Justin Upton To Open Season On Injured List
Angels outfielder Justin Upton has been diagnosed with turf toe, Mike DiGiovanna of the Los Angeles Times reports on Twitter. He’ll be added to the injured list for the start of the season.
That’s unfortunate news for the Halos, particularly at this stage of camp and with Shohei Ohtani still building back. It’s not yet clear how long Upton will be sidelined, but he’ll surely be brought along cautiously to ensure that this issue doesn’t linger.
The Angels don’t exactly have an appealing back-up plan, but they’ll have to make do without Upton for at least a few weeks. There are only three other outfielders on the 40-man roster at this point: Michael Hermosillo, who’s expected to be on the IL as well, and stalwarts Mike Trout and Kole Calhoun. Peter Bourjos could end up seeing the lion’s share of time. Fellow non-roster invitees Cesar Puello and Jarrett Parker are also possibilities, though the latter is also not at full health at the moment.
Angels Release Dan Jennings, Option Jaime Barria
The Angels announced Tuesday that they’ve released left-handed reliever Dan Jennings. He’d been in camp on a minor league pact in hopes of earning a roster spot but will instead head back out onto the open market. The Halos also optioned righty Jaime Barria to Triple-A Salt Lake.
Jennings, 31, had a rough spring but has a lengthy track record as a quality left-handed bullpen option. He spent the 2018 season with the Brewers and worked to a 3.22 ERA with 45 strikeouts against 23 walks through 64 1/3 innings of work, holding opposing left-handed batters to a .226/.266/.304 batting line along the way.
It’s at least something of a surprise that Jennings has had difficulty latching onto a big league roster spot given the success he’s had; in his seven-year career, he’s never turned in an ERA of 4.00 or higher. He’s pitched to a combined 2.96 ERA with a 272-to-150 K/BB ratio through 344 1/3 innings in the Majors. His release is further surprising given that he was viewed as a candidate to open the season as the only lefty option in the Angels’ bullpen. The Halos don’t have a lefty reliever on the 40-man roster, nor do they have any experienced non-roster invitees still in camp, so perhaps there’s a move for a lefty still on the horizon.
As for Barria, he’d been in line to round out the Halos’ rotation behind Matt Harvey, Trevor Cahill, Tyler Skaggs and Felix Pena. Instead, it seems that role will now go to newly acquired right-hander Chris Stratton, whom the Angels picked up in a Tuesday-morning trade with the Giants. Barria, 22, made his big league debut last season and ultimately tallied 129 1/3 innings of 3.41 ERA ball with averages of 6.8 strikeouts, 3.3 walks and 1.2 home runs per nine innings pitched. Rather than look to continue that success, he’ll get some early work in Salt Lake.
Pena could also find himself bound for Triple-A once Andrew Heaney is able to come off the disabled list, although given the barrage of injuries that has beset the Angels’ pitching staff in recent seasons, it seems a fair bet that each of the aforementioned names will make some starts at the MLB level in 2019.
Angels Acquire Chris Stratton From Giants For Williams Jerez
The Giants and Angels have swung an intrastate deal involving a pair of pitchers. Southpaw Williams Jerez is heading up to San Francisco in exchange for righty Chris Stratton.
Jerez, 26, will give the San Francisco organization a left-handed relief option. That could come in handy if the club ends up moving one or more of its veterans. Jerez handed out six walks to go with six strikeouts in 7 1/3 spring innings after struggling in his first 15 MLB frames last year. But he also showed a mid-nineties heater and the ability to get swings and misses (11.8% SwStr) at the game’s highest level and carried 12.0 K/9 in 55 2/3 innings over 38 Triple-A appearances.
The Giants will have the opportunity to shuttle Jerez up and down as they see fit. That would not have been the case with regard to Stratton, who is out of options. Presumably, then, the Halos see a spot for the former first-round pick on their MLB staff as either a starter or long reliever. The 28-year-old has worked to a 4.63 ERA with 7.1 K/9 and 3.7 BB/9 in 213 2/3 innings in the majors. He hasn’t excited much at Triple-A either, with 327 total frames of 4.10 ERA ball, but could help stabilize a Halos staff that has seen quite a lot of turnover in recent years.
Angels Release Daniel Hudson
The Angels have released righty Daniel Hudson, Maria Torres of the Los Angeles Times tweets. As an Article XX(B) free agent, Hudson would have commanded a $100K roster bonus had he not been added to the 40-man roster.
The Halos decided to go in a different direction after taking a look at the 32-year-old in camp. Hudson was touched for five earned runs and three long balls during his 6 2/3 innings in spring action.
