Cactus League play wraps up for our Halos today and the fellas will head home for the annual Freeway Series. It seems like Spring Training takes forever to get here and then is gone in a flash. I had a blast on my annual trip and still consider it my favorite time of year.
I don’t think I’m going on a limb by saying Kyren Paris is the breakout star of the Angels preseason. He’s really made a case for a roster spot and given fans a reason to dream about the near future.
Paris got some off season work with Aaron Judge’s swing coach and the results so far have been incredible.
In a perfect world, Kyren’s breakout is real and he teams with Zach Neto for a solid keystone combination for years to come. Neto will miss Opening Day but is ahead of schedule and eager to get into action. Joining them on the All Draft Pick infield later this year could be Christian Moore, who has looked decent this spring but clearly not MLB ready.
Paris and Moore look to be heading to the minors, but the Angels have several roster decisions to make. Ron Washington gave some answers but little insight into how those will go.
Health will dictate some of those decisions, at least early. Neto isn’t the only early question in the Angels infield. Luis Rengifo has been slowed by a combination of maladies but has been in game action this week. Starting third baseman Yoan Moncada has a bruised thumb that kept him sidelined but he expects to be ready on Opening Day.
Tim Anderson and JD Davis appear to have the bench roles locked up, particularly after Scott Kingery was DFA’d this week to make room for Angel Perdomo, creating a roster decision in the bullpen.
The Angels will have a new centerfielder when the regular season starts. Jo Adell’s defense has been a bit of an adventure but his bat is heating up as the season gets closer. If Jo can continue to improve as he did last year, he’s a very interesting part of the future.
Speaking of the Angels future, Matthew Lugo could also play a part in two ways. I’m just not sure if he will. If Lugo can post solid numbers in AAA that deserve a call up to MLB, he makes a Taylor Ward trade much more palatable. So far he’s shown both good and bad in the Cactus League.
One guy who will be joining Lugo in the minors is Chase Silseth, who was optioned this week.
From around the league:
The Dodgers are 2 and 0 after beating the Cubs twice in Japan with Ohtani thrilling the locals with a homer in game 2.
In a cool moment for me, Japanese boxing phenom “Monster” Inoue announced play ball. The kid is absolutely electric and I’m going to see him live again soon. How awesome is he? Even Ohtani walked over to tip his cap.
Jackie Robinson is a national hero who served our country in World War 2. But he wasn’t white so his military history was deleted by the Pentagon this week. After a social media outrage his page was restored and something that might somehow maybe pass for an apology was issued.
It is both astonishing and sad that nearly 78 years after he played his first MLB game he’s still a focal point for civil rights and a huge portion of our society learned nothing from his life.
Enjoy your weekend and link what I missed. By this time next week we’ll have real games to discuss. I’ll be with family this weekend and will skip the Dodgers fan fest at the Big A this preseason. But it will be good to have baseball back.
a little sad but just a little. I followed Suarez from his days in AA and thought he might develop into…well, a useful pitcher. And it’s been a long road, a long time. Each year, even when it got more and more doubtful, I still hoped he’d come around.
I wish him good luck in whatever organization he lands.
Well, one less reason for existential despair. I think we have an actual shot at .500 this season.
Suarez gone. Traded for Ian Anderson
White Sox released Drury… reunion?
While I think Drury is a good guy, I would pass. A subpar defender and already have a stockpile of underachieving infielders;
Kingery,Newman, Anderson, JD Davis…When hell freezes over?
Perry and his buddies in Atlanta just swap their junk.
SUAREZ IS GONE
WooHoo!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6cnryxwH6A
Thank You AA
https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2025/03/braves-to-acquire-jose-suarez.html
Our long national nightmare is over
Plus we get a Right handed starting pitcher https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2025/03/braves-to-acquire-jose-suarez.html (he may be a little wild but he plays a mean flute.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha7HY1DtZtw
Welcome aboard Een!
https://youtu.be/O0yxRaDLWa8?si=qDxjrlGeQWjmtgyW
https://x.com/SamBlum3/status/1903916707892383990
Only 9 years ago.
