to do.

This FanPost is authored by an independent fan. Tell us what you think and how you feel.

Trending Discussions