LA Angels Weekend News Crash: Getting Closer

Tied for last:

28. Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (total score: 10/30)

Young MLB hitters (5/10): SS Zach Neto, C Logan O’Hoppe, 1B Nolan Schanuel, OF Mickey Moniak, OF Jo Adell
Young MLB pitchers (4/10): LHP Reid Detmers, RHP Chase Silseth, RHP Jose Soriano, RHP Sam Bachman
Prospect hitters (1/5): SS Kyren Paris, OF Jordyn Adams
Prospect pitchers (0/5): RHP Ben Joyce, RHP Victor Mederos, RHP Jack Kochanowicz, RHP Caden Dana

At the 2023 trade deadline, the Angels found themselves at a fork in the road. They could either do the rational thing — flip impending free agent Shohei Ohtani for a generational haul — or the bold thing — deal away the last few highly touted prospects in an already weak farm system to make one final push behind their two-way star. The Angels did the bold thing, which also turned out to be the wrong thing, and now, they have neither Ohtani nor the building blocks to compete in the next half-decade.

That this farm has zero pitching prospects of note two years after the organization chose pitchers with all 20 of its picks in the 2021 MLB Draft is an utter disaster. There is volatility in pitching, sure, but it’s a legit failure that the only real contributor from that class is 11th-rounder Chase Silseth (who is actually pretty good).

On the hitting side, one can gaze at the quartet of shortstop Zach Neto, catcher Logan O’Hoppe, outfielder Mickey Moniak and first baseman Nolan Schanuel through rose-colored glasses and see hope. But while those four have shown flashes in spurts, none has anything close to a track record (though we are big believers in O’Hoppe and Neto). And even if they all turn into every-day players, the dearth of young arms makes it incredibly difficult to envision a world in which Mike Trout experiences success in Orange County.

The idea behind this project is simple: Rank all 30 MLB teams by the talent in their organizations age 26 and under.

Prospect lists and farm system rankings do a phenomenal job of highlighting the future impact players still developing in the minor leagues. But that exercise overlooks the importance of young talent already at the big-league level. Players aged 26 and under produced 246.2 fWAR in 2023, the second-highest total ever by that contingent. In other words, young big leaguers have never been so crucial.

This is the second year we’ve conducted this exercise, having introduced the rankings last spring at FOX Sports. After the inaugural run, we reflected on some of the biggest strengths and weaknesses of the project and looked at which teams proved us especially wrong or right. Ultimately, we opted not to change our methodology. Once again, each organization was assigned a grade in four categories:

-Young MLB hitting
-Young MLB pitching
-Prospect hitting
-Prospect pitching

In an effort to properly weigh the contributions of players already making an impact at the big-league level, the young MLB hitting/pitching categories were scored from 0-to-10, while the prospect categories were scored 0-to-5. This ensures that teams with more young MLB talent score higher on the whole than those that simply have a bevy of promising youngsters in the minors.

We also placed a greater emphasis on prospects expected to reach the majors at some point in the next two seasons. While promising youngsters thriving at the rookie levels and in A-ball are valuable in the grand scheme of things, the longer the road ahead of them, the less likely they are to become relevant to a team’s outlook. If a prospect-eligible player is expected to be on a team’s Opening Day roster — Evan Carter or Jackson Chourio, for example — we evaluated him as part of the young MLB group.

After assigning each team scores in the four categories, we added them up to produce a total 26-and-under grade, with 30 the highest possible score. Conversations with people in and around the industry helped inform our scores and when it came to breaking ties between organizations with identical totals.

Players included in these rankings must be entering their age-26 seasons or younger, defined by Baseball-Reference as a player’s age on June 30, approximately halfway through the regular season. It’s an imperfect cutoff that produces some unfortunate and admittedly arbitrary outcomes — Yordan Alvarez (born June 27, 1997) is “too old” to be included, while Luis Robert Jr. (born Aug. 3, 1997) is not — but it’s a crucial one nonetheless.

Why 26, you ask? As much as we celebrate the phenoms who race to the big leagues in their early 20s, swaths of players on prospect lists and/or players still finding their MLB footing are in their mid-20s. Last season, hitters such as Nolan Jones, Spencer Steer, James Outman and Josh Jung all broke out in a big way as 25- or 26-year-old rookies. Orioles outfielder Heston Kjerstad, 25, or Cubs infielder Michael Busch, 26, could have a similar impact in 2024. As such, 26 seems like an appropriate upper limit for the age range when evaluating each organization’s core of young talent.

With that, there are some wonky side effects. For instance, Juan Soto, a 25-year-old set to hit free agency after this season, is included as part of the Yankees’ batch of young talent. However, in cases such as Soto and other arb-eligible veterans still 26-and-under, including Bo Bichette and Vladimir Guerrero Jr., we adjusted the teams’ ratings accordingly. If the spirit of the exercise is to focus on which teams have the strongest cores of talent secured for the long haul, we didn’t want to over-reward teams for players reaching free agency in the near future.

https://sports.yahoo.com/mlb-26-and-under-power-rankings-evaluating-all-30-teams-by-the-young-talent-in-their-organizations-from-the-rockies-to-no-1-155931913.html