Well Suarez has been in this organization for almost 11 years!
Alex has a riding crop, calls up Perry when it’s time to donate for tax purposes
And wait there’s even more fun facts about the newest Angel:
High walk rates made him a must have…. We have a type.
The Plan? Detmers replacing Suarez in the pen. Jack with the Silent C goes to AA or SL……and Een is our new 5th starter.
Wash says no for now.
https://x.com/mikehuntley63/status/1903937249252962495
Koch is scheduled to pitch on Tuesday vs the Doyers so unless he blows up I have to believe he gets the last spot in the rotation . The Angels haven’t announced a starter for tomorrow night. It’s TA’s turn. I think this is more about opening up a spot for the Rule 5 kid getting a bullpen spot over Detmers but we will see.
I just fell to my knees in WalMart.
And it wasn’t even because of some crazy Walmartians!
PARTY TIME !!!!!
Now we’ll need to find another Fall Guy to bitch about.
Geezus, it’s Perry and the Braves again. In less than a week, he’s taken on a couple of Alex’s discards, Perdomo and Anderson.
Braves likely to dump Suarez but he really needed to find another home. Only two years away from a couple of decent years. Health is not a concern. Maybe he’ll find his pitch mix like Griffith Canning.
Suarez sucks. His “decent” years he got bailed out by better relievers cleaning up his mess.
Congratulations I.E. I know you, especially, have been waiting for this day for years now.
Like the Epstein Files..
Interesting to see if they release the “Redacted Suarez Files”? We all assumed he had dirt on someone in the Angels organization. Only reason he stuck around as long as he did.
Well that and he was left handed.
I guess chicks dig the southpaws.
I’ll never have to watch the Venezuelan winnie the pooh in an angel uniform ever again. Thank the baseball gods.
Julio Urias is suspended from a job he doesn’t have until the All Star Break.
I’m willing to be he’ll pitch in Mexico this season and thereafter.
Went from getting a $200 million contract to 200 pesos contract… and doesn’t even deserve those pesos!
Looks like Detmers to the pen…. Meh, I don’t like it.
https://x.com/JeffFletcherOCR/status/1903116838789320847
I saw Fontenelle’s name on the lineup card. Not going to lie, I completely forgot about him existing.
Love that Paris looks like he will play the whole game splitting time between 2B and CF. I don’t think he’s been written off of the MLB roster just yet.
Paris starting the road game at 2b while Mershon starting the home game at SS, noted.
Three biggest minor-leaguer mysteries I’m looking forward to seeing resolved in 2025…
1) Will Rada regain Top 100 prospect status? I still think he’s the best position prospect in the system. He batted over .300 last two months of the season in AA basically as a high school senior. Seems not-out-of-bounds that he hits .280 or better between SLC and RC, swipes 40 bags and debuts next year as a 20-year-old impact rookie.
2) Battle of the Over-Slots: Dylan Jordan and TGA. Would be awesome if at least one of them lays down the hammer in the ACL, where they will presumably debut, and maybe gets a taste of A-ball after.
3) Joswa Lugo. Rada and E. Quero notwithstanding, none of our high-profile Latin signees have yet to take the minors by the neck and quick-rise to the MLB a la Chourio/DeLaRosa/Cruz. This guy potentially looked the part last season in the DL.
Lots of good stuff here. I’ll add George Klassen and Walbert Urena.
Both guys have elite stuff and are being developed as SPs. Their respective ceilings are drool-worthy — I’m talking ace-level stuff. Klassen is further along and each guy has reliever risk (Urena moreso).
The Dos Lugo’s?
Well lets hope they dont turn out to be Dos loogies
Walbert turned 21 in January.
Last season in High A+
77 IP (16 starts)
4.19 ERA
1.55 WHIP
64 Ks
“Walbert Urena (Angels’ No. 17 prospect per MLB Pipeline and No. 12 via FanGraphs) retired all six batters he faced today.
