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Where do the Angels stand as the off-season winds down?

Gary A. Vasquez-USA TODAY Sports


As we all know, the internet has been completely abuzz with the off-season moves the Angels have made. They've been declared the clear winner of the off-season with such moves as signing Justin Upton, adding Cozart, and most of all being so cool that Ohtani has decided to join the team at a league minimum rate. The Angels FO simply couldn't be flying higher!!!

Wait. No. That's not right. That was last year, wasn't it?

OK, so one year, stop-gap deals with Harvey, Cahill, Bour, and Lucroy aren't quite as exciting as last year, but that doesn't mean the Angels can't be in the playoff mix next year. After all, Trout, Ohtani, and Simmons are all still right there as the most exciting trio in the MLB today!!!

I thought it would be interesting to try to get a perspective on where the Angels stand after their recent moves. While I'm 100% clear that predicting things, especially the future, and especially in baseball is somewhere between hard and impossible, let's take a look at where they stand right now with, admittedly, a few moves presumably still left in them.

In order to do that, what I decided to do was to compare the WAR from 2018 to the projected 2019 WAR from fangraphs of the Angels current roster and see where it stands. Are the Angels projected to better? Worse? About the same? While no one can really answer that, I think the the results are kind of fun anyway.

For those that don't know. fangraphs not only has actual numbers from prior years, but does depthchart projections for the upcoming year, which can be found here.

I took these projections and put them into two really big tables. One for position players and one for pitchers. I chose to show the fWAR of the players as well as the plate appearances (for position players) and innings pitched (for pitchers) to remind everyone what 2018 actually looked like in terms of contribution and playing time and show what fangraphs is estimating for 2019.

The table I created or position players is here:

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The table for pitchers is here:

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That's a lot of detail, but I think it's fun to see what the folks at fangraphs think both in terms of contribution and playing time.

There are clearly things I don't agree with / hope don't happen. I think they underestimate Ohtani and I sure hope Hermosillo doesn't get 182 PA unless we get more than we've seen so far, for example. I also don't think Pujols will do even replacement level well and I hope he doesn't get that many PA. But, I went with what they have.

Regardless of all that, what I then did was summarize the information by adding up the WAR for all the position players and all the pitchers for 2018 and 2019 and compared where fangraphs projections think we stand currently relative to last year. The table I produced for that is here:

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First of all, just to validate that adding up WAR as a method of predicting wins, I used the common method of adding up total position player WAR + total pitcher WAR for 2018 and then added that to the number 47, which is a common number used to estimate the number of wins a completely replacement level team would receive.

As you can see, if we just add up everyone's WAR from last year and add it to that 47 number, we get that, according to WAR, we should have had 82 wins. We actually had 80, which is close enough for this sort of exercise for me to consider it reasonable.

So, where do fangraphs projections have us as it stands right now compared to 2018?

Actually, a little better. It's interesting that they have our pitching staff a little worse than it was last year (yikes!!!), but they have a position players as actually being pretty significantly better, mostly as a result of raising that floor most of us talk about.

So, the bottom line is they estimate our current roster will get 86 wins. That doesn't sound too wrong, I guess. What does everyone else think?

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

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