Hudson got his career back on track in 2015 after a long run of arm issues. He has struggled since to produce results, but has continued to draw MLB opportunities by continuing to carry mid-to-upper nineties heat and strong swinging-strike rates (at least 12.0% in each of the past four years). Last year, he worked to a 4.11 ERA with 8.6 K/9 and 3.5 BB/9 in 46 innings for the Dodgers.
Angels Extend Mike Trout
March 21: Trout will make $36MM in 2019 and 2020 before earning $35.45MM annually over the remainder of the contract, Bill Shaikin of the L.A. Times reports (via Twitter).
March 20: The Angels have formally announced Trout’s extension. The contract was announced as a 12-year deal, though that term also includes the two years for which he was already under contract.
The Orange County Register’s Jeff Fletcher tweeted today that it is technically being structured as a new 12-year deal and that the Angels have discussed moving some of the money he’s owed in 2019-20 back into the 2021-30 portion of the deal. Regardless of the exact structuring, the bottom-line numbers haven’t changed; Trout will be paid a total of $426.5MM over the next dozen years, effectively making the contract a 10-year, $360MM extension on top of the $66.5MM he was already set to earn in 2019-20.
March 19: The Angels are nearing agreement on a record-setting contract with superstar outfielder Mike Trout, according to ESPN.com’s Jeff Passan. Trout will be promised $360MM in new money over a ten-year term, according to reports from Bill Shaikin of the Los Angeles Times (on Twitter) and Jeff Fletcher of the Orange County Register.
Trout stands to earn $36MM in each of those ten seasons. The deal leaves in place his preexisting $33.25MM salaries for the 2019-20 seasons, which he agreed to under a previous extension that was also negotiated by agent Craig Landis.
Trout will turn 39 during the final season (2030) of his new contract. In all likelihood, he and the deal will still be with the Halos at that time. The new agreement will not include any opt-outs, per Shaikin (via Twitter), and provides Trout with full no-trade protection, Bob Nightengale of USA Today adds on Twitter.
From one perspective, it’s a record-setting contract befitting Trout’s status as a player of historic excellence. But the salary numbers pale in comparison to Trout’s own productivity on the ballfield. Since his first full season of play, in 2012, the peerless center fielder has vastly outproduced every other player in the game with a tally of 64.2 fWAR and 63.8 rWAR. Others have approached and even bettered Trout in single seasons — somehow, he has only twice been awarded the American League Most Valuable Player award — but none of his contemporaries has maintained anything approaching his unfathomably consistent level of top-end output.
Viewed in that light, there’s an argument to be made that this deal actually underpays Trout — perhaps by a significant amount. It’s important to bear in mind that he was still two years shy of free agency, which he’d have reached at 29 years of age owing to his earlier contract. Nolan Arenado, just one season away from the open market when he new contract with the Rockies, had more leverage relative to his own abilities. But it’s still notable that Arenado — an outstanding player whose best season nevertheless lags Trout’s worst — commanded a then-record $33.4MM AAV over seven new contract seasons. Trout’s deal promises to be longer and larger, but to be sure, but not by a margin that reflects the gap in these players’ established performance levels. Unsurprisingly, Trout’s new deal also easily tops the previous record for total guarantee that was recently set by Bryce Harper and the Phillies. That was a free agent deal; Harper took a longer term (13 years) to briefly reach a new high-water mark in total guarantee ($330MM). Still, in terms of new money, the gap between the contracts is only $30MM. The Harper vs. Trout prospect debate has been resolved conclusively to this point: the former is a heck of a player and the most marketable commodity in baseball; the latter has somehow already compiled numbers that warrant placement in Cooperstown.
It’s hard to overstate the immensity of Trout’s on-field output to this stage of his career. He has only once finished a full season with less than eight fWAR: the 2017 campaign, in which he was limited to 114 games due to a broken wrist and nevertheless posted 6.9 fWAR. While he’s no longer quite as dynamic in the field and on the bases as he was when he first cracked the majors — he’s merely very good or excellent in those areas — Trout’s offensive ability has morphed and risen over the years. He’s now as likely to take a walk as he is to strike out and might hit forty home runs in any given season. He has reached .300+ isolated power and .600+ slugging percentage tallies in each of the past two seasons. Frighteningly, Trout was never better with the bat in hand than he was in 2018, when he slashed an immense .312/.460/.628 — nearly twice the productivity of a league-average hitter (191 wRC+).
We can safely presume that Trout will age and decline like most players. But he still promises to be a hugely productive player for many years to come. There’s always risk in a long-term deal, but you couldn’t pick a better or more durable player to stake a bet on than Trout. All things considered, the Halos certainly seem to have secured quite a lot of promised future output for their money.