He sat 97-100 on his sinker and generated two punchouts — one on a slider and another on a changeup.
If that 30-grade command improves this year…”
https://x.com/bmags94/status/1902863675851178282?t=JyB4KUpjJltNUY19W3doVw&s=19
We’re getting to the point where we have several minor leaguers worth following and dreaming on a bit. It has been a long, long time since I can remember that being the case.
As Turk’s will point out there’s not any frontline pitching or All Star level position player prospects and I understand that, but there are potentially many components of a good team.
We really need to nail this draft and deadline, though.
Who lands where?
The AA and AAA rosters will be interesting to watch
Deadline arguably more important than draft at this point
There’s a lot of talk about “needing to nail the draft” – but it’s not like it’s the 2009-10 drafts where the team is larded up with tons of extra draft picks. They have one advantageous #2 selection and then one extra pick outside the top 100. It’s basically a normal draft for them with nice first round position.
That’s why I natter on about wanting to trade for a CBA round selection, but honestly, it’s just fantasy. That’s a Dodger move, not a Perry move.
I’m completely sold on your CBA idea. I think Rengifo is the guy most likely to net it, but Ward to the Twins is distinctly possible as well.
The Angels really need to nail 2 and I think 47 could produce a good player as well. This is not the year to go below slot at 2. Get a stud, pay him, and move on.
Come on TT. I know MNT was fat but to call his draft “larded up” is just wrong
I’m just happy to have both arms. And dana. And Aldegeri. And Silseth. And Silent C. And Murphy. And McDanials. And Torres….
Torres was released yesterday. Your point still stands
Dern it…. oh wait, I was thinking of Yovan… duh
The Angels prioritized signing Dylan Jordan & TGA over Ryan Prager. Whether those decisions were the right ones only time will tell .
Another way to look at it is, if we beat the NIL money Prager was being offered we’d then be complaining about the three nothing burger draft picks we made to compensate for having no pool money left….
Unless we wanted to forfeit a #1 draft pick there was no way to sign all three ( unless we didnt want to sign over slot pick Ryan Johnson as well) . None of the other draft picks signed significantly over slot so it really came down to those 3 players and a limited pool of money
What I still would like to know is: would Jordan or TGA have accepted less? Did Jordan really need $1.25M to sign? He wasn’t a highly ranked prepster at all. It’s not like we was promised insane NIL money from Florida State.
Had he declined to sign, the team would have just burned a fifth rounder on a pure lotto ticket, as opposed to burning a top 100 pick on the ace of the national champs. Prager’s probably a #4 guy in an MLB rotation, but 95% of kids like Jordan don’t even see AAA.
And TGA with an almost $2M bonus – was that really his threshold point, or did the FO just float funny money to make him sign and be done with it?
That’s not how I personally view it. I look at most of the value in the draft coming within the first 100-150 selections – roughly the first three rounds, though teams occasionally find decent value in rounds 4-8. Not going to complain about lowballing late rounders if the goal is getting early picks signed (not least the ace pitcher on the #1 college team in the country).
The FO went $1.5M underslot from the get-go with Christian Moore, and Prager’s NIL-beating number was exactly $1.5M – reasonably generous, since Prager was open to accepting slightly less than what a middle reliever on the Vols (Chris Cortez) received from the Angels. But more importantly, the pool savings was there to meet Prager’s quite reasonable number.
The FO seemed to decide post-draft that they valued Dylan Jordan ($1.25M) more than Prager (asking $1.5M), and TGA even more ($1.96M). Clearly, when they selected Prager in the third round, they didn’t know if TGA was going to be on the board on day three. They retroactively devalued Prager.
As Cowboy mentions, only time will tell if that’s the right move – maybe they liked TGA’s ceiling over Prager’s floor. But the high valuation of Dylan Jordan I still don’t get at all.
All I know for sure is I am wrong about college pitchers about 75% of the time and I liked Prager…. so he is likely the next Griffin Canning
Rada is such a critical piece and I’m also really interested in Denzer Guzman. Those two are young and will repeat AA.
