Angels Rising

Rookie pitchers spark a rejuvenated pipeline

Welcome to Warning Track Power, a weekly newsletter of baseball stories and analysis grounded in front office and scouting experiences and the personalities encountered along the way.

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The baseball season is more than one quarter complete, and the Angels’ standing as contenders finally looks like more than just wishful thinking.

Best-players-on-earth Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani continue to perform as expected, but these Angels go a lot deeper.

As is often the case when front offices experience more frequent turnover, the contributions can be attributed to multiple executives.

Taylor Ward, drafted two regimes ago under now-Mariners GM Jerry Dipoto, is breaking out this season. The 2015 first-rounder leads all of baseball in average and OPS. (Seattle’s 2015 draft was fruitless.)

While it shouldn’t surprise anyone if the 2022 AL MVP came from the home clubhouse in Anaheim, please let me know if you had Ward as the guy on the receiving end of the hardware. We’ve got a ways to go, but it’s hard to argue with a .481 OBP and an OPS of 1.194. (Ward has missed the last few games after aggravating his neck crashing into the wall.)

The pitching staff, beleaguered for much of the past decade, has gotten a boost from lefty Patrick Sandoval, acquired from the Astros via trade in July 2018 (for catcher Martin Maldonado) by Billy Eppler, now the GM of the Mets.

The six-man rotation also includes a couple rookies whose progress will be critical to the Angels’ postseason aspirations.

Perry Minasian, the Angels current GM, was hired in November 2020. He has been with the organization for only one amateur draft — last year when the club selected 20 pitchers (all but one a college arm) and no position players.

It turns out, one of those draftees has already graduated to the big leagues.

Chase Silseth could still be pitching at the University of Arizona, preparing for the Pac-12 tournament which begins today. Instead, he signed with the Angels for $480,000 — essentially fourth-round money — after being selected in the 11th round last year. He is the first — and so far only — member of the draft class of ’22 to appear in the Major Leagues.

One year ago, Angels bench coach Ray Montgomery was canvassing the country scouting for the draft. As director of player personnel, the position he held in 2021, his responsibilities were quite different from what they are today.

“Until you bring it up, I don’t think about it,” Montgomery says when asked about the shift from the scout section to the dugout.