Even beyond the value the team can hope to achieve, the Angels have now locked in one of the game’s best-ever players for his entire career. The L.A./Anaheim organization has had its share of difficulties with sizable contracts and hasn’t yet produced a consistent core of talent to supplement Trout. But it also has only three more years left to pay aging slugger Albert Pujols and has steadily rebuilt its farm system over the past several years under GM Billy Eppler. It’s easy to dream on Jo Adell joining Trout and Justin Upton to form the game’s best outfield and tantalizing to envision Shohei Ohtani returning fully from Tommy John surgery to make an iconic superstar pairing. Whatever happens with the club’s other players, though, the Halos have certainty regarding the task at hand. The Angels and Trout are now bound together in pursuit of an elusive World Series title.
Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.
Angels Outright Kaleb Cowart
The Angels announced that infielder/relief pitcher Kaleb Cowart has cleared waivers and been assigned outright to Triple-A Salt Lake, thus clearing a spot on the 40-man roster.
Cowart has bounced around the league a bit since the end of the 2018 campaign. The Mariners claimed him from the Angels back in December but lost him to the Tigers via a late-January waiver claim. A month later, the Angels claimed him back off waivers and brought him to big league camp. He’s now been reassigned to minor league camp.
Cowart, a first-round pick back in 2010, has never established himself as a credible bat at the Major League level, batting just .177/.241/.293 in 380 trips to the plate. The former top prospect has had his share of success in Triple-A (.298/.361/.469 in parts of four seasons), and he’s recently sought to improve his versatility by functioning as a two-way player. Each of the teams who has rostered Cowart since the end of the ’18 campaign has done so with a willingness to try him out as a two-way player, but that’s a tough experiment to conduct at the MLB level. And, given that Cowart is out of minor league options, exposing him to waivers was a necessity in order to allow him to work on that new role in Triple-A.
Andrew Heaney To Begin Season On Injured List
MARCH 17: While Heaney will resume his throwing program Sunday, he’ll start the season on the injured list, Fletcher tweets.
MARCH 13: Angels left-hander Andrew Heaney has been shut down due to ongoing discomfort stemming from inflammation in his left elbow, the team revealed to reporters (Twitter link via Jeff Fletcher of the Orange County Register). While that’s clearly unwelcome news for a Halos staff that has been ravaged by injuries over the past several seasons, the good news is that an MRI has already been performed, with no structural damage being found.
It’s not clear yet just when the Angels believe Heaney will be ready to throw. Fletcher notes that Heaney dealt with a similar issue last spring but wound up missing only a week and a half of the regular season. Meanwhile, MLB.com’s Rhett Bollinger tweets that Heaney is optimistic he’ll be able to resume throwing in the near future. However, he’s only totaled 1 2/3 innings this spring, which seemingly makes it unlikely that he’ll be ready to start the season in two weeks.
Heaney, 27, pitched to a 4.15 ERA with 9.0 K/9, 2.3 BB/9, 1.35 HR/9 and a 41.2 percent ground-ball rate in 180 innings of work (30 starts). That marked only the second time in his career that Heaney was able to make more than five starts at the MLB level or pitch more than 100 innings. To this point, the clearly talented lefty — he’s a former first-round pick and consensus top prospect — has been snakebit by injury issues, most notably including Tommy John surgery.
With Heaney now looking decidedly unlikely to be ready to take the mound early in the season, the Angels project to rely upon Matt Harvey, Trevor Cahill and Tyler Skaggs as the top three arms in the rotation. Jaime Barria and Felix Pena are strong candidates for those final two rotation spots, although the Angels do have alternatives including offseason pickup Dillon Peters, who has been sharp thus far in Spring Training (one run in 10 innings). Nick Tropeano isn’t expected to be ready for the opener either, while J.C. Ramirez and Shohei Ohtani aren’t options following 2018 Tommy John surgery.
SP Notes: Keuchel, Braves, Eovaldi, Astros, Angels, Phils, Kershaw
With left-hander Dallas Keuchel still unemployed, the big-name free agent’s preparing for the season by “going through a full Spring Training, just like [Kyle] Lohse did,” agent Scott Boras told Jon Morosi of MLB.com earlier this week. Boras was referring to Lohse’s protracted trip to free agency six years ago, which ended March 25, 2013, with a three-year, $33MM agreement to join the Brewers. The majority of MLB followers expected Keuchel, 31, to land a far richer deal than that when the offseason began, but the onetime AL Cy Young winner has instead watched in recent months as most of the majors’ other high-profile free agents have come off the board. Still, the longtime Astro “is receiving offers,” Boras informed Morosi, who writes that the Braves are monitoring Keuchel’s market but are leery of surrendering a draft pick to sign the qualifying offer recipient. Jon Heyman of MLB Network reported earlier this week Atlanta would “consider” Keuchel on a short-term deal; regardless of contract length, signing Keuchel would only cost the Braves their third-highest draft pick in 2019.
