A streak of 10 straight losing seasons has left the Angels under a cloud of negativity.
To the baseball world, and even to many of their own frustrated fans, the Angels have become a punch line.
As much as the players might try to shelter themselves from it – perhaps by shutting down their social media, as some have done – there’s only so much they can do.
“You’re always going to see it, no matter what,” left-hander Reid Detmers said. “The last couple years, you know people are talking about you even if you don’t pay attention. You know they’re saying stuff.
“It’s our job to shut ’em up.”
Depending who you ask in the Angels’ clubhouse, the negative predictions are either bulletin board material or something to be ignored.
To shortstop Zach Neto, it’s a little of both.
“I could care less what other people think,” Neto said. “But we also use it as motivation. We know that nobody thinks we’re going to win ballgames. We joke around here like ‘Oh (expletive), we won a game today.’ But we all believe we can win.”
It’s easy to understand why few others do.
Last year the Angels were 72-90, in last place in the American League West. They ranked 25th in the majors in runs per game and 28th in ERA.
If you judge the 2026 Angels simply by the additions and subtractions from the 2025 team, it seems like this team ought to be worse.
Taylor Ward, the player who led the team in RBIs and finished second in home runs, is now gone.
Mike Trout, who carried their offense before enduring years of injuries, was finally relatively healthy last season, playing 130 games. He still had his worst offensive season. Although the three-time American League MVP expects to be better, 34-year-olds are more likely to go down than up.
Meanwhile, the best player added to the offense is outfielder Josh Lowe, who has been hurt for each of the past two seasons and got hurt again this spring.
On the mound, the Angels lost their closer when Kenley Jansen left as a free agent. Most of the pitchers they added are coming off serious injuries, past their 35th birthday, or both.
Most of their additions this winter were players trying to revive their careers after injuries.
That adds up to a projected 72 wins, according to FanGraphs, with a 5% chance of making the playoffs.
“Obviously a lot of people are counting us out,” said left-hander Brent Suter, who is new to the team. “I don’t even know what the projections are, but I think we can turn some heads, big time. I think we can be a really special group. We’ve got pieces in this clubhouse to be a very special team.”
Suter said the young talent he’s seen has “been head-turning. I can’t believe, looking around this clubhouse, the studs that we have.”
In order to buy that the Angels can be better, you need to look deeper than additions and subtractions. You need to look at the room to grow among the players they already had. It’s the same story as last year.
A year ago, they believed that Neto, catcher Logan O’Hoppe, first baseman Nolan Schanuel and pitchers José Soriano, Jack Kochanowicz and Ben Joyce could each show enough improvement to lift the team.
Neto definitely did, and Schanuel showed incremental improvement, but O’Hoppe, Kochanowicz and Soriano got worse and Joyce was hurt.
The Angels balanced some of those negatives by getting an unexpected breakthrough from outfielder Jo Adell and better health from Trout, who had only played 29 games in 2024. Detmers, who had struggled as a starter, flourished as a reliever.
With that, they actually did surpass some modest expectations in 2025, winning nine more games than they did in 2024. Another nine-victory jump in 2026 would get the Angels to .500 and have them in contention for a wild card spot.
The core players they banked on last season are still closer to 25 than 30, so it’s possible that we haven’t seen their best. Soriano is 27. Adell, Detmers and O’Hoppe are 26. Right-hander Grayson Rodriguez, an addition to the team who showed signs of being elite before a year-and-a-half of injuries, is also just 26, although there are still questions about his health. Neto is 25. Schanuel is still 24.
“We have that middle-aged group which I feel we haven’t had the last couple of years,” said Detmers, referring to players in or approaching their prime. “We have young guys, but they’ve all been here, done it. It’s just a matter of putting the pieces together and showing everybody who we are.”
Plus, bubbling beneath all of that is what the Angels believe is a pool of young arms ready to burst onto the scene.
Early in spring training, General Manager Perry Minasian gushed over the fact that he could walk from field to field and see more than a dozen pitchers regularly throwing 98 mph.
The Angels are no longer relying on pitchers like Tyler Anderson or Kyle Hendricks for the major league rotation, with a bunch of waiver claims and journeymen as the depth.
Instead, they have a stable of 25-and-under pitchers with impressive raw stuff, including right-handers Ryan Johnson, George Klassen, Caden Dana, Walbert Ureña and Tyler Bremner. The Angels still haven’t given up on Kochanowicz, who looked much better this spring. Some scouts even see promise in less-heralded pitchers, like Joel Hurtado and Victor Mederos.
All of them need some tweaks. That’s why the Angels hired acclaimed pitching coach Mike Maddux.
The Angels know that most of them will never pan out, either because of injury or an inability to adjust, but they’re banking on having so much quantity that a few break through.
While all of that gives the Angels reason to hope, they acknowledge that the picture isn’t as rosy among hitters.
Their best hope at inserting a new homegrown player into the lineup this year is second baseman Christian Moore, who struggled in the spring and earned a ticket back to Triple-A. Their top position player prospect is outfielder Nelson Rada, a 20-year-old defensive specialist who provides speed and sprays singles around the field.
The Angels didn’t replace Ward’s middle-of-the-order production. The Angels need everything to go perfectly with their other core players if they are going to have an above-average offense. If anyone in the Trout-Neto-Schanuel-Adell-O’Hoppe core gets hurt or underperforms, there’s no safety net.
It’s easy to imagine injuries to players like Lowe, Trout, 30-year-old third baseman Yoán Moncada or 34-year-old DH Jorge Soler, and the Angels would be hard-pressed to replace them with even average production.
Which is why the Angels need everything to break just right if they are going to get out from under that cloud of negativity.
The odds say it won’t happen. In the clubhouse, they aren’t listening.
“We can’t worry about what other people are thinking,” Trout said. “We gotta all pull from the same rope and worry about ourselves. For me, personally, I don’t worry about that stuff. I can’t speak for everybody in here, but the whole message of the group is it doesn’t really matter what they say outside.”
O’Hoppe said it took him some work to come to this mindset.
“If you asked me this question a year ago, I’d say I’m very driven (by doubters),” O’Hoppe said. “This year, I’m so detached from that noise outside this clubhouse, and I think I speak for a lot of guys in here that we’re detached from that noise outside too. We’re getting motivated by each other, being in the day-to-day process of it, learning what the process is and how that works is something that I learned this past offseason. I’ve been able to apply it in camp so far and I think other guys have done the same too. It doesn’t feel as noisy as it has the past couple years in here, and I think that’s really good for us.”