If Taylor Blake Ward is right and Rada is Denard Span 2.0 that drastically changes the rebuild.
To go full hopium, we could see a lineup like:
Rada CF
Schanuel 1B
Trout RF/DH
Free agent power bat OF/DH
Free agent LF/DH
Moore 3B
Paris 2B
Neto SS
O’Hoppe C
Adell will solidify himself this season. That fills one OF spot.
CMo is suspect defensively at 2nd, no chance he ends up at 3rd. Move him to the OF.
Draft Ethan Holliday and stick him at 3rd in 3-4 years
There are gonna be some pretty solid 3B in the draft this year from the college ranks too… and I still have hope for Fontenelle
Same here. Perhaps it is a little bias from watching him play in college, but you don’t put up those type of numbers in a power conference without having some ability.
And even if Fontenelle only plays at a 2 WAR level, that’s a production boost and saves $38 million for studs elsewhere on the roster.
one guy for me to watch is Mershon.
DavidSS v3 – looks like the most talented one yet, by a good margin.
Aiva Arquette is really catching some eyes. Adding him to the system could allow Paris to play around the diamond.
The Fischer kid from Tennesse is likely available at 47. Probably more upside than Fontenelle, but I’m still holding onto hope for Fontenelle.
Aiva is really hot now, but he’s got a TON of risk in him…. like hit Joey Gallo style with less power type risk. And I kinda get the sense that he’s more talented than smart…. but who knows, he’s young.
Here’s a pic of Lugo moments before that sweet gapper that tied the game.
The Angels with Rock Piles in Az & Anaheim.
It’s an organizational motif.
Free the IE!
Corona HS is set to have 3 players taken in the first round of the MLB Draft. It would be unprecedented.
Here’s a story on how this team was built, at a school that doesn’t have the resources of a California powerhouse.
https://x.com/SamBlum3/status/1902738326706409739
I was watching BA talk about that…. possibly most stacked HS team ever and it’s not a crazy recruiting school like the Florida athletic schools or Mater Dei.
Nice. Thanks.
What does a rebuild actually look like? It’s not just throwing children out to the wolves.
We don’t have Ohtani, Pujols or Trout’s happiness to consider at this point. We have JD Davis and Tim Anderson. Thus we don’t have to rush Paris or Moore.
We have Anderson and Hendricks. So Silseth can work out his comeback kinks in SLC.
We have Jansen so we don’t have to kill Joyce till next year and a whole slew of MiLB pen arms can avoid getting clobbered by MLB hitters too early.
But NONE of this “depth” means much as far as winning a lot now. It’s developmental depth. None of it really blocks a guy like Paris if he’s hitting for a .950 OPS in June either.
The price is you will likely have to watch JD Davis. Angel Perdomo. Etc PLUS you’ll get to see this team without Ward or Rengifo etc soon… mmmmm, poopy.
Exactly. Hopefully now we can bring prospects up when they are ready and give them a little runway once they get here.
Ideally we are clamoring for Dana to arrive later this year. Klassen in 26.
Why is the Pentagon deleting peoples military history? Oh wait, never mind, I guy I texted and asked told me it was a URL glitch…. I was like “isn’t that something they keep for like EVERYONE for forever?”.
Not to mention it wasn’t his military records. It was a specific web page. I just thought something crazy was happening like they slashed the budget so much that they just weren’t gonna keep military records past 1950 or something…. cause who needs that shit about US Grant and Pershing and stuff? Sounds crazy but……
You should have tacked “Kyren Paris” onto the end of this post to make it baseball-oriented.
I hate politics. It’s in the links above bro. Can’t get more related than that. I hate nothing more than having to sit through dumbfk Americans who read blurbs that make 1990s USA Today “news for the stupid” look like Howard Zinn tell me about what ever has outraged them this week.
Accept for the whole thing about our water turning frogs gay. That was dope.
It wasn’t a glitch. It was an intentional purge of stories and Jackie’s story went down along with the Navajo Codetalkers and the one not white guy at Iwo Jima.