The latest on a couple other established starters…
- Nathan Eovaldi re-signed with the Red Sox on a four-year, $68MM contract in December, but only after the right-hander drew serious interest from elsewhere. The Angels and Phillies “really wanted” Eovaldi, per Rob Bradford of WEEI.com, though the feeling wasn’t mutual. During the free-agent process, Eovaldi informed his agency, ACES, he only wanted to sign with the Red Sox or his hometown Astros, according to Bradford. But the Astros, despite the questions in their rotation, didn’t pursue the 29-year-old. “Houston is home for me,” Eovaldi told Bradford. “I would have had more talks with the Astros but they just didn’t want any part of it so they were out of the question. While Eovaldi added that he was “a little surprised” the Astros ignored him, he’s happy to be back in Boston after helping the club to a championship in 2018.
- Clayton Kershaw has been the starter for the Dodgers’ last eight Opening Days, but it appears the superstar southpaw’s streak is on the verge of ending. Manager Dave Roberts said Friday (via ESPN.com) it’s “unlikely” Kershaw will take the ball for the Dodgers on March 28 in their season-opening game against the Diamondbacks. Kershaw has been battling shoulder inflammation throughout the spring, which has prevented the three-time NL Cy Young winner from making an appearance in the Cactus League and from throwing offspeed pitches during his rehab. Set to turn 31 on March 19, Kershaw’s entering the first season of a three-year, $93MM contract – a deal that’s off to an inauspicious start.
Angels Select Luke Bard
The Angels have selected the contract of right-hander Luke Bard to the 40-man roster, per a team release. In a corresponding move, the team’s placed righty Keynan Middleton on the 60-day injured list.
Los Angeles signed the 28-year-old Bard, a former Rule 5 selection of the team ahead of the 2018 campaign, to a minors deal in mid-February.
A Trackman dandy, Bard was coveted in the Rule-5 for his super-high spin rates – his 2770 average RPM on the four-seam ranked first among MLB hurlers with at least 100 fastballs thrown last season – and newfound ability to miss bats. In five minor league seasons before 2016, the Georgia Tech-product didn’t post a K-rate north of 8.08 per nine; since, he’s hovered around twelve, though the transition from heavy sink to top-of-the-zone heat has left him susceptible to the occasional gopher ball.
Bard still has minor league options left, so he’s no sure bet to crack the 25-man roster by March 28’s Opening Day. He’ll continue to jostle with a bevy of recycled and/or unproven arms for the last couple slots in the team’s pen, including Ty Buttrey, Hansel Robles, Noe Ramirez, Jake Jewell, and Taylor Cole.
Middleton, 25, is still recovering from a May 2018 Tommy John surgery and remains on track to return sometime in the middle of the season. The hard-throwing righty opened eyes in his 2017 big-league debut, striking out nearly 10 men per nine with solid command in 58 1/3 IP. He was shaky in 17 innings before the surgery last season, with the balky elbow perhaps in large part to blame.
Billy Eppler On Angels’ Rotation
Angels GM Billy Eppler downplayed the possibility of a late-spring rotation addition, as Jeff Fletcher of the Southern California News Group writes. It seems the organization is content with its existing options entering the season.
The indication for some time has been that the Halos have already pushed their payroll to the max this winter. Previously, the team inked Matt Harvey and Trevor Cahill to short-term but reasonably expensive contracts.
New elbow woes for southpaw Andrew Heaney won’t change the team’s stance, despite the ongoing presence of Dallas Keuchel and Gio Gonzalez on the free-agent market. For one thing, Eppler says, doctors haven’t identified any structural concerns in or around Heaney’s elbow. For another, he adds, the club already has “starters we are comfortable with.”
That statement doesn’t close the door on a move, though it hardly suggests that the organization is suddenly free to spend more to bring in a pricey hurler. And it seems the Halos won’t be rushing to make a cheaper deal with one of the other free agent hurlers still waiting for a job, either.
So, should Eppler be comfortable with what’s on hand? Righty Nick Tropeano is nearing a resumption of mound work but won’t be ready for the start of the season, putting him in much the same situation as Heaney. That leaves Jaime Barria, Felix Pena, and Dillon Peters battling for two openings, Fletcher suggests. There’s an argument that all three could be at least passable back-of-the-rotation options, though the Halos may need more than that if they’re to keep pace with a loaded Astros team.