After significant uproar the famous stories listed above were put back up but most are still down.
It was a glitch because they were taken down because the same URL designator for their DEI info was used in those web pages. It’s also not Jackie Robinson’s military history being deleted because he wasn’t white.
When I first heard about this I actually thought they were deleting MILITARY RECORDS… not a web page that was set up by the US militaries DEI program to push the idea that the military was only MOSTLY racist for a long time.
Jackie Robinson statue decimated last year… internets first thought is racism, because of course, turns out it was some tweakers. Jackie Robinson website that is prob #5 on a list of most visited Jackie Robinson websites goes down, must be racism!
I don’t want to argue racism etc. It exists and it sucks. All I was saying was that I originally thought “Holy shit! Why are they deleting minority military service records? Or is it all old records? What’s going on?”
But it turned out that the Military DEI business is closing down so their website (or the pages their funding maintains) was shut down… like my websites when I am done with them. It was not a case of what I was afraid of, simply deleting military records because it wasn’t white people.
No, it wasn’t deleting official military records because it wasn’t white people, it was deleting public biographies and historical articles because it wasn’t white people.
And doing it in the dumbest way possible:
Several photos of an Army Corps of Engineers dredging project in California were marked for deletion, apparently because a local engineer in the photo had the last name Gay. And a photo of Army Corps biologists was on the list, seemingly because it mentioned they were recording data about fish — including their weight, size, hatchery and gender.
The motivation is transparent – delete articles with keywords “gay” or “gender” in them. And the hamfisted way they’re going about – riddled with false positives – makes the intention *and* the methodology very unambiguous.
I
Didn’t
Fucking
Ask
All I said was that I had had a mistaken impression about Robinson’s situation at first, but it turns out I was misinformed.
I’m sorry I used the word glitch everybody. I’ve enjoyed your outrage, but I’m not Trump. I’m the guy who hates politics. Now suck my dick.
Oh let’s stop with the coy jargon: “URL designator” lol.
The administration is simply doing very crude and non-technical keyword searches targeting a few hundred keywords (eg “female” “native american” “african american”), then modifying the URLs with “DEI” annotations, and making the original content inaccessible (people encounter 404 errors in place of previous content). They are then *very* selectively restoring a few pages when the media blowback is too fierce.
There’s nothing “glitchy” about it – it’s a systematic purge of all public-facing web content that celebrates female and minority veterans. The “DEI info” in many cases are just annotations the flacks conducting the purges are themselves applying. The “DEI” tag applied to Robinson’s page was automatically applied by those conducting the content purge, because it clearly contained keywords the govt now finds politically incorrect.
The administration itself isn’t pretending it’s unintentional – Hesgeth is proudly trumpeting “DEI is dead” and Ullyot stated unambiguously that he was “pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms” – so I don’t get the water-carrying defense that it’s a “glitch”. More than 100k pages are currently targeted, and more than 26k have been tagged and/or removed at this point:
https://apnews.com/article/dei-purge-images-pentagon-diversity-women-black-8efcfaec909954f4a24bad0d49c78074
But when you’re doing stupid keyword searches on words like “gay” across a corpus, you’re going to start auto-tagging and deleting articles on historical subjects like Enola Gay because it’s a brute force (read: stupid) way of doing content annotation, and the folks doing it have no idea how aggressive they should be in their filtering and takedowns.
As someone who worked 17 years at Google, the shit engineering offends me as much as the racism motivating the content purge.
Again. Fuck you and fuck politics. Was that “uncoy” enough for you big guy? I wasn’t asking for a sermon of any type about any politician. I just mentioned that I had a mistaken impression from the first headlines I read. Yeah, I know, they brute forced a bunch of changes and that unplugged a whole lot of different things…. an error in the way they did a big dumb thing… like a glitch…. a big pile of oops. I’m not defending or attacking them for it because I do that on POLITICAL SITES.
I agree with some faithful that the first week of the season can sort of be a telling point how bad the team can be this year. Sox and Cards are rebuilding teams ; the Angels have a better roster. If we start by dropping both those series……..oh man. Expect shelling by Cleveland our opening weekend.
Our first 29 games (March + April):
20 road games
9 home games
The schedule to begin the season is utterly ridiculous. I’ll feel really good about our team if we go something like 15-14.
So much travel early in the year. But the Tampa series was switched due to their stadium situation so that skews the disparity further.
So the TB series was moved to TB (April 8-10) because TB has a stadium issue?
I will feel really good anytime we go 15-14 this year. We’d be ahead of our timeline if we pull that off a lot.
I bitched about this a couple of days ago. But hey, that weather in Anaheim is uncertain in late March or early April. They’re better off playing in Chicago.
Exactly. Chicago weather is much more predictable so we can plan for the windy and mid-thirties.
this team doesn’t like sunshine anyhow.
yeah 15-14 would be good. but 10-19 is probable
I’m not sure we’re better than the Cards roster at all…. we’re kind of the same, but they have more hitters.
Every NFL, MLB, and NBA venue was ranked by their average rating on Facebook, Google, Yelp, and Trip Advisor… #31 ain’t bad. Amazed the Trop beat out SoFi, Levi’s and other newer facilities.
I can’t take that list seriously because Intuit Dome is by far and away #1.
I like Angels Stadium btw.
Haven’t been there yet. Maybe just not enough data and generally looks like NBA venues don’t score well. Here’s my list of the 14/90 I’ve been to:
Staples (seeing Kings & Lakers win championships at home secured this spot)
Petco
Dodgers (HRD, ASG & stadium series games)
Coors (HRD, ASG)
Yankee (most GS ever in a MLB game)
Angels
Levi
Sofi
TD Garden
State Farm
Gillette
Empower
Soldier
Chase
Clearly seeing a top tier event and/or having something historic happen can make any of these spots fluctuate.
I went to Mercedes Benz Stadium in Atlanta and it was a jewel, and liked it a bit better than SoFi.
Goals Scored? GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOALLLLLLLLLLLLL!
Grand Slams… 4 in one game.
Angels stadium is great. People like to vote or comment on the “historic” places, but for actual events Angels stadium is better than most. SoFi is nice also. What’s the beef with it?
I’ve been to 49er games at Levi’s. What’s wrong with that one? I enjoyed it. Certain aspects of the list seem a little backward.
As a stadium, Angels Stadium is nice. In-game experience is lacking, compared to Petco or T-Mobile (to give two examples).
Chase Field in Phoenix is unifyingly hated by everyone who lives here, including ownership, so this list feels fooked for starters.
Yeah, I’m not a fan of it. Just so much concrete it feels drab or like jail or something. At best the roof makes it feel like a giant airplane hangar.
I do love the playground areas on the third level, though. Being able to bring the kids there and still see the game was a nice touch.
It’s not bad, its still pretty enjoyable experience.
There was no better place as a fan to watch NHL hockey than the Mullet!
I think this may have factored in a lot of general unhappiness, not quality of the venue. For example, I know Miamians wish they’d built a new stadium further north for the Dolphins cause Hard Rock is a pain. Look at how many NEW AND AMAZING stadiums are ranked low. Likely because they are so expensive to get to, get into and sit in that normal fans dislike them. Lot’s of nostalgia in that top 15. Though it does remind me, I’ve never been to Coors Field but my friends in Denver all love the place like it’s PNC light….
seeing Lambeau, Wrigley and Fenway near the top convinces me this list was made completely by drunkards.
I’ve loved Paris in the Springtime
But in the Summer, will he sizzle or fizzle?
https://youtu.be/wIE5wwvicew?si=ad2Scf1X_Bty5Cxz
It’s amazing Moniak hit only .190 in the spring. So talented, but still inconsistent. The retooling of the Halos is happening before us otherwise. Paris might add some pop. Moore needs to keep moving forward. Neto. O’Hoppe. Adell. Maybe Schanuel. We will see.
They have some younger pitchers they have hope for. It’s be nice if they could win some